The Lost World of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls
042
Portions of the Hebrew Bible and some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are written in Aramaic, the common language of Jesus’s time. What are these texts, who wrote them, and why do they matter?
As geopolitical shifts sent ripples across the ancient Near East, from the Mediterranean coast to the borders of modern-day India, cultural tensions and transformations became a part of life. One interface between empires and regional groups concerned language—both spoken and written.
Naturally, Hebrew was the language of Israelite tradition, scripture, and culture. Aramaic, on the other hand, took hold in much of the ancient Near East as both the official and common tongue, starting in the eighth century B.C.E., to eventually supplant Akkadian as the lingua franca of the region.
Despite its diffusion, much of ancient Judaism’s Aramaic scribal heritage was presumably lost or forgotten. All we find of it in the Bible is the imperial dispatches in Ezra (Ezra 4:8–6:18; Ezra 7:12–26), apocalyptic dream-visions and court tales of the first half of Daniel (Daniel 2:4b–7:28), and a few Aramaic words and phrases dotted elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Genesis 31:47; Jeremiah 10:11). Aramaic was largely relegated to commentary about the mostly Hebrew canon, as half of the Babylonian Talmud and most of the Jerusalem Talmud were written in some dialect of Aramaic, as was the collection of creative translations in the Targumim.
Our knowledge of Jewish Aramaic texts, however, all changed with the modern discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The fragmentary scrolls uncovered—in the late 1940s and early 1950s—near the site of Qumran, just off the shores of the Dead Sea (hence, Dead Sea Scrolls), are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. From an early time, the so-called “sectarian” literature (written by a particular group within Judaism) and “Biblical” texts penned in Hebrew became a focal point in Qumran studies. Similarly, the Greek texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls have received significant scholarly attention. The Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran Cave 1 was among the first discoveries in the Judean Desert and was promptly published (1955), but the larger suite of Aramaic texts had long remained among the most understudied materials in the collection. It was not until 2009 that the last of these texts received full, critical publication.
The tally of Aramaic texts among the Dead Sea 043Scrolls includes upwards of 30 literary works. These represent between 10 and 13 percent of the Qumran finds, depending on how you collect, count, and configure the epic jigsaw puzzle that is the Dead Sea Scrolls. These Aramaic fragments include previously known works (e.g., Daniel 2–7 and Tobit), texts that served as sources for other Jewish or Christian compositions in antiquity (e.g., Aramaic Levi Document and the Book of Giants), and completely new materials (e.g., Visions of Amram and Prayer of Nabonidus).
Given the cultural and linguistic context of mid-Second Temple Judea, the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls show how Jewish scribes reimagined their sacred and authoritative traditions. They did this by many means and for many purposes. They revisited inherited scriptures and imbued them with interpretive elements, expanded them for the purposes of education and even entertainment, and instilled them with a sharp theological edge to cut against the imperial powers of the day, as they believed the end times were lingering on the horizon. Yet all of this was done in the common language of the day, Aramaic. This begs the question: Why would faithful Jewish scribes reflecting on their ancestral past and expecting the dramatic arrival of divine rule pen their works in Aramaic, their adoptive language, rather than Hebrew, the traditional language of their sacred scriptures?
In the most basic sense, language is about communication. However, it can also be an effective tool for establishing or maintaining identity and advancing ideology. The chosen idiom of a work speaks volumes about how an author and community understand themselves politically, religiously, and socially. To write a work in Hebrew or Aramaic, then, makes a statement. Just what type of statement is a matter of debate.
The Qumran community apparently preferred to write in Hebrew. This deference to the ancestral 044language plugs into a larger linguistic revival percolating in the mid-second century B.C.E. The Book of Jubilees, for example, makes the bold claim that Hebrew was a revealed language—the tongue of ancestral tradition and even the idiom through which creation was spoken into being (Jubilees 3:25; 12:25–27). Second Maccabees makes regular recourse to “the ancestral language,” not least in key moments of the narrative where rebels and martyrs are pitted against their imperial oppressors (e.g., 2 Maccabees 7:8). Collectively, these various takes on language choice amplify Hebrew’s importance for certain Jewish communities and groups.
In this context, the selection of Aramaic is curious and requires explanation. There are three possible explanations for the use of Aramaic in the Dead Sea Scrolls:
First, because the Aramaic texts are largely set in either the times of the patriarchs and matriarchs or during the Exile, perhaps the choice was a purely literary and logical one. After all, would Abram speak Hebrew given that the Bible says he was from Ur Kaśdim in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq)? On the other end of the timeline, would it not be odd to have tales of Jews in exilic courts speaking Hebrew?
Second, in most cases our earliest Jewish materials with apocalyptic inclinations are either inscribed in Aramaic or crafted on the basis of Aramaic traditions. Daniel and Jubilees are cases in point. In this sense, medium and message intersect—apocalyptic scribal settings apparently had a knack for Aramaic, perhaps due to the early cultivation of some aspects of early apocalyptic thought in Babylonian mantic and divination texts.
Third, since Aramaic was the lingua franca of the age, perhaps the choice was pragmatic: Writing in Aramaic meant that the texts were accessible to communities beyond Judea, including Jewish communities in the Diaspora.
The correct answer is probably somewhere in a combination of the above options, which are not mutually exclusive.
To be sure, language choice represents only one 045aspect of the dynamic of the Aramaic scrolls, which are diverse in their character and content. Despite this variety, there are some currents of continuity in the Aramaic writings that involve main themes and overarching interests. These common features suggest there is a degree of cohesion to these texts—to the extent that they seem to form a corpus of sorts within the Qumran library.
Right out of the gate, readers will notice that the tales told of Genesis and the Aramaic texts reimagine the ancestral past predominantly in bold first-person voices of Biblical characters, even though their authorship lies with anonymous authors centuries later. These pseudepigrapha capture the vivid and authoritative voices of founding figures for a new generation or give the impression of Diaspora characters telling their own story of the plight of the recent past. Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen) 5:29, for example, introduces a new section as “a copy of the book of the words of Noah.” Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242) 1–3:1 begins, “The words of the prayer of Nabonidus, king of Babylon, the great king.” This seems to be a common compositional technique that recurs throughout ancient Jewish Aramaic literature.
The Aramaic texts are not only indebted to the cast of characters from the Hebrew scriptures, but are also steeped in topics and expressions drawn from them. There are works that adhere closely to the text of the Hebrew scriptures, such as the translation of Job (11QtgJob) or remnants of an apparent Aramaic rendition of Leviticus (4QtgLev). Other writings, such as 1 Enoch or Genesis Apocryphon, blur the border between scripture and interpretation by developing creative and clever expansions of familiar stories. Still others interacted with later pools of Hebrew traditions, like the New Jerusalem text (1Q32; 2Q24; 4Q554–555; 5Q15; 11Q18), which depends on the visionary tour of Ezekiel 40–48 for its ornate and detailed blueprint of eschatological Jerusalem and her temple. In sum, the scribes of the Aramaic texts exhibit an exceptional command of ancestral traditions as well as creativity in reimagining them.
Regardless of how we describe these texts’ formation and function in light of their scriptural antecedents—rewriting, interpretations, allusions, 046etc.—the overarching insight here is that the scribes of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls transport us to a lost world of larger traditions of the Second Temple period. In their time, scripture was more than a single set of inscribed texts; it encompassed bodies of vibrant traditions.
In addition to their general interests in the figures from Genesis, the scribes of several Aramaic works paid a particular attention to priestly topics and personae. In the veritable “trilogy” of literature associated with Levi, Amram (Moses and Aaron’s father), and Qahat (one of the sons of Levi), we find discourses and demonstrations of priestly service, admonishments to maintain the purity of the priestly line, and portrayals of transmitted priestly lore down through the generations. In the Visions of Amram, the priestly patriarch even experiences a dream-vision of an angel revealing to him the “mystery” of the work of the priesthood. In this way, the priestly concerns of the Aramaic literature span the practical, genealogical, and ideological.
With the motif of revelation extending across many other texts and topics in the Aramaic scrolls, the collection as a whole has unmistakably 047apocalyptic contours. The imaginative spin-off of Enochic tradition in the Book of Giants (1Q23–24; 2Q26; 4Q203, 530–533; 6Q8), for example, features the blood-thirsty giants of Genesis 6:4 as experiencing a series of foreboding nightmares intended to communicate their imminent death in the coming deluge and appointed annihilation at the end of the age.
Messianic figures feature both implicitly and explicitly. For example, Messianic Apocalypse (4Q521) describes the anticipated happenings of the messianic age in a form similar to that described later in the Gospels (see Matthew 11:2–6; Luke 7:18–23). Whether it is privileged dialogues with angelic revealers, seers beholding or inscribing celestial tablets, views of the upside-down populated with angels and demons, outlooks of the order and consummation of humanity’s timeline, or any number of items typically blended into apocalyptic literature, the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls check all the boxes. The study of the evolution of the apocalypse and theologies of the Second Temple period, therefore, must account for the contribution of the Aramaic scrolls.
Let us now turn to one book from that corpus that has been studied for the better part of two millennia. The Book of Daniel is the “odd man out” in the Hebrew Bible for three reasons: Its linguistic DNA is a double helix of Aramaic and Hebrew; in the form we know it, the book came together in the mid-Second Temple period (c. 160s B.C.E.); and its genre and ideas are unapologetically apocalyptic. And yet precisely these oddities make it happily at home within the Qumran Aramaic corpus. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide not only eight new manuscripts of Daniel, but also a fresh context to reconsider the book’s theological, cultural, and literary dynamics in light of Aramaic literature.
To begin with, the comparison of idioms between the canonical Book of Daniel and the Qumran Aramaic texts reveals something of a common stock of terms. Take, for example, the famous description of the fourth beast in Daniel 7:7 as “dreadful and terrifying.” A reappraisal of a fragmentary section of the Visions of Amram suggests that upon beholding the frightening figure of an angel of darkness, Amram also remarked at this otherworldly figure’s “dreadful and terrifying” visage (4Q544 1:13). Such analogies open questions of the proximity and relationship of the scribal groups responsible for the Qumran Aramaic texts to those behind the Danielic materials.
The figure of Daniel also enjoys an extended résumé in the Qumran Aramaic scrolls. Not unlike the so-called Additions to Daniel in the Septuagint, a small collection of texts from Cave 4 feature Daniel in previously unknown adventures and episodes. The Pseudo-Daniel fragments (4Q243–244; 4Q245), for example, name Daniel in the context of some familiar characters, such as the Babylonian kings Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar (see Daniel 2–5). They also associate Daniel with other traditions, including genealogical lists apparently revealed to him for both kings and priests from the ancestral and monarchic past down into the Second Temple period.
From these and similar observations, the material of canonical collections appears to be but soundbites of a larger conversation had among ancient Jewish scribes and communities around the figure of Daniel.
As we look beyond the Aramaic text of canonical Daniel and through the Qumran Aramaic corpus as a whole, we should conclude where we began: Where did the Aramaic texts come from? Who wrote them? Why were they written in the first place?
With the Aramaic texts only relatively recently coming onto the radar, we have more questions than answers. We know they were read and some even 048revered as authoritative at Qumran. Take, for example, the nod to “the Book of Daniel the prophet” in Florilegium (4Q174 1–3ii:3) or the allusion to a likely Aramaic Levi tradition in the Damascus Document’s interpretation of Isaiah 24:17 (CD 4:14–19). The favorable reception of the Aramaic texts at Qumran, however, does not mean they originated in that community. In fact, the consensus is that the Aramaic texts mostly date before the sectarian settlement at Qumran and certainly come from locales beyond it. The opportunity we now have is to explore what these writings reveal about the patterns of thought and practice of ancient Jewish culture and the life that existed beyond the wilderness of the Judean Desert.
Since the Qumran group was likely part of a larger Essene or Essene-like movement, the Aramaic texts may provide a lens into the ideas and ideals of other groups. The topic of dualism, for example, is traditionally seen as a hallmark of Qumran thought in view of key Hebrew texts, such as “Treatise on the Two Spirits” in the Community Rule (1QS) or portrayals of the War Scroll (1QM). However, dichotomies and metaphors pitting light and darkness are also found in the Aramaic texts. In one such fragmentary work (4Q548, a text possibly featuring the final words of an unknown dying patriarch), we find the familiar phrases “sons of light” and “sons of darkness.” Is it possible that this fragment harkens to a group outside Qumran, yet one that conceived of the world in terms and categories similar to that of the community that preserved the scrolls? If so, this fragment could serve as the bridge between the Aramaic and Hebrew scribal communities. The Qumran Aramaic texts present new questions about the literature of ancient Judaism; they also demand new questions and models for mapping the social and cultural worlds of ancient Judaism as a whole and the situation and origins of the Qumran group in particular.
Since an early time, the Dead Sea Scrolls have proved both beneficial and controversial for New Testament studies. Comparisons and connections between Qumran and early Christianity, however, have not always recognized inherent diversity to these movements and the literature they generated. The scrolls are not a uniform group of texts representing the singular thought and practice of a monolithic sociological community; they are not a singular variable to be brought into comparison. If we want to account for the ancient Jewish context of Christian origins, the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls should be the first stop on that lengthy tour—simply because they originate in the larger cultural, ideological, and literary landscape of ancient Judaism.
Take but one example illustrating the potential of the Qumran Aramaic texts for comparative study of the New Testament: Abraham laying hands on Pharaoh in prayer to exorcise an unclean spirit, in Genesis Apocryphon 20:29. As many commentators noted, this is the earliest such reference to this posture of apotropaic prayer—one that is designed to drive away evil—which features heavily in the descriptions of Jesus’s miracles (e.g., Mark 5:23; Mark 6:5; Luke 13:13). Elements of the Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon reflect the broader common culture—the culture in which other Jews, including those of the early Jesus movement, also walked and thought.
With the field of Qumran studies basking in the afterglow of its 70th year and contending with prospects and problems on many fronts—from forgeries to potential new caves to new applications of technology—we would be wise not to lose sight of the original purpose of written texts. Now that the arduous and detailed task of publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls in critical editions has been completed, and we’ve determined what these ancient texts say, we should now be asking: What do they mean? These Aramaic texts provide a point of departure for pursuing this question both in and beyond the words and world of Qumran.
Next to the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls are the most valuable literary source for the study of ancient Judaism. Some readers are surprised to discover that many of the scrolls are written in Aramaic. What is the particular significance of the Aramaic texts among the scrolls for elucidating the literary, societal, political, and religious contexts of ancient Judaism and nascent Christianity?
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
Already a library member? Log in here.
Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username