Is CD a Reliable Witness to Qumran's Damascus Document? The Case of III 14-17

This paper examines the important six word phrase in CD III 16 פתח לפניהם ויחפרו באר למים רבים, noting its syntactic, contextual, and literary problems, and makes the case that this phrase is a later accretion to the text. It then suggests that this insertion may originate in the medieval period, and offers an alternate meaning of the six words. Such a finding would complicate the standard use of the Cairo Damascus Document as a source for the Damascus Document as it appeared at Qumran.