John Joseph Collins

is associate professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Scripture and Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Mediating the Divine: Prophecy and Revelation in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism.

is a doctoral candidate in Early Christianity at the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation is entitled “Apocalypse and Society: Boundary Making and Cultural Participation in Early Christian Letters.”

is Associate Professor of Ancient Judaism in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale. Her books include Seconding Sinai and Recovering the Future: An Analysis of 4 Ezra.

is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Old Testament at Emory University. She is the author of The Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran and The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations.

holds the chair for Old Testament and Early Judaism and is director of the Qumran Institute at the University of Groningen. He is editor of the Journal for the Study of Judaism and Dead Sea Discoveries. His books include Reading the Human Body and The Jewish Revolt against Rome.

is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Duke Divinity School, and author of Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in early Judaism.

is Dean Ireland’s Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford. His books include The Open Heaven and Blake and the Bible.

is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Pomona College. She takes up analysis of apocalypse and politics in her book The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex, and Sovereignty, as well as in her articles “Biblical Promise and Threat in U. S. Imperialist Rhetoric, before and after 9.11,” in The Scholar and Feminist Online, and “Desiring War: Apocalypse, Commodity Fetish, and the End of History,” in The Bible and Critical Theory.

is Professor of Old Testament at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he is also Director of Peace Studies. Among his publications are the commentary on the book of Daniel for the New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary and A Theology of Exile.

is the Rev. H. James Yamauchi, S. J. Professor of the History of Religions at Loyola University of New Orleans. Her books include How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate. She is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism. She has published a number of books and articles on the Branch Davidians.

John J. Collins, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature, Oxford Handbooks (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), xi–xiii.… (mais)

This book makes the almost-impossible look easy.

"Almost impossible," as in, writing about the recent history of the Dead Sea Scrolls without landing in the middle of a huge swarm of controversies about slow publication, withholding of data, minor falsifications, lies of omission, and pure academic spite is about like trying to walk a tightrope while people at both ends try to saw through it. Author Collins of course has to address these issues, in his substantial final chapter "The Battle for the Scrolls," but he is fair to all sides, and although he offers admits his own opinion (that the scrolls should have been made available more readily and sooner, which is also my own opinion and that of most others), he assigns very little blame. It is a fine example of even-handedness.

Most of the other chapters are almost as good: An overview of the discovery, and several chapters on the interpretation of the scrolls and scholars' attempts to fit them into our other knowledge of the Maccabean and Roman eras of Jewish history.

There are a couple of places where I have problems. One is Collins's discussion in his second chapter of the Essene Hypotheses -- that is, the widespread but not universal belief that the owners of the Scrolls were the Jewish sect known as the Essenes. Collins correctly notes that the scrolls often match what is said of the Essenes in other sources, but in some ways clearly do not. Thus, if the Essenes are correctly described by Josephus and Philo, and if the Qumran community had to belong to one of the sects we know to have existed, then the Qumraners must have been Essenes, not Pharisees, Sadducees, or Zealots. But there are two points I don't think Collins gives enough attention: First, Josephus and Philo were not Essenes, although Josephus had some experience with them; their descriptions -- which certainly weren't intended for twentieth century scholars! -- may not have been accurate, and second, who is to say that we know all the Jewish sects of the period? I felt like I was getting a lot of technical arguments about Essene-dom (good arguments, to be sure) without other alternatives really being considered.

The other lack I felt was any sufficient attention to the Biblical manuscripts among the scrolls -- most of the discussion is of the various Rules, Commentaries, Hymnals, and such. But textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible is a complex task, and the Scrolls are very important for this. All later Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible agree very closely -- yet the Hebrew text sometimes doesn't make sense (e.g. the Book of Job looks as if the text is badly damaged), and in several books, the earliest translation into another language, the Greek Septuagint or LXX, implies an underlying Hebrew text very different from what has been preserved in Judaism. (The LXX of Jeremiah, for instance, is dramatically shorter than the Hebrew.) A substantial fraction of the Qumran texts -- especially, according to Collins, the later ones -- agree with the text that Judaism later used. But some do not.

Collins brushes this off with little more than a statement that different people used different texts. And it is true that it doesn't really matter within Judaism -- their Bible is the Hebrew text of the Middle Ages, even if it is defective or nonsensical, and they did an amazing job of preserving this texts from (roughly) the second century of our era until the present day. But I, for one, want to know what the Hebrew Bible originally said, not what some second century scribe decided it should say. In at least two books -- Samuel and Jeremiah -- the scrolls imply that the original Hebrew was very different: Several fragments of Jeremiah indicates that the short LXX text was translated from an earlier, better Hebrew text than the much-expanded Hebrrew version we have now, and the substantial manuscript 4QSam(a) has a text of Samuel which differs from both the Hebrew and the LXX, implying that, for Samuel at least, we need to do a complete reconstruction of the text based on the MT Hebrew, 4QSam(a), and the LXX; the MT Hebrew is simply too corrupt to stand. Collins doesn't even mention this task of reconstruction.

Also, Collins has a nice list of scholars involved in the publication of the Scrolls, but no catalog of the most important scrolls, such as the Damascus Document and "MMT." This would have been a very useful addition.

For these reasons, this is not a complete discussion of the Scrolls; you will need other works to get the whole picture. But it is a fair, highly readable, quite useful volume as long as you realize that there are a few more volumes still to be read.… (mais)