The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

BETZ The Qumran Halakhah Text 4QMMT 201
Conclusions
I cannot yet believe that the letter 4QMMT will revolutionize our
previous understanding of the religious parties during the Hasmonean
age and of the origins of the Qumran community in particular. But it
certainly can improve and enrich it as this will be done by some other
fragments form Cave 4 which still await publication. Above all, the
official edition of 4QMMT by E. Qirnron will shed fresh light on this
important document and on the way how some of the lacunae in this
mutilated text can be filled.
Despite its many peculiarities, I believe that 4QMMT breathes the
spirit of Qumran. One can link it with the Dead Sea Scrolls and with
the reports on the Essenes, written by Philo, Pliny, and Josephus. It is
quite surprising that this letter deals with quite a few special cases of
levitical purity and with details of the offering of sacrifices and the
slaughtering of animals, in a way similar to that of rabbinic halakhah:
the criticism raised in these ma 'ase ha-torah must be considered constructive.
For the author wants to correct the temple service, not to
condemn it. But his ultimate concern must have been the service of
God's people and the priests, the purity of the chosen city and the holy
land. When he wrote on the case of a man who had to immerse himself
on a certain day (because of a nightly defilement), he may have
thought of the 'union' (ha-yahad) of holy men, in which a ritual bath
was performed by everyone on every day.
For our letter was issued by a special group that 'had separated
themselves from the mass of the people and refrained from becoming
intermingled with these things' (C 7-8). Through his criticism of the
temple service our author may have intended to justify the 'sectarian'
step, taken by him and his followers, in an indirect way. This step
must have led to the formation of the Sadoqites (Bene Sadoq) under
the Teacher of Righteousness, who was a priest joined by priests,
Levites, and lay-people. His group went into a kind of exile (galuth) in
the Land of Damascus and in the Judean Desert, in which God
revealed (higldh) to them the law of Moses and the books of the
prophets (see the interpretation of Amos 5.26 in CD 7.14-17). In
opposition to the Sadducean priesthood in Jerusalem and determined
by the expectation of the immediate coming of God to the final judgment,
these Sadoqites interpreted the sanctuary of God and the holy
service of the priests in a spiritual way; they also extended it to the