Bronson Brown-deVost. Commentary and Authority in Mesopotamia and Qumran.
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019.
According to the Qumran community, the secrets of the impending apocalypse have been encoded in ancient texts. These hidden secrets were revealed to the Teacher of Righteousness, and subsequently expounded in pesharim, or commentary texts, for the benefit of the initiated. Texts revealing eschatological secrets might seem to perfectly exemplify the zeitgeist of the late Second Temple period. However, Bronson Brown-deVost sets out to demonstrate that the Qumran commentary corpus can fruitfully be compared with much older Mesopotamian literary forms. This comparison is developed through a series of guiding inquiries: First of all, how similar are these two collections on a formal level? Second, what historical connections might account for the similarities that do exist between them? Finally, if these commentary forms are at all similar, does that mean that the scribes who wrote them ascribed similar types of authority to the base texts upon which they were commenting?
In brief, this book comprises introductory matter; two chapters dedicated to the formal analysis of Qumran pesharim (“Qumran Commentaries: A General Description” and “Qumran Commentaries: A Formal Description;”); two chapters dedicated to comparing the formal features of Qumran pesharim with Mesopotamian ones (“Mesopotamian Commentary, Qumran Pesher: A Comparison of Formal Features” and “Mesopotamian Commentary, Qumran Pesher: Compositional Models”); one chapter reflecting on the historical implications of this comparison along with its methodological limitations (“Mesopotamian Commentary, Qumran Pesher: Commenting Communities and Comparative Conclusions”); and a final chapter called “Authority.” The technical material in the first section of the book is also supplemented by extensive and useful appendices. As this distribution suggests, the bulk of this book is about the forms of the commentaries: its discussion of authority is a secondary exploration which raises intriguing questions to be pursued in future work.
Brown-deVost carefully bounds the data set in question by selecting “those Qumran commentaries that bear a close formal resemblance to Mesopotamian ones, and vice versa” (p. 31). This selection of easily comparable material is well suited to the statistically-oriented analysis of literary forms included in the first part of the book. This analysis yields interesting findings. For example, the author identifies different subtypes within the Qumran commentaries based on the relative lengths of the lemmata (quoted source text) and the comments. Based on a similar analysis of the Mesopotamian material, though, the author finds that in spite of some apparently similar technical vocabulary, there are significant structural differences between the two corpora. The author does find evidence of similar scribal approaches to challenges such as the harmonization of textual variants. However, in his own words, “any genetic relationship between Mesopotamian commentaries and Qumran pesharim can be understood to exist only on the level of hermeneutical technique, not of literary structure or genre” (p. 156).
In this fine-grained assessment of the formal features, the author’s text-critical skills shine. The major insights emerging from these analyses are not always summarized in introductory or concluding assessments, so the yield is primarily accessible to specialists who are able to follow along with each step of the analysis themselves. The appendix is similarly full of useful material for the expert reader: it includes editions of all of the Qumran pesher texts central to the analysis, along with some bibliographic and text-critical notes, occasional inset photographs to clarify epigraphic uncertainties, and tables summarizing various quantitative analyses. The author also helpfully provides his own transliteration and translation of the Enuma eliš Commentary 1 manuscripts, to facilitate comparison with the Qumran material.
The more ambiguous methodological challenge of this work emerges in the latter portion, where Brown-deVost uses the data and statistical tools deployed in the formal analysis to answer questions about the history and cultural context of these commentaries: What are the historical connections through which the shared “hermeneutical techniques” could have been transmitted? Could the scribal practices common to the two corpora indicate that scribes attributed similar kinds of authority to the base texts? The author briefly surveys literature addressing the potential historical links, but the questions of text use and the implied “authority” wielded by a text become the focus of the final chapter of the book.
Here, Brown-deVost enters a crowded arena: scholars from a range of sub-specialties have recently turned their attention to questions of canon formation, “scriptural” status, and the various uses of text in the Second Temple period. This chapter continues to extrapolate from the results of the preceding formal analysis, however, rather than venturing into broader conceptual discussions of, or challenges to, these categories. Nonetheless, some interesting claims emerge from it: the author argues that, although the precise definitions of “scripture,” “canon,” and “authority” are highly contested, the existence of commentaries on a particular text correlates with a higher degree of textual fixedness, and also some kind of authoritative status. Within the category of textual authority, the author assigns various texts to the subcategories of “Normative,” “Oracular,” “Mytho-Historic,” and “Scholarly” authority. These distinctions could perhaps be better supported with a more extended explanation.
The author’s conclusions led me to wonder about an angle of comparison that had been addressed only obliquely: Are the commentary texts from Mesopotamia and Qumran actually doing the same kind of commenting? Should the function of a text affect the generic comparisons we make with it?
Brown-deVost acknowledges early on that “since no instances of commentaries to technical compositions (e.g., omen, medical, or lexical works) are known to exist at Qumran, this has removed the vast majority of Mesopotamian commentaries from direct consideration” (p. 15). Later, on a formal level, he concludes that “...the two commentary traditions operate in very different modes: Mesopotamian commentaries are reference works of a supplementary nature; Qumran pesharim are stand-alone works” (p. 110). Finally, one of the most suggestive hints comes in the form of a qualification: “Even though the pesharim do reveal a strong compulsion to focus the interpretation of the base-text within the sphere of the apocalyptic, interpretations were, at times, grounded in an understanding of the original context of the prophet’s words…” (p. 91). If the Qumran commentaries are mostly preoccupied with eschatology, are their rare instances of more straightforward glossing enough to make them comparable with the Mesopotamian commentary corpus, which is predominantly concerned with clarifying technical literature for the routine use of specialist practitioners?
The answer to this question may, in fact, be yes. Commentary and Authority at Mesopotamia and Qumran has laid a marvelous foundation for the comparison of these two corpora on a formal level, and represents masterful text-critical analysis. Having raised such compelling questions, I hope very much that the author will continue to elucidate the relationships between these complex corpora. In the meantime, specialists interested in either or both of these bodies of ancient literature must take note of Brown-deVost’s important observations.
Emily Branton is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.