Recherche – Detailansicht

Ausgabe:

November/2021

Spalte:

1029–1031

Kategorie:

Judaistik

Autor/Hrsg.:

Bundvad, Mette, and Kasper Siegismund [Eds.]

Titel/Untertitel:

Vision, Narrative, and Wisdom in the Aramaic Texts from Qumran. Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, 14–15 August, 2017. Ed. with the collaboration of. M. S. Bach, S. Holst, J. Høgenhaven.

Verlag:

Leiden u. a.: Brill 2020. 290 S. = Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, 131. Geb. EUR 99,00. ISBN 9789004413702 (auch: Open Access).

Rezensent:

Henryk Drawnel

The conference held at the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and Letters in August 2017 and organized by a team of Dutch scholars working at the University of Copenhagen took up the study of the Aramaic manuscripts from Qumran. The volume under review contains papers presented and discussed during this conference and published in the STDJ series.
The twelve articles published in the volume are structured into three thematic groups. The authors of the first four articles discuss the concept of memory and expectations in the context of religious past and eschatological future as envisioned in individual Aramaic texts from Qumran. Andrew B. Perrin studies the Aramaic Pseudo-Danielic texts (4Q243–244; 245) detecting scribal memories and innovations in shaping the figure of Daniel, known from earlier biblical and Near Eastern compositions, in them (»Remembering the Past, Cultivating a Character: Memory and the Formation of Daniel in the Aramaic Pseudo-Daniel Texts [4Q243–244; 4Q245]«, 6–30). Mika S. Pajunen attracts the attention of the reader to the transmission process of patriarchal figures in the Aramaic corpus from Qumran, focusing on Enoch, Noah, Abram as well as on Levi, Qahat and Amram (»Transmitting Patriarchal Voices in Aramaic: Claims of Authenticity and Reliability«, 31–51). The authors of the Qumran Aramaic compositions stemming from the late Second Temple period relied on the traditions found in Genesis to augment them with their own interpretations and with new revelatory material. The emphasis on the pre-Sinai events led to the inclusion of cosmological and universal perspectives of the universal union of humans and angels opposed by the forces of Belial into the theol- ogical mindset in which the covenant and revelation at Sinai, chronologically later, became relativized and subject to theological verification. While analyzing the fragmentary text of the New Jerusalem composition (4Q554, 4Q554a, 4Q555, 5Q15, 11Q18, 1Q32[?]), Hugo Antonissen reconstructs the architecture of the ideal city and compares banquet houses and their furnishing with the Graeco-Roman dining rooms, which serves for him as a starting point for the study of Greek banquet culture in comparison with Jewish pious banquet customs (»The Banquet Culture in New Jerusalem, An Aramaic Text from Qumran«, 52–77). Torleif Elgvin takes up a challenging task of searching for the traditio-historical background of the mysterious priestly figure in 4Q541 that he classifies as a Levi testament (»Trials and Universal Renewal—the Priestly Figure of the Levi Testament 4Q541«, 78–100). The opposition encountered by the eschatological priest together with the motifs of trials, suffering and atonement are drawn from Isaiah 50 and 53, his central role as a priestly leader depends on Ezekiel 40–48, while his redemptive function is related to Jer 30:18–24 and perhaps Zech 13.
The next four articles examine several topics concerning the Visions of Amram (4Q543–4Q546; 4Q547; 4Q548), an Aramaic composition in which Amram, Levi’s grandson, plays the most prominent role. Considering the Visions of Amram to have a testamentary form, Liora Goldman identifies Amram’s son called »the angel of God« with Moses, the future leader of Israel (»Between Aaron and Moses in 4QVisions of Amram«, 101–118). Jesper Høgenhaven pays close attention to the geographical names and setting of the Visions of Amram discovering therein a sequence of temporal periods known from the Pentateuch: Patriarchs in Canaan – Israelites in Egypt, at Mt. Sinai, and finally in Canaan (»Geography in the Visions of Amram Texts [4Q543–547]«, 119–136). Piecing together the original sequence of the Aramaic fragments of the Visions of Amram constitutes a challenging endeavor undertaken by Søren Holst (»Fragments and Forefathers: An Experiment with the Re­construction of 4QVisions of Amram«, 137–152). Due to the overlaps found between fragments in 4Q543–4Q547, he transcribes the Aramaic text in the following order: 4Q545, cols. I-IV; 4Q544, col. I; 4Q543, cols. I–II, V; 4Q547, col. III. Since the verb ןתנ »to give« (4Q543 2 1–2) was interpreted by R. Duke as a case of the 3rd person sin-gular suffix conjugation, Kasper Siegismund notes that there are no other instances of the root in the Qumran corpus that would attest to a similar verbal use (»4Q543 2 1–2 and the Verb »To Give« in Qumran Aramaic«, 153-167). Since in Qumran Aramaic the verb ןתנ is attested in the prefix conjugation with the suppletive בהי used in the perfect, Siegismund considers Duke’s interpretation as un-likely, and parses the form ןתנ as a 1st person plural »we will give«.
The last group of the four articles discusses the socio-historical context of the Qumran Aramaic texts, their relation to the New Testament and recent »discoveries« of some additional Qumran fragments turned out to be modern forgeries. Departing from avail-able archaeological and historical data from the Persian and Hellenistic period in ancient Israel, Daniel A. Machiela reconstructs a hypothetical socio-historical scenario that could correspond to historical and literary data retrieved from most Aramaic texts found at Qumran (»The Compositional Setting and Implied Audience of Some Aramaic Texts from Qumran: A Working Hypothesis«, 168–202). The authors of these texts recruited from a small group of elite priests living in Jerusalem in Judea during the fourth to mid-second century BCE. In their compositions, they frequently re-curred to antediluvian, patriarchal and priestly traditions so as to preserve and strengthen the observance of the ancestral (legal) tradition and faithfulness to the God of Israel, fend off intermarriage, but at the same time remain in dialogue with foreign cultures and powers. Being convinced that some parts of the material character-istic of the Gospel of Luke resonate with themes and motifs found in Qumran Aramaic texts, George J. Brooke compares the figure of the »son of God« and »son of the Most High« in 4Q246 with the application of the corresponding Greek expressions to Jesus in Luke 1:32–35 (»Aramaic Traditions from the Qumran Caves and the Pales-tinian Sources for Part of Luke’s Special Material«, 203–220). He notes that Luke may have had access to the Palestinian tradition about the son of God whether in its Aramaic form (4Q246) or a Greek translation, and applied it to Jesus in a positive context, thus supplying his other sources on which he relied, that is Mark and Q source. The second point of contact with Aramaic traditions in the Luke’s Gospel is the correlation of Enoch as the seventh (Luke 3:37; 1 En. 60:8; 93:3; Jub 7:39; Jude 14) in Luke’s genealogy (Luke 3:23–38) and Jesus as the seventy seventh (Luke 3:23).
Melissa Sayyad Bach returns to 4Q246 to propose a collective understanding of the Aramaic syntagm »people of God« interpreted independently from the figure of the »Son of God«, a point that differentiates her approach from earlier studies of the text (»4Q246 and Collective Interpretation«, 221–241). She identifies the decisive role of the people of God in causing the new age to begin and following Craig. A. Evans proposes to read 4Q246 II, 4 as denoting the resurrection of the people of God. The article by Årstein Justnes discussing eight fake Dead Sea fragments closes the volume (»Fake Fragments, Flexible Provenances: Eight Aramaic ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ from the 21st Century«, 242–272). Being non-provenanced and undocumented, the fragments can be traced back to the Bethlehem an-tiquity dealer William Kando, son of Khalil Iskander Shahin. Four of them are part of the Schøyen collection, two belong to the South-Western Baptist Theological Seminary, and one is held at the Azusa Pacific University.