The Cairo Genizah - the Damascus Document (CD) and 4QMMT

The Cairo Genizah, alternatively spelled Geniza, is a collection of some 300,000 Jewish manuscript fragments that were found in the genizah or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat or Old Cairo, Egypt. These manuscripts outline a 1,000-year continuum (870 CE to 19th century) of Jewish Middle-Eastern and North African history and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world.

The Septuagint (LXX)

The Septuagint (from the Latin septuaginta, "seventy") is a translation of the Hebrew Bible and some related texts into Koine Greek. As the primary Greek translation of the Old Testament, it was translated in Egypt primarily for the diaspera there.

The legend of its translation by 70 elders (hence LXX) is first found in the pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas to his brother Philocrates, and is repeated, with embellishments, by Philo of Alexandria, Josephus and by various later sources, including St. Augustine

The Elephantine Papyri

The Elephantine Papyri consist of 175 documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Syene (Aswan), which yielded hundreds of papyri in hieratic, Demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Coptic, spanning a period of 2000 years. The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives.

The Apocrypha

Apocrypha are works, usually written works, that are of unknown authorship, or of doubtful authenticity, or spurious, or not considered to be within a particular canon. The word is properly treated as a plural, but in common usage is often singular. In the context of the Jewish and Christian Bibles, where most texts are of unknown authorship, Apocrypha usually refers to a set of texts included in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Bible.

The Pseudepigrapha

The Pseudepigrapha are falsely attributed works, texts whose claimed author is represented by a separate author, or a work whose real author attributed it to a figure of the past.

The literature under this description is most fascinating by its diversity of style and content, some of which is madrashic in nature.

Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls, in the narrow sense of Qumran Caves Scrolls,are a collection of some 981 different texts discovered between 1946 and 1956 in eleven caves from the immediate vicinity of the ancient settlement at Khirbet Qumran in the West Bank. The caves are located about 2 kilometres inland from the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name. The consensus is that the Qumran Caves Scrolls date from the last three centuries BCE and the first century CE.

The texts are of great historical, religious, and linguistic significance because they include the third oldest known surviving manuscripts of works later included in the Hebrew Bible canon, along with deuterocanonical and extra-biblical manuscripts which preserve evidence of the diversity of religious thought in late Second Temple Judaism.

ABOUT ME

My name is Robin Wilkey and I live in Swindon, UK. I began studying Second Temple literature about 50 years ago with the Dead Sea Scrolls that were then available, many as photographic plates, and a number of times I thumbed through these in Blackwells in Oxford as they were expensive, as was DJD (Discoveries in the Judean Desert), now up to 40 volumes.

Recently, I revived my interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls when I realized that the whole corpora was now available in English, from 1997 apparently, and I wanted to update myself not only on the new fragments, but also the recent scholarship regarding them. I was glad to add a complete edition to my bookshelf (the Geza Vermes translation).

More recently, I was inspired by Prof. Larry Schiffman's persuasive arguments on CD and 4QMMT, and the Sadducean sectarian background that the 4QMMT seems to hint at, rather than the common view of Essene. So therefore my research has taken me on a long and deep journey into the current thinking on Second Temple literature and the study of the Hasmonean dynasty in the Second Temple period (or Second Commonwealth), the Hellenists and social change.

In putting together this website, it was my intention to identify these resources and put them in one place, but mostly I have spent my time explaining only what they contain and the parameters of such documents. I hope it will be of some use to the few.