Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of Jewish manuscripts recovered from caves near Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, including copies of Old Testament books alongside sectarian and other Jewish writings.¹ The oldest of them, such as the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa), date to at least the second century BC.² They were produced and preserved by a Jewish community, generally identified with the Essenes, that combined apocalyptic expectation with a prolific output of religious texts.³

Significance for the Text of Scripture

Craig A. Carter argues that the Great Isaiah Scroll’s substantial agreement with the later Masoretic text tells against theories that the book of Isaiah was assembled piecemeal, long after the prophet’s own lifetime, from originally separate and unrelated compositions:

“It seems quite likely to me that the text of Isaiah that we see in the Great Isaiah Scroll of Qumran (1QIsaa), which dates from no later than 125 BC, is basically the same book that came from Isaiah himself or else from a close and like-minded disciple… No manuscript or archaeological evidence exists for shorter versions of Isaiah or of portions of Isaiah circulating separately.”²

On this reading, the scroll is evidence for the text’s stability rather than its fragmentation: the copy from Qumran already presents Isaiah as the single, unified book later Jewish and Christian tradition received, centuries before the critical theories that divide it into multiple, independently written parts.²

Qumran and the Question of Canon

The Qumran community’s own writings became a touchstone for New Testament scholarship on a different question entirely: whether the earliest Christians, convinced that Christ would return within their lifetime, would have had any motive to produce lasting written Scripture of their own. Michael Kruger argues that Qumran supplies a direct counterexample. The community was, by its own writings, thoroughly apocalyptic, awaiting God’s imminent eschatological inbreaking, and yet it was also “a prolific producer of texts”:

“One of the major activities of the Qumran community was the production of religious texts. Not only were many of their writings committed to careful exegetical interaction with Old Testament texts, but they also composed new treatises which no doubt would have had a quasi-scriptural status.”³

Kruger draws the parallel explicitly: the early church performed “these same two functions” as the Qumran community, interpreting the Old Testament text it already had while also producing new authoritative writings of its own, and treats Qumran as proof that apocalyptic urgency and sustained scriptural writing are not in tension.³ The same point appears, more briefly, in his earlier book: “the discovery of the Qumran literature showed that communities could be decidedly eschatological/apocalyptic and also prolific producers of texts.”¹ Kruger further notes that the covenantal self-understanding running through the Old Testament and into the New pervaded Qumran’s own writings as well, citing Geza Vermes’s observation that “it was this same Covenant theology that served as the Qumran Community’s basic beliefs.”⁴

Interpretive Method: The Habakkuk Pesher

The Habakkuk Pesher (1QpHab), a line-by-line commentary on the prophet Habakkuk, shows how the Qumran community read its own Scripture. Philip Chase Sears’s study of the concept of “mystery” in Paul’s letters treats 1QpHab as the primary Qumran instance of a broader interpretive pattern: an Old Testament prophecy is read as veiled speech about the interpreting community’s own present, its true meaning unlocked only through revelation given to one authorized figure, the “Teacher of Righteousness.”⁵ By submitting to that figure’s reading, Sears explains, the community understood itself to be

“the people of the New Covenant, the true remnant of Israel living in the end-time… the guardians of the purity and authenticity of the true priesthood and of the correct interpretation of Scripture, an interpretation revealed to the Teacher of Righteousness.”⁵

Sears then sets this alongside Paul’s own use of the same prophet in Romans 1:17, where Paul quotes Habakkuk 2:4 (“the righteous shall live by faith”) to introduce the gospel. The structural move is similar, locating the fulfillment of Habakkuk’s word in the interpreter’s own moment, but the two interpreters resolve it differently:

“In line with the Qumran community (1QpHab 7:1-14), Paul understands the ‘appointed time’ for the completion of Habakkuk’s vision has come (Hab 2:3). Only for Paul the fulfillment is not in the Qumran community and Teacher of Righteousness, but in Christ and his church. Qumran interpreted Habakkuk’s prophecy as a call to faithfulness to God’s law (1QpHab 7:10-12) and loyalty to the Teacher of Righteousness. Paul, on the other hand, uses Habakkuk 2:4 to highlight the oracle’s call to faith in the word of the Lord that salvation comes via judgment.”⁶

Both readings depend on an authoritative interpreter unlocking Habakkuk’s meaning for the present age. What divides them is who that interpreter is, and where he locates the “appointed time” Habakkuk foresaw: in an ongoing sectarian community awaiting vindication, or in Christ himself.⁶

Related Doctrines

References

Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 5, “The Apostolic Origins of the Canon.” ↩ ↩²
Craig A. Carter, “Interpreting Isaiah 40-48 Theologically,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 3. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), chap. 3, “The Writing of Canon,” 79-118. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Kruger, The Question of Canon, chap. 2, “The Origins of Canon,” 47-78. ↩
Philip Chase Sears, “The Jewish Apocalyptic Mystery Schema,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 23-61. ↩ ↩²
Sears, “The Mystery Schema of Romans,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11,” 62-131. ↩ ↩²