The Dead Sea Scrolls - Session Two
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The History of the Community – Identifying the Key Players through Biblical Interpretation The Dead Sea community did not write a straight-forward account of their history and there are very few uncoded historical references in the surviving texts. Thus, it is difficult to try to reconstruct the history of the sect – d ifficult, but not impossible. As Geza Vermes has written: “Most of the knowledge we possess of the sect’s history originates from works of Bible interpretation. The Qumran writers, while meditating on the words of the Old Testament prophets, sought to discover in them allusions to their own past, present and future. Convinced that they were living in the last days, they read the happenings of their times as the fulfilment of biblical predictions.” (Vermes, 49). Thus, if we have some rudimentary understanding of the history of the period, it is possible that we can try to “break the code”, as it were, and attempt to associate what is recorded in the inter