Biblical Interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Looking Back and Looking Ahead

The decade from 1987 to 1997 was one of burgeoning textual publication, as the number of volumes in the official series Discoveries in the Judean Desert grew at a rapid pace. Many of the works first published in DJD during that period were related to the Bible in some way, either “rewritten Bible,” or “parabiblical,” or biblical commentaries. But compared with the decade from 1997–2007, synthetic work on biblical interpretation was rather infrequent. Thus, for example, a search of the Rambi database for the linked subjects “Dead Sea Scrolls” and “biblical interpretation” provides only 20 entries for 1987–1997 and 92 for the decade 1997–2007.
As might be expected in the early stages of digestion of so many new texts, a great deal of the scholarly effort in the publications of the last decade was narrowly focused on the interpretation of those specific texts. There has, however, been a gradual movement toward synthetic treatments dealing either with the nature or methodology of biblical interpretation within groups of texts or literary genres. This tendency has been driven, in part, by the proliferation of guides or handbooks to the Qumran scrolls which now contain “mandatory” chapters on biblical interpretation in the Scrolls.
The course of scholarly history is hard to predict, but there is much more to be done in this latter area, and I envision further rigorous work being done on the exegetical methodology of all the genres of Bible-related texts from Qumran. The legal material, in particular, has not received as much treatment in the past as the non-legal material. I should hope that the area of comparative study of the traditions of interpretation in the Scrolls with those found in later Judaism and Christianity will also take on a greater relative prominence, as the artificial disciplinary barriers which have often divided scholars of the Scrolls from students of rabbinic and patristic texts continue to fall.