When Geza Vermes first coined the term “Rewritten Bible” a half-century ago, I suspect he did not have any idea of the impact that term would make in Qumran studies. I also suspect that the phenomenon to which he applied the term seemed to him clearly defined and easily recognizable. It certainly has to me for much of the time since I first encountered the book of Jubilees and the Temple Scroll, nearly fifteen years ago in Bernard Levinson’s seminar on Scripture and Interpretation at the University of Minnesota. Rewritten Bible, for me, was simply a biblical text that had been revised according to a later interpreter’s own agenda; as Vermes put it, “In order to anticipate questions, and to solve problems in advance, the midrashist inserts haggadic development into the biblical narrative—an exegetical process which is probably as ancient as scriptural interpretation itself.” Comparing the book of Jubilees to Genesis or Chronicles to Samuel-Kings allows one to grasp immediately what Vermes describes. Granted, my work with the Temple Scroll made clear to me early on that Vermes’ definition, focused as it is on “haggadic development,” must be extended to include law as well as narrative. But the basic image of a Second Temple scribe interpretively reconfiguring the text to reflect a new set of perspectives and priorities remained.
I think many of my Qumran colleagues would agree with my sense that one of the recurring themes of recent scholarship across all sorts of subfields in the study of the Scrolls is the need to apply a “hermeneutic of suspicion” to our own scholarly constructs: in light of the full publication of the Qumran texts, we have come to realize that what we once regarded as intuitively obvious may in fact be more complex than we suspected. (I am thinking of issues like the Essene Hypothesis, the reconstruction of the community’s history, and the distribution of texts among the various caves, among many others.) The concept of “Rewritten Bible,” and with it my image of a lone scribal rewriter, has not been immune from this development. Discussion of the proper use and application of the term has flourished in the past decade in particular; one notable and widely-accepted proposal is that we speak not of “Rewritten Bible” but of “Rewritten Scripture,” in recognition of the absence of a fixed canon until sometime after 70 CE. My own recent work has complicated the idea of scriptural rewriting in other ways. In particular, my ongoing projects on the Temple Scroll and on the 4QPseudo-Ezekiel manuscripts have made clear to me the difficulty of recovering that one individual scribe and the particular scriptural text that scribe is rewriting. In other words, while the scribe/rewriter and the scriptural text remain the two poles around which the entire concept of Rewritten Scripture orbits, the Qumran textual evidence forces us to think about rewriting in a more complex way.
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