The Double-Derivative Text: CD II.14-18 as Rewritten Proverbs 7:24-27 and 1QS I:3-9

• In Event: The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Abstract

The category of Rewritten Bible is often invoked in arguing for linear, straightforward influence of a scriptural text on a later, interpretive one. However, this model unnecessarily limits the nature of relationships that ancient documents can have with one another. What would happen if a textual selection were to exist that seemed to build upon two distinct scriptural corpora? More specifically, what if we were to come across a passage in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls that relies not only upon a biblical pericope but upon another Qumran sectarian document as well? This paper proposes that we encounter just such a case of double influence in CD II:14-18 (the Damascus Document). It will analyze this text against its precursors in Proverbs 7:24-27 and 1QS I:3-9 (Serekh ha-Yahad) and subsequently analyze the particular methodological advantages and complications that such a study offers.
This paper will first engage in a close reading of the relevant texts, demonstrating the dependence of the Damascus Document passage on both the selection from Proverbs and that from Serekh ha-Yahad. It will then problematize a simplistic notion of Rewritten Bible that has been prevalent in some scholarly circles, both by demonstrating that the text is doubly derivate and by posing the question of which texts the Damascus Document considered to be “scriptural.”
In that sense, this paper is part of a broader project that examines closely the Damascus Document’s use of scripture on the level of textual pericopae. While previous scholarship has highlighted many instances of biblical language use and citation in CD, its methods have been atomized, primarily noting individual biblical words and phrases in CD rather than segments of the CD text that rewrite biblical pericopae; thus, its account of CD’s unique usage of the Bible is deficient. This paper will ask these very questions of how CD utilizes the Bible – along with other texts it considers “scripture” – while simultaneously demonstrating some of the complications implicit in such an analysis.
By closely examining this passage and its intertexts, while concurrently reevaluating scholarly conventions, we will shed light both on CD’s interpretive practices and on certain deficiencies in the Rewritten Bible genre.

author

• Edmond Isaac Zuckier, Yale University