The Damascus Document
A work of exhortation and law from the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It tells of a “teacher of righteousness” raised up 390 years after Nebuchadnezzar and of a “new covenant in the land of Damascus”. Known first from medieval copies, then from Qumran.
See the object at deadseascrolls.org.il ↗English translation by Solomon Schechter, 1910, from p. xxxi (Internet Archive) ↗Description of a Cave 4 fragment, 4Q271 (Library of Congress exhibition, 1993) ↗
Solomon Schechter found two medieval copies of this work among the manuscripts of the Cairo Genizah and published them in 1910 under the title Fragments of a Zadokite Work. He dated the longer copy to the tenth century and the shorter to the eleventh or twelfth. After 1947, fragments of the same work were found in the caves at Qumran, most of them in Cave 4. They showed that it was a thousand years older than the Cairo copies and belonged with the other writings of that community.
The first part is an admonition that retells Israel’s history and the origin of the group. The second part gives its laws on oaths, courts, purity and the sabbath. Unlike the Community Rule (1QS), it provides for members who live in “camps”, marry and have children (CD 7.6–7). Its figure of 390 years is the number given in Ezekiel (Ezekiel 4:5), and many scholars take it as symbolic. The teacher and his opponents are never named. See the Community of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Cited in
- about 150 BC to AD 68, estimated date