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‘Doing Justice’ (משפט בעושי) to the Dead Sea Scrolls: Reading 1QS 8:1–4 in literary and sectarian context

Paper · 2016 · Llewellyn Howes

Summary

Howes asks whether 1QS 8:1–4, a hopeful-sounding passage from the Community Rule (Qumran cave 1), can fairly support the view that Jesus or his early followers expected a future judgement that would restore all of Israel, outsiders included. He argues that the passage has been cited as an intertext without examining its own setting. Using judgement and boundary-drawing as his interpretive key, he moves inward in three steps: first the shared worldview of the sectarian scrolls, then the Community Rule as a whole, then the passage itself. The sectarian texts are strongly dualistic. They treat the wider Jewish population as condemned outsiders and the sect as the only true Israel. Read this way, the "twelve men and three priests" are an elite group of tribal leaders. Their trials and judging purify the community in preparation for the final judgement. That judgement saves insiders and destroys outsiders. The passage therefore cannot support a vision of judgement without condemnation. The paper also shows the value of reading a text within its own corpus before comparing it with others.

Key points

  • The passage studied is 1QS 8:1–4 from the Community Rule. Cave 4 fragments are deliberately set aside. Translations follow García Martínez (1994), and the Hebrew follows Abegg (2004) in the Parry & Tov edition.
  • Earlier scholars used the passage as an intertext for an inclusive restoration of Israel, among them Horsley (several works), Allison, Davies & Allison, Kaylor and Van Aarde.
  • The author sorts the sectarian charges against wider Israel into eleven categories. Examples include Torah violation, impurity, idolatry, injustice, deceit and arrogance. He also lists many insulting labels, such as "sons of darkness" and "lot of Belial".
  • Following Davies (2008), the word "Israel" has three senses in the scrolls:
    • the sect itself;
    • the guilty nation of the past, punished in the exile;
    • the present illegitimate Jewish out-group.
  • The "twelve men and three priests" are read with Berg (2007) as an elite core of tribal leaders described as walking in "perfect holiness". This reading is supported by 4Q164, CD 10:4–10 and 4Q491. Their role is to judge and cleanse the Yaḥad before the final judgement.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Before linking a text to outside sources, analyse it within its own text and corpus (Weren's principle), so that cross-text links rest on more than surface resemblance.
  • I2. The reading moves "centripetally": first what the whole corpus shares, then the document, then the single passage, so each level constrains the next.
  • I3. A passage that sounds positive on the surface turns out to have the opposite function in context, since its talk of justice serves later condemnation.
  • I4. One word ("Israel") has three distinct referents depending on in-group or out-group framing, so the sense is fixed by the speaker's social stance.
  • I5. The referent of an ambiguous demonstrative (whether הלא means the fifteen men) is settled by comparing it with parallel passages in other documents (4Q164, CD).

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Resolve meanings inside the world of the current text first, and consult the external knowledge graph only after local context has been used up.
  • I2 (frames): Pragmatic interpretation could layer genre-level and document-level priors before resolving frames for a single sentence.
  • I3 (frames): This is a useful test case for irony and implicature: the stance of a sentence should be computed from the surrounding discourse, not from its own wording.
  • I4 (world): Entity linking could attach speaker perspective to a referent, so the same name can map to different entities depending on who is speaking about whom.
  • I5 (frames): For uncertain coreference, Mova could look for parallel constructions elsewhere in the corpus and use them as witnesses, recording that evidence as the explanation.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of JohannesburgJohannesburg · South Africa4 works · 340 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksSocial Sciences · 1,954 worksSociology and Political Science · 626 worksPolitical Science and International Relations · 206 worksReligious studies · 227 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Hebrew & Aramaic · 496 worksBiblical Hebrew · 255 works

Cite

Cite as Llewellyn Howes. 2016. ‘Doing Justice’ (משפט בעושי) to the Dead Sea Scrolls: Reading 1QS 8:1–4 in literary and sectarian context. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 72.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4102/hts.v72i4.3257

@article{howes2016doing,
  title = {{‘Doing Justice’ (משפט בעושי) to the Dead Sea Scrolls: Reading 1QS 8:1–4 in literary and sectarian context}},
  author = {Llewellyn Howes},
  journal = {HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 72},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.4102/hts.v72i4.3257},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v72i4.3257}
}

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