Historiography in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Full title
Historiography in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Updated By
Research notes

Reader Checked|OA 08/04/2013

Reference type
Author(s)
Collins, John J.
Year
2012
Journal / Book Title || Series Title
Dead Sea Discoveries
Volume
19
Issue / Series Volume
2
Pages
159-176
Alternative title
DSD
Reprint edition
John J. Collins, Scriptures and Sectarianism: Essays on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 332, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014, 119-132.
Label
09/07/2012
Abstract

Historiographical writing is woefully under-represented in the Scrolls. This fact may be due in part to ideological reasons. The sectarians were not disposed to preserve the praises of the Maccabees, and they seem to have been far more interested in the niceties of halakah than in historical records. But in part it is also due to chance. The pesharim presuppose familiarity with historical traditions, whether oral or written, that have not survived. The so-called annalistic texts provide a glimpse of the form those traditions may have taken. These texts are not historiography on the grand scale of the books of Maccabees or Josephus, but they are historical records, however minimal, and they show that Judeans between the Maccabees and Josephus, including the sectarians known from the Scrolls, were not entirely indifferent to historical memory.