SENSE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DEAD-SEA-SC ROLLS - THE PRESENT STATE OF QUMRANIAN STUDIES

The first syntheses on the manuscripts and the Dead Sea community have a preliminary character to the extent that they are based upon a limi ted number of texts. Now that the publication of the group of manuscri pts, and in particular those of cave 4, is almost finished, it is wort h reexamining the picture. The identification of the community and the site of Qumran as being essenian has certainly been confirmed by the recently published texts. However, the question of the duration of the ir establishment in Qumran and that of their relations with other sett lements of the essenian sect remains unresolved. The Qumran library co ntains three literary ensembles: the biblical manuscripts, the communi ty literature and the non-community literature. The so-called communit y texts can be distinguished from the others by their terminology and their content. The analysis of new fragments indicate that these texts have a long and complex literary history and that they use sources th at can be traced to at least the beginning of the 2nd century B.C.E. S imilarly, the fact that a third of the library consists of ''non commu nity'' texts, leads us to reformulate the problem of the origin and fo rmation of the community. The affinity of these texts on the one hand with common Jewish tradition and on the other with apocalyptic literat ure (of which a significant amount, written in aramean, recalls Jewish traditions which emerged from the babylonian and persian diaspora) in dicate that the issue of the community origins must be considered with in the vaster context of Judaism under the Second Temple as a whole. F ar from constituting an obscur little group on the margins of Judaism, the Qumran community must have constituted a central group, situated within the very heart of the sacerdotal milieu.