From Universal to Sectarian. The Zadokites, Qumran, the Temple and Their Libraries

From Universal to Sectarian. The Zadokites, Qumran, the Temple and their Libraries approaches the theme from the point of view of Hellenistic libraries, founded with the aim at collecting certain corpuses of tradition. The founders of the library of Alexandria aimed at collecting the cultural heritage of the Greek speaking world of their time (among them the most ancient translation of the Pentateuch). 2 Maccabees 2:13-14 refers to Nehemiah’s library and the books collected by Judas Maccabee. The collection of manuscripts found at Qumran has been often referred to as a library. There is no clear archaeological evidence of a physical library space at Qumran, and what we can see is an abstract library, a “textual community” – a term often used for medieval religious communities. They comprehend their identities thanks to written texts, which were interpreted for them by individuals. Commentating the texts owned generated new texts. The redactional history of some of the Qumran texts (1QS, for example) might shed some light on the group’s historical evolution and in particular on the establishment of the Zadokite element within it. A virtual library in which the Zadokite element grew over the years until it became overwhelming and transformed a sectarian library, – or, to put it in J. Collins’s terminology, a grey area library – into a Zadokite library containing sectarian texts.