Reading the Qumran Library

The constitution of the community. Start here for the rules of entry: a two-year probation, pooled property, an annual covenant ceremony ranking every member afresh, and the Two Spirits discourse dividing humanity between truth and deceit. Ten further Cave 4 manuscripts show the text was revised repeatedly, so it reads as a working rule rather than a fixed document.

The community at prayer. About thirty first person hymns open with the formula "I thank you, O Lord". Many scholars attribute a core group, the Teacher Hymns, to the founding Teacher of Righteousness, while the Community Hymns speak for the covenant body, giving the rule of the first stop an inner voice.

The community reads its own history into scripture. This best preserved example of the pesher genre interprets Habakkuk verse by verse as veiled prophecy, naming the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest only by title.

The community looks to the end. Nineteen columns from Cave 1 set out the order of battle between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, down to trumpet inscriptions and spear lengths, yet seven engagements end with the seventh settled by the hand of God.

The longest of the scrolls, about eight and a half metres, from Cave 11. It presents itself as divine speech to Moses and describes an ideal Temple larger than Solomon's or Herod's. Scholars disagree whether it is a sectarian composition or an older text the community preserved.

Scripture retold. One of the seven original scrolls from Cave 1, it expands Genesis in the first person, most famously Lamech questioning his wife Bitenosh about their radiant newborn Noah, and is the only scroll of this scale composed almost entirely in Aramaic.

Another rewriting of Genesis and Exodus, dictated to Moses by an Angel of the Presence in forty-nine jubilee periods. Its 364 day calendar condemns the lunar reckoning of the Jerusalem temple, and about fifteen copies were found in the Qumran caves.

A work found at Qumran only in Aramaic fragments, complete only in Geez. The Astronomical Book and the Book of the Watchers are its oldest layers, third to second century BCE, and the Book of Parables is absent from the caves. It is canonical in the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches.

The widest circle. Fragments from Qumran show this domestic tale of Tobit, Tobias and the disguised angel Raphael was also written in Aramaic or Hebrew. Judaism does not count it as scripture, Catholic and Orthodox churches receive it as deuterocanonical.