הוראות ליחיד בספרות החכמה מקומראן

Instructions to individuals comprise one of the main topics in sapiential literature. These instructions can be broadly assigned to two types: those that reflect the sitz im leben of daily communal life and those related to religious or moral issues. Both types also appear in some of the sapiential texts from Qumran. This comparative investigation attempts to clarify the degree to which the specific religious and social ideology of the Qumran community is reflected in two sapiential texts found at Qumran: 4QInstruction-like Composition B (4Q424) and 4QInstruction – Musar LaMevin (4Q415–418). 4Q424 includes instructions concerning the reliability of persons with whom one intends to enter into economic, social, and judicial relationships. It describes the unreliable persons, on the one hand, and the reliable persons on the other, warning whom to avoid and recommending whom to trust. These instructions reflect the conventional wisdom of a wise instructor, based upon his experience and practice, and resemble literary instructions to individuals known in the biblical, apocryphal, and other sapiential texts of antiquity or late antiquity. The instructions found in Musar LaMevin (4Q415–418) are conventional at times, but also reflect the instructor's personal ideological outlook. The latter recommends that the individual study the רז נהיה ('the mystery of becoming') to distinguish between justice and evil, and between wisdom and stupidity, and as a guide to proper behavior. The inquiry into the רז נהיה is typical of apocalyptic literature, including the sectarian texts from Qumran. It reflects their specific deterministic outlook upon reality, history, and eschatology in general, and on individual life as well. Thus the sources for wisdom – whether from the sage's own experience (4Q424), or a mysterious revealed wisdom (4Q415–418) – comprise one difference between conventional and apocalyptic wisdom, accepted or even written by a sectarian author.