Scriptural interpretation at Qumran

The Qumran Dead Sea scrolls constitute a collection of Jewish manuscripts recovered from eleven caves near an ancient settlement called Khirbet Qumran on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. Discovered between 1947 and 1956, and originating from what scholars call the late Second Temple period of Judaism (c. 250 bce–70 ce), it contains over 900 manuscripts in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. The vast majority are literary texts of a religious nature, although most have only survived in a considerably damaged state.
Given its size, it is helpful to subdivide the Qumran collection to aid understanding. One way of doing so that views the manuscripts within their late Second Temple context is to propose a threefold division: (i) the widely circulating scriptures that those at Qumran, like other late Second Temple Jews, assumed had an origin in ancient Israel and Judah; (ii) other pious works which make no such claims to antiquity and, lacking signs of a Qumran origin, were also probably circulating widely; and (iii) the so-called sectarian Qumran Dead Sea scrolls. As we shall see, the first of these categories included books from the later rabbinic Bible (e.g. Genesis, Isaiah), as well as other texts believed to stem from ancient Israel and Judah (e.g. Jubilees, Tobit). The second category, in addition to a long-known composition like the second-century bce Ben Sira, included writings previously unknown to scholars such as 4QSapiential Work (4Q185) and 4QLegal Texts A–B (4Q251, 264a). The third included other previously unknown works normally dubbed ‘sectarian’ because their distinct vocabulary and ideology show that they were produced by those responsible for the collection as a whole (e.g. 4QMMTa–f (4Q394–9), Community Rule (1QS, 4QSa–j (4Q255–64), 5QS (5Q11)).