Reflections of a Canadian Churchman

Session Six – The End Time: Eschatology and Apocalypse As a part of their self-understanding as the remnant of Israel, the Community understood themselves as a community of the “last days”.   In their view, all of history had pointed to the moment in which the Community existed. They were living on the cusp of the culmination of history. Thus, like most apocalyptic movements, the Community expected an imminent intervention of God, the defeat of their enemies (and the forces of darkness) the intervention of an angelic or messianic figure, and some sort of “reset” or “re-creation” of the world.   Through their “inspired” reading and interpreting of biblical texts (especially by an authoritative leader, in our case, the Teacher of Righteousness), they possessed a secret knowledge and understanding of how these times were unfolding and about to unfold. Their vision of the end times included ideas of a “New Jerusalem”, visions of heaven, messianic figures (often more than one), s...

The Dead Sea Scrolls – Session Five   Further Adventures in Reading, Interpreting, and Re-writing the Bible   In a previous session we explored how the Community read biblical texts, in particular the Prophets and the Psalms, in light of their own experience.  The Biblical commentaries, or  pesharim ,  offered an interpretation of a given text that read the Community’s story into the biblical story as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy.  In this way, it appears the Community saw itself as  the culmination of the story of Israel.   The Genesis Apocryphon However, this was not their only approach to reading Scripture. Found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls are several previously unknown examples of re-written Scripture  (e.g., the Genesis Apocryphon) .  In addition, they seemed to  have  treasure d  copies of text s  that have been preserved in later editions and have come down to us largely through ecclesiastical traditio...