"Age of Wickedness" or "End of Days"?: Qumran Scholarship in Prospect

Interpretation of the newly available texts will inevitably reflect existing theories, controversies, and issues. The chief focus in this report is on the evidence for the communities that we already know from other Qumran texts (1QS, CD, 1QSa), in the hope of discovering more of their ideology, structure, and relationship. But two other factors come into prominence: what do the large number of texts reflecting no community at all tell us about the nature and origin of the Qumran archive? And what does the appearance of more than one text on one manuscript and, indeed, the evidence of varied material juxtaposed in the same text tell us about the immediate source of the literature? The rival theories of origin in Jewish sects and of origin in Jerusalem libraries may need to be reconciled in some way in future research.