The Use of Scripture in the Damascus Document 1-8, 19-20.

• Author: Tov, Emanuel
• Position: Review

By JONATHAN G. CAMPBELL. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, vol. 228. Berlin and New York: WALTER DE GRUYTER, 1995. Pp. xii + 218. DM 124.

This monograph, a reworking of an Oxford D. Phil. dissertation (1991) written under the supervision of G. Vermes, focuses on the scriptural background of one of the major texts of the Qumran community, the Damascus Document (D). It has been known since 1897 from the copy discovered in the Cairo Genizah (CD), as well as from ten fragmentary Qumran texts ([4QD.sup.a-h]; 5Q12; 6Q15). The Qumran texts from Cave 4 were known to the author from their preliminary transcription by B. Z. Wacholder and M. G. Abegg, A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave Four, I-IV (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1991-96), but not from the final DJD edition by J. Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4, XIII: The Damascus Document (4Q266-273), Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 18 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) [see preceding review]. On the whole, the Cave 4 parallels were not much consulted in the present study, a fact which hampers the discussion only to a small extent. At a second stage, brief references to differences between CD and D were incorporated in the book (e.g., pp. 53, 108) in a rather unsatisfactory fashion.

The study focuses on the so-called "Admonition" section of D, preserved in CD I-VIII, XIX-XX, and parallel with [4QD.sup.a-e], together with the material in [4QD.sup.a,b,c] which precedes the "Admonition" in CD, and which is not paralleled in CD. Although the author is cognizant with what he terms the "newly liberated material" (p. 3), it is hardly used in the monograph. The photographs of D which were available to the author in the Brill microfiche edition (1992) are not even mentioned. Instead, reference is made to preliminary editions, known to be imprecise, by Wacholder and Abegg (1991) and by R. H. Eisenman and M. Wise (The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered: The First Complete Translation and Interpretation of 50 Key Documents Withheld for Over 35 Years [Rockport, Mass.: Element, 1992]). The author adds, however, that the "new" D texts will probably not alter his views of the "Admonition" section (pp. 4, 5), as they generally match CD.

After a useful summary of the research on D (pp. 4-8), a general discussion of the use of the Bible at Qumran, and a review of a monograph by O. J. R. Schwarz examining exactly the same...