Habakkuk Pesher

A Commentary, Not a Copy

This is not a manuscript of Habakkuk. It is a commentary on Habakkuk, and the difference is the whole point of it. The scroll quotes the biblical text in order, a paragraph at a time, and after each quotation writes out what the passage means, introduced by the Hebrew word pishro — "its interpretation is" — from which the whole genre takes its name, pesher. Physically it is a modest object: 148 centimetres long, only 14 high, thirteen columns in a clear square hand of the Herodian type. One detail on it is worth pausing over. Wherever the four-letter name of God appears in the quoted text, the scribe wrote it in the old palaeo-Hebrew alphabet rather than in the square script he used for everything else, a way of marking the name off as untouchable.

It was one of the seven scrolls from Cave 1, found in 1947, and one of the four bought by Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, taken by him to the United States at the end of the 1940s, and purchased there on behalf of the State of Israel in 1954. It is now in the Shrine of the Book, catalogued as accession 95.57/28. The commentary runs through Habakkuk 1 and 2 and stops at 2:20; the rest of the last column was left blank, so the ending was a decision and not an accident. A few scholars have read that as evidence that the commentator's copy of Habakkuk had no chapter 3. This app's introduction to Habakkuk sets out the case against, and it is a strong one: a pesher is a running commentary rather than a copy, chapter 3 is a liturgical psalm with musical rubrics that this genre had no use for, and chapter 3 is present in the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the book that preserve that part of it, including the Wadi Murabba'at scroll and the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Nahal Hever.

People Who Are Never Named

The commentary is populated, and the Israel Museum's note lists its cast: the scroll alludes to "the Teacher of Righteousness," "the Wicked Priest," "the Man of Lies," and others, and its second great subject is the arrival of the Romans on the historical scene, whom it calls the Chaldeans or the Kittim. Not one of the people is given a name. The writer plainly expected his readers to know exactly who was meant, which is a good indication of how recent the events were and a very poor one for anybody trying to reconstruct them two thousand years later.

The Kittim are the least contested: the description of a relentless, idolatrous imperial army arriving from the sea fits Rome, and that is how most specialists read it, though a Seleucid identification has also been argued and the scroll itself never says. The Teacher and the Wicked Priest are worse. Names have been proposed for both for eighty years, mostly from among the Hasmonean high priests, and none has carried the field. The Israel Museum's own note on the scroll puts it flatly: these are individuals "whose exact identities have yet to be established." An article that hands a reader a confident identification here is telling them something the evidence does not support.

Habakkuk 2:4 Before Paul Reached For It

The verse a Christian reader will want is Habakkuk 2:4 — "the righteous will live by his faith" — which Paul quotes at Romans 1:17 and Galatians 3:11 and which the letter to the Hebrews quotes again. The commentary on it survives; the quotation of it does not. T. H. Lim, who has edited the scroll, says so plainly: "nothing of Hab 2:4b is preserved in the mutilated line 17 of col. 7," and the lemma printed in every translation is his reconstruction from the pattern the scribe follows everywhere else. What is actually on the leather is the comment, at column 8. In F. F. Bruce's rendering it runs: "Their interpretation concerns all the doers of the law in the house of Judah, whom God will save from the house of judgment because of their trouble and their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness." Lim argues from this that Paul's choice of the half-verse makes better sense than it first appears — there was already a Jewish tradition of reading it, visible in this scroll, as a statement about who is saved and who is judged rather than as a general observation about integrity.

That is a real result, and it is worth being exact about its size. It does not show that Paul read this scroll, that he knew the Qumran community, or that he learned his doctrine from them; the recurring claim that Paul or John the Baptist was an Essene rests on nothing in these texts. Nor do the two readings agree, and the clearest statement of the difference comes from an evangelical scholar who took the parallel seriously. Bruce granted the resemblance — "if the Qumran sect believed that they would escape condemnation in the last judgment because of their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness, Paul proclaims that God justifies the man who has faith in Jesus" — and then said where it breaks: "Faith in the Teacher of Righteousness implied mainly belief in his teaching; whereas saving faith in Jesus, according to Paul and his fellow-apostles, involves over and above this a personal commitment to Him as Lord and Redeemer." The Qumran acquittal is promised to doers of the law; the justification Paul preaches is, in his own phrase, apart from the law. And Bruce lets the other side answer in its own voice rather than summarising it: "The Qumran sect would have thought this a scandalous misapplication of their proof-text from Habakkuk." What the scroll gives is the shape of the conversation Paul was writing into — evidence that the verse was already being read as a question of salvation a century before he quoted it, by people who answered it differently.

Scripture references

• Habakkuk 1:6-11 — The Chaldeans, whom the pesher reads as the Kittim of its own day
• Habakkuk 2:4 — The half-verse the commentary reads of the Teacher of Righteousness
• Habakkuk 2:20 — Where the commentary stops, leaving the rest of the column blank
• Romans 1:16-17 — Paul quoting the same half-verse to a different end

Sources

• Holding institutionThe Israel Museum, Jerusalem — The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls: The Commentary on Habakkuk Scroll — The Israel Museum, Jerusalem — Shrine of the Book · The museum's own object record: "Qumran, Cave 1", "1st century BCE", "Parchment", "H: 14; L: 148 cm", "Accession number: 95.57/28", thirteen columns in "a clear, square Herodian script", the tetragrammaton "written in ancient Hebrew characters", and the allusions to figures "whose exact identities have yet to be established". Served over http onlySupports: The dimensions, script, accession number, palaeo-Hebrew divine name, and the unresolved identifications
• ScholarshipT. H. Lim, "Why did Paul cite Habakkuk 2:4b?" — T. H. Lim, University of Edinburgh · The Expository Times 133:6 (2022), 225-232, DOI 10.1177/00145246221075893. The publisher's own page refuses automated requests; this is the University of Pretoria repository's open copy. Argues that Paul selected the half-verse "because there was already a tradition of Jewish biblical interpretation, evident in Pesher Habakkuk, that understood the verse as a salvation of the" righteous — and states plainly that "nothing of Hab 2:4b is preserved in the mutilated line 17 of col. 7", so the lemma every translation prints is a reconstructionSupports: That the quotation of Habakkuk 2:4b is reconstructed rather than extant, and the argument about why Paul chose it
• Primary textM. Burrows (ed.), The Dead Sea Scrolls of St. Mark's Monastery, Vol. I: The Isaiah Manuscript and the Habakkuk Commentary — Millar Burrows, with J. C. Trever and W. H. Brownlee; American Schools of Oriental Research · New Haven: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1950 — the editio princeps of this scroll and of the Great Isaiah Scroll, and the plates behind every translation of either. Print onlySupports: The text of the commentary described and quoted throughout this article
• ScholarshipF. F. Bruce, The Teacher of Righteousness in the Qumran Texts — F. F. Bruce, University of Sheffield · The Tyndale Lecture in Biblical Archaeology, 1956 (London: The Tyndale Press, 1957); freely readable in full. Source of the translation of 1QpHab column 8, lines 1-3 quoted in section three, and of the comparison with Paul — including Bruce's own concession of the resemblance and his statement of where it breaksSupports: The wording of the pesher on Habakkuk 2:4, and the difference between its reading and Paul's
• Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority, Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library: Discovery Sites — Israel Antiquities Authority · "Qumran Cave 1 (1Q) - Discovered by a young Bedouin shepherd in 1947 and excavated by archaeologists in 1949", and lists "Pesher Habakkuk (Habakkuk Commentary)" among the seven scrolls from that caveSupports: The find circumstances and the scroll's place among the original seven
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Habakkuk Commentary

Further reading

• The Israel Museum: The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls
• The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library
• Wikipedia: Habakkuk Commentary

Reflect

The community that wrote this read their own troubles into an old prophecy, and were sure they had it right. When have you been sure a text was about you?