Are We Still Searching for the Teacher of Righteousness?

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Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the figure known as the Teacher of Righteousness has captivated both scholarly and popular imagination. On the basis of the limited evidence available, early scroll scholars created a portrait of the teacher as a religious and political figure who established the scroll community in the face of fierce opposition. Some even identified this individual with the high priest and Hasmonean leader John Hyrcanus or a historical figure known as Judah the Essene referenced by Josephus.a But how does the early assessment of the Teacher of Righteousness hold up after decades […]

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Footnotes

1. For a review of these theories, see Ben Zion Wacholder, “Who Is the Teacher of Righteousness?” Bible Review, April 1999.

Endnotes

1. Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 63–69.

2. F.F. Bruce, “The Teacher of Righteousness in the Qumran Texts,” The Tyndale Lecture in Biblical Archaeology (London: Tyndale Press, 1956), p. 16.

3. Angela Kim Harkins, “Who Is the Teacher of the Teacher Hymns? Re-examining the Teacher Hymns Hypothesis Fifty Years Later,” in E.F. Mason et al., eds., A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 449–467.

4. Alison Schofield, From Qumran to the Yahad: A New Paradigm of Textual Development for the Community Rule (Leiden: Brill, 2009); and John J. Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

5. Charlotte Hempel, The Qumran Rule Texts in Context (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), p. 5.

6. Angela Kim Harkins, “How Should We Feel about the Teacher of Righteousness?” in Ariel Feldman et al., eds., Is There a Text in This Cave? (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 493–514.