Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE MISSION OF JESUS §12.6
fits with the confidence of blamelessness on the part of a Pharisee like Saul (Phil.
3.6), and 'the righteous7'sinners' antithesis in the Psalms of Solomon evidently
worked with a frame of reference which was not dependent on the exilerestoration
paradigm. The Qumran community certainly made use of the exilerestoration
motif, but in different ways: a return from 'Damascus' already accomplished
(CD 1.4-8), 425 an exile from Jerusalem in the wilderness (of
Judea!), 426 and the threat of future exile to the wicked (repeating the pattern of
Deut. 29.27-28). 427 The complexity of the use of the exile imagery is not adequately
caught by concluding simply that the sect still considered itself in exile.
428 The same point about the complexity of the motif of restoration can be
made with regard to Jubilees 429 and the 'sign prophets' in Josephus (Ant. 20.97-
98, 167-72). 430 And generally it goes beyond the evidence to deduce that those
Carroll sees the absence of 'any sense of the permanence of the diaspora experience' in the prophetic
literature as reflecting 'the point of view of the Jerusalem community' ('Deportation and
Diasporic Discourses in the Prophetic Literature', in Scott, ed., Exile 63-85 [here 83]). 'The elite
community regarded Jeremiah's prophecy as so entirely fulfilled, so thoroughly vindicated as to
be no longer relevant. ..' (B. Halpern, 'The New Names of Isaiah 62:4: Jeremiah's Reception in
the Restoration and Politics of "Third Isaiah'", JBL 117 [1998] 623-43 [here 630]).
425. 'CD does not mention the sixth century BCE return directly, because the writer considered
the exile to have ceased only with the foundation of his own community' (J. G. Campbell,
'Essene-Qumran Origins in the Exile: A Scriptural Basis', JJS 46 [1995] 143-56 [here
148]).
426. M. G. Abegg, 'Exile and the Dead Sea Scrolls' in Scott, ed., Exile 111-27 (here
120-24), cites lQpHab 11.4-8 (the 'exile' [galot] of the Teacher of Righteousness); 1QH 12.8-9
('they drive me from my land'); 1QM 1.2-3 ('the exiles [gold] of the desert'); 4Q171 2.26-3.1
('the returnees/repentant from the desert'); 4Q177 8-10 ('exile'?); 4Q390 1 5-6 (the first to go
up 'from the land of their captivity' [m'rtz shim, an echo of Jer. 30.10; 46.27] in order to build
the sanctuary, who will not join in the evil as of the pre-exilic period); cf. references to the community
in the desert (1QS 8.13-14; 9.19-20). 4Q161 2.14, 'when they returned from the wilderness
of the pe[ople]s\ evidently echoes Ezek. 20.35, with its conception of the wilderness as a
purgative intermediate stage between exodus from the lands of the diaspora and entry into the
land itself (20.33-38).
427. 4Q169 3-4 4.1-4; Abegg fills out 4QMMT C21b-22 in the same terms ('Exile' 122-
23).
428. As Abegg does ('Exile' 120 n. 38, 121).
429. B. Halpern-Amaru, 'Exile and Return in Jubilees', in Scott, ed., Exile 127'-44, concludes:
'from the postexilic perspective of the author, restoration of a lost purity, not exile and
return to the Land, is the signature of the imminent eschaton' (144).
430. C. A. Evans, 'Aspects of Exile and Restoration in the Proclamation of Jesus and the
Gospels', in Scott, ed., Exile 299-328 (more or less equivalent to 'Jesus and the Continuing Exile
of Israel', in Newman, ed., Jesus and the Restoration of Israel 77-100), is unwilling for the
obvious imagery of reenacting the conquest of the promised land (the parting of the Jordan, the
collapse of city walls) to stand without pressing the corollary that such movements must have
'regarded Israel as in a state of bondage, even exile' (305).
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