Pesher

The best preserved pesher, a running commentary on the book of Habakkuk found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, shows the method at work verse by verse. Habakkuk's original warning about the Chaldeans advancing to punish Judah becomes, in the commentator's hands, a warning about the Kittim, a code name most scholars read as the Romans, whose swift and terrifying army the sectarian author saw as the latest instrument of a judgment unfolding in his own generation. Other verses are turned toward the community's own internal history rather than a foreign threat: Habakkuk's complaint about the wicked surrounding the righteous is read as a description of a struggle between a figure the text calls the Wicked Priest, usually identified by scholars with a sitting high priest in Jerusalem whom the sect regarded as illegitimate, and the community's own founding figure, called the Teacher of Righteousness, whose authoritative interpretation of scripture the community believed had been divinely inspired to unlock what the prophets themselves could not fully understand. The commentary states this assumption almost as a rule of method: God told Habakkuk to write what would happen to the last generation, but did not make known to him the fulfillment of the prophecy, and it fell to the Teacher of Righteousness alone to whom God made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets. That claim, that the true meaning of ancient prophecy was sealed until the community's own teacher could open it, is what separates pesher most sharply from midrash's more open, ongoing conversation with the text, and it depends entirely on the community's conviction that it was living inside the very last days the prophets had described.

The Habakkuk Pesher is usually read for what it says, but that reading says nothing about how a text that had sat sealed in a cave for roughly nineteen centuries came to be read at all, and the discovery is its own documented episode.

In late 1946 or early 1947, Bedouin shepherds searching the cliffs above the Dead Sea near the ruin of Qumran came across a cave holding sealed clay jars containing ancient leather scrolls. The scrolls passed first through antiquities dealers in Bethlehem before reaching scholars at all, split between two buyers who did not initially know the other held part of the same find, Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Syrian Orthodox metropolitan of Saint Mark's Monastery in Jerusalem, and Eleazar Sukenik, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University. The Habakkuk Pesher was among the seven scrolls in this first batch, and its identification as a running verse by verse commentary reading Habakkuk's ancient prophecy as a coded description of the Qumran community's own recent history was itself part of what convinced early scholars the find was both genuine and extraordinary.

Further excavation through the 1950s located ten more caves and thousands of additional fragments nearby, but the first cave's seven scrolls, reaching scholarly hands within months of a shepherd's discovery, are what made pesher exegesis, previously known mainly at second hand through later rabbinic memory of sectarian reading, into a body of primary text that could be read directly rather than inferred.