Creative Reception: The Bible and its Interpretations at Qumran

Corrado Martone treats a body of literature to which 1 Enoch is integral: the texts discovered near Khirbet Qumran. Martone is taken up with the Qumran biblical texts themselves. There is longstanding agreement that variants in those texts may betray alternate textual traditions to the MT or SP. Martone suspects, however, that those variants number so many, and concur so often with Yaḥad ideology, that they must also reflect a suffusion of that ideology into the biblical texts. Cases for this can be (and have been) made. But here Martone furnishes support from another quarter, the similarly ‘free attitude toward the biblical text’ one finds in sectarian exegetical and foundational literature. Taking note of three factors—the liminal position occupied by Qumran rewritings of the Bible (between biblical text and commentary), the sensus plenior assumed for the prophets in the pesharim and the manipulation of lemmata in formative sectarian documents such as Pesher Habakkuk and the Cairo Damascus Document—Martone detects a liberty in dealing with scripture which, he contends, doubtless reaches into the biblical manuscripts themselves.