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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > June 1992

New Light on the Pharisees

Insights from the Dead Sea Scrolls

By Lawrence H. Schiffman

The texts from Qumran lead us to a new understanding of the history of Judaism in the Second Temple period. Initial research on the scrolls naturally concentrated on the Dead Sea Scroll sect. But the full corpus will teach us a tremendous amount about other Jewish groups as well, as I argued in an earlier article in these pages.a Judaism in all its modern manifestations ultimately derives from rabbinic Judaism, the religious system of the rabbis of the Mishnah (compiled in about 200 C.E.b) and the Talmud (compiled between about 400 and 600 C.E.). First codified in the Mishnah, […]

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Footnotes

1.

Lawrence H. Schiffman, “The Significance of the Scrolls,” BR 06:05; see also my “Confessionalism and the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Jewish Studies 31 (1991), pp. 3–14.

2.

C.E. (Common Era) and B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), used by this author, are the alternate designations corresponding to A.D. and B.C. often used in scholarly literature.

3.

Halakhah (plural: halakhot) is the obligatory, legal side of Judaism, including Jewish practices and observances, covering daily life, festivals, dietary laws, purity rituals and civil and criminal law.

4.

See Raphael Levy, “First ‘Dead Sea Scroll’ Found in Egypt Fifty Years Before Qumran Discoveries,” BAR 08:05.

Endnotes

1.

For a comprehensive discussion of this entire period, see Lawrence H. Schiffman, From Text to Tradition, A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1991).

2.

See Jacob Neusner, From Politics to Piety, the Emergence of Pharisaic Judaism (Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973).

3.

Note that Avot 1:1 ascribes this notion to “the men of the Great Assembly,” the last of which is said to have lived c. 250 B.C.E.

4.

See Schiffman, The Halakhah at Qumran (Leiden: Brill, 1975), pp. 22–32.

5.

M.P. Horgan, Pesharim: Qumran Interpretations of Biblical Books, Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series 8 (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Assn., 1979), pp. 160–162.

6.

For bibliography, see Horgan, Pesharim, p. 184.

7.

Ben Zion Wacholder, “A Qumran Attack on Oral Exegesis? The Phrase ‘asher be-talmud shegaram in 4QPesher Nahum,” Revue de Qumran 5 (1964–1966), pp. 575–578.

8.

Frank M. Cross, “The Early History of the Qumran Community,” New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, ed. David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971), pp. 70–89.

9.

See the extremely important article of Yaakov Sussmann, “The History of Halakha and the Dead Sea Scrolls—Preliminary Observations on Miqsat Ma’ase Ha-Torah (4QMMT),” Tarbiz 59 (1989–1990), pp. 11–76 (in Hebrew).

10.

See also Schiffman, “The Temple Scroll and the Systems of Jewish Law of the Second Temple Period,” Temple Scroll Studies, ed. G.J. Brooke (Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, 1989), pp. 245–251 and “Miqsat Ma‘aseh Ha-Torah and the Temple Scroll,” Revue de Qumran 14 (1990), pp. 435–457.

11.

See Schiffman, “The New Halakhic Letter (4QMMT) and the Origins of the Dead Sea Sect,” Biblical Archaeologist 53 (June 1990), pp. 64–73.

12.

In the scrolls we also find evidence of the falling out that was to separate the Pharisees from the Hasmonean dynasty as the Hasmoneans became progressively Hellenized. In this respect, the scrolls confirm evidence found in Josephus and in rabbinic literature.