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Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, Vol. XVIII: Qumran Cave 4 • XIII, The Damascus Document (4Q266-273)

Joseph M. Baumgarten, on the basis of transcriptions by J. T. Milik, with contributions from Stephen Pfann and Ada Yardeni

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 236 pp., 42 b&w plates, $135.00 (hardcover)

Solomon Schechter called them the Zadokite work—the two partial copies he found in 1897 in the genizah^a of a Cairo synagogue. Today some call them the first Dead Sea Scroll.^b In scholarly circles the Cairo copies became known by the siglum CD, for the Cairo Damascus document, because they referred to the group’s having been in Damascus. Even though the copies from the Cairo Genizah dated to the 10th and 12th centuries, Schechter speculated that they were the compositions of a Jewish movement that existed before the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. He was proved correct when ten fragmentary copies turned up in the caves of Qumran.

This volume is the editio princeps of the Dead Sea Scroll copies of the Damascus Document, found in the famous Cave 4. They are referred to in this volume simply as D, as opposed to CD, permitting confusion with the strand of the Hebrew Bible attributed to the Deuteronomistic historian, which uses the same siglum. (The siglum QD would have avoided the confusion.)

Half of the fragmentary texts of the Damascus Document from Qumran Cave 4 parallel CD, but the other half (actually 53 percent) are new. The parallels indicate that the copying of the text, for more than a millennium, was amazingly accurate. In more than 300 parallel lines, there are fewer than 30 significant variants. In short, just because a manuscript is late doesn’t mean it is unreliable.

When CD was published, scholars naturally asked which movement’s philosophy was reflected in the work. The idea that it might have been an Essene composition was considered but quickly rejected.

In this volume, Joseph Baumgarten refers to the Damascus Document as one of two “foundational” documents of the Qumran sect (he does not call them Essene, although he ascribes to the Essene hypothesis), the other being the Manual of Discipline, also called the Rule of the Community (1QS). Yet there is a distinct difference between the two documents as regards the “lifestyle” of the group. The Manual of Discipline presupposes a community of males who share their goods. The Damascus Document “presupposes men and women living a normal family life … with individual ownership of property.”

Does this undermine the Essene hypothesis? Not necessarily, according to Baumgarten. There may have been two different kinds of Essenes—the marrying kind and the celibate kind. Baumgarten even finds a hint of two different subgroups reflected in CD, “which distinguishes between sectarians who walk in ‘holy perfection’ and those adherents of the community who dwell in camps in the manner of the land, marrying and bearing children, while following the Torah.” The Qumranites presumably fall into the former category.

In the Damascus Document we find the earliest post-Biblical evidence for a collection of legal rulings arranged under subject rubrics (sometimes in red ink). This process later culminated in the six major orders of the Mishnah, the earliest rabbinic legal compilation (about 200 A.D.), which orders were then subdivided into tractates.

The Damascus Document also contains the earliest instance of blessings beginning with the phrase “Blessed art thou” (Baruch ut^c), which addresses the deity directly. As Baumgarten notes, Qumran law and Pharisaic law had much in common, even though the Qumranites and the Pharisees were adversaries.

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These Cave 4 texts are published with the punctilious care that we would expect from a scholar like Joseph Baumgarten, who is a master of rabbinic law, and his accomplished associates (Stephen Pfann, who wrote the physical descriptions, and Ada Yardeni, who wrote the sections on paleography). The title page and the introduction generously recognize the contribution of Jozef T. Milik, to whom these texts were originally assigned for publication.

The price of this volume ($135 for 236 pages plus 42 plates), unfortunately, places it beyond the reach of almost everyone except institutional libraries—even more so when one considers that the DJD (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert) series is now projected to about 35 volumes. Nevertheless, this is a welcome addition to the swelling tide of Dead Sea Scroll publications.

Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism

Jan Assmann

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) 276 pp., $29.95.

Jan Assmann is one of the great Egyptologists of our time. He has written numerous books, many of which are classics in his field (he is professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany). In this remarkable book, Assmann takes the very essence of Western religion—the principle of monotheism—as his topic, tracing its effects by looking at its counter-image in the Western imagination—the memory of Egypt. After all, Egypt is the backdrop of the Mosaic revolution, and the Biblical memory of Egypt resonates with connotations of oppression, slavery, injustice, paganism, polytheism, luxury, decadence and falsehood. In the Western tradition, Egypt is the counterimage to the austere truth of Biblical monotheism.

Yet this “Mosaic distinction,” as Assmann calls it, between false religion (connoted by Egypt) and true, revealed religion, has its own problems, not the least of which is the intolerance that is often generated by labeling the other as deluded or irrational. The Mosaic distinction, though basic to Judaism, was also applied by Christianity (and later by Islam) to characterize the other as contemptible and potentially evil. So it was that the Jews became subjected to the Mosaic distinction by this new turn, the ugly history of anti-Semitism being its legacy. For Assmann, a German scholar writing in the generation after the Holocaust, these ancient religious controversies seem all too modern, and he explores these issues both as a historian and as a concerned modern thinker.

Based on his intimate and profound knowledge of ancient Egyptian religion, Assmann is able to construct a new image of the contrast between Egypt and monotheism. First, he argues that in ancient polytheisms there was no category of false religion. Each locale had its religious version of what was seen as a transcultural reality, and each version was in theory “translatable” to other versions. In this way ancient peoples identified their gods with the gods of other nations—Canaanite Baal was identified with Egyptian Horus, for instance. The Mosaic distinction initiates a new kind of religion, one that rejects and repudiates the validity of other religious views. So the innovation of monotheism is not just a reduction from the Many to the One, but perhaps more decisively, a rejection of the translatability of religions in favor of the absolute contrast of true vs. false religion. Thus the seeds of religious intolerance are born.

Assmann uncovers a deep irony here, for he shows that this Mosaic distinction was first invented not by Moses but by the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, a brilliant heretic of the 14th century B.C.E. Akhenaten elevated the god Aten to primacy in his radically new theology and declared all other religious versions to be false. This was the first “counter-religion,” in Assmann’s terms, the type of religion that denies the principle of translatability in favor of the category of false religion.

But, Assmann goes on to show, this was only the first of Akhenaten’s innovations. He also redefined the category of god, in that Aten, who was the sun, was also the “one-and-all,” encompassing and encompassed by all things. In a sense the difference between monotheism and polytheism is effaced by this conception, as is the difference between God and nature. Aten is, as one temple hymn states, “the One who makes himself into millions.” Assmann elucidates this concept of Aten “as a ‘hidden unity,’ in which all living plurality on earth has its origin and whose inscrutable nature can be experienced and stated only in its manifestations.” So God and Nature are one, the world becomes divine, God is at once the unity and multiplicity of reality.

In this new understanding of Akhenaten’s religion, Assmann shows the seed of the Mosaic distinction, with its bitter fruit of religious antagonism but also the possibility of an alternative result. In the way that later Egyptian religion embraces aspects of Akhenaten’s theology but returns to the concept of religious translatability, he suggests that it may be possible to alleviate our long-held impulse to label other versions as false and others as depraved. Perhaps, as some Enlightenment thinkers believed (and to whom Assmann devotes several chapters), a renewed memory of Egypt can help us to revive an authentic religiosity without antagonism.

Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, Vol. XVIII: Qumran Cave 4 • XIII, The Damascus Document (4Q266-273)