Decrees for the “Volunteers” of the People: The Function of the Pesher of the Well in the Context of the Damascus Document

The Damascus Document’s Pesher of the Well (CD 6:2–11) has generally been treated as an isolated unit, either as an example of Qumran exegesis or as evidence for the history of the sect. The present study offers a fresh reading of this section that gives special attention to its rhetorical function within the document and its relationship to the document’s legal material in particular. It is argued that the pesher was intended to authorize the body of legal rulings found within the document by interpreting the two lines of Numbers 21:18 as an outline of two stages of the sect’s history. The pesher is built around two anchor-words in the lemma: ‮שרים‬‎ (“officials”), a reference to the sect’s founders who established an authoritative body of torah rulings, and ‮נדיבי העם‬‎, a reference to the sect’s later “volunteer initiates” who were to remain faithful to these rules throughout the Epoch of Wickedness.