שיכרון שהוא רוויון: לביאורו של פשר חבקוק יא 8— 16

Habakkuk 2:15–17 is a satirical dirge describing how a wicked man seduces another person to become drunk in order to draw satisfaction from seeing the latter’s nudity. The prophet asserts that God will repay the wicked, publicly revealing his own disgrace. This passage is interpreted in 1QpHab as referring to the Wicked Priest, who persecuted the Teacher of Righteousness, and v. 16 is understood as relating the Wicked Priest’s foreseen punishment (1QpHab 11:8–16). Embedded in this passage (ll. 13–14) is an allusion to Deut 29:18, a passage that is similarly alluded to in 1QS 2:11–17. The two scriptural passages seemingly have no verbal point of contact, and commentators were forced to assume various kinds of associations between them that could have yielded the present composition of 1QpHab 11:8–16. This paper explains the integration of the two passages against the linguistic background of the bilingual Jewish society in which 1QpHab was composed. The prophet refers to drunkenness (employing the Hebrew root š-k-r), while Deut 29:18 refers to saturation (employing the Hebrew root r-w-y). Aramaic r-w-y, however, is the standard equivalent of Hebrew š-k-r in the Targumim and other Aramaic versions of the Bible. It stands to reason, therefore, that a bilingual pesherist could easily have connected š-k-r in Hab 2:15 with r-w-y in Deut 29:18. The paper further discusses the literary and exegetical implications of this insight in the context of 1QpHab and for our understanding of the sectarian literature more generally.