הדגם של תיאור מלחמת הקץ בספרות קומראן

Although scholarly consensus generally holds that six Cave 4 manuscripts (4Q491–496) are copies of the Cave 1 War Scroll (1QM), critical examination suggests a different relationship. Certainly, the Cave 4 manuscripts deal with the same theme – the eschatological war – and have many points of contact with 1QM, at times even almost identical passages. The similarity, or even identity, between 1QM and the Cave 4 manuscripts is observable in two types of material: prayers, and the descriptions of the final eschatological war. The similarities in several prayer sequences are probably attributable to the fact that they already existed as complete units before the authors of this literature. The present article contends that this was also the case for the war descriptions. Critical analysis of the shared structure and sequence, as well as of the elements constituting the war descriptions in all the manuscripts, suggests the use by both 4Q491–496 and 1QM of a single literary model to describe the battles involved. This literary model of the final war description was apparently available to the authors of the war literature in complete, worked-out form and adapted by each author for his own purposes. Thus the surviving remains of the eschatological war literature, now in our possession, point to the use of previously existing models and ready-made literary units (such as prayers), which were variously readapted. Therefore, we cannot speak of the Cave 4 manuscripts as actual copies of 1QM, but rather as a different reworking of the same literary traditions.