Poetic and Prophetic Literature of the Old Testament
RELG 301
Module 4 Notes - Psalms 51-100
Notes on the textbook
Page 388 - Christ in the psalms
- The book mentions "Qumran texts". These are better known as "The Dead Sea Scrolls". They are a collection of scriptures which were produced by a community of Essenes who lived at what is now known as Qumran, near the northern part of the Dead Sea.
The Essenes were a Jewish sect who wanted to keep themselves pure from the politics and what they saw as contamination of the main Jewish groups at the time of Jesus. Most of them moved out of Jerusalem and went to live at Qumran, where they spent some of their time copying the scriptures and writing their own texts and the rules for their community.
In AD 70, forty years after the crucifixion of Jesus, the Jews rose in revolt against Roman rule. The Romans put down the revolt, burned Jerusalem to the ground, and took the remaining Jews as slaves.
During the revolt, the Qumran community hid their precious scrolls, putting them in large pottery jars, and stacking them in caves in the hills surrounding their community. The community was destroyed, and no-one came back for the scrolls. The scrolls sat in their jars, in the caves, for two thousand years.
In 1946, just after Israel became a State, and while the Arab/Israeli conflict was escalating, a Bedouin boy was trying to round up some goats near the caves of Qumran. He threw a stone at the goats in a cave, and heard the stone hit something inside the cave.
The story is very long and complicated, involving the black market in antiquities, the Jordanian and Israeli governments, claims that the Vatican was part of a conspiracy to stop research on the scrolls, and a contentious strife between archaeologists who wanted to work on the scrolls and wanted to block others from working on them. At one point, an antiquities dealer hid some of the scrolls in a shoe box in a damp hole under the floor of his house, where they started to fall apart. It still makes me sick to think of it.
Things took years to sort out, and ownership of the scrolls is still disputed. Over the following years, more caves were explored, and more fragments of scrolls were found. The main collection of scrolls is now housed in a special museum in Jerusalem (The Shrine of the Book). The background for the webpages for the Poetic Literature course shows part of one of the scrolls, unrolled to show the text.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are important for Biblical studies, because they are the oldest manuscripts that we have for most of the Books of the Old Testament - including the Psalms. We know that they cannot have been written later than AD 70, and some of them are probably several hundred years earlier than that.
The Qumran community not only copied the scriptures which we now know as the Old Testament, but they also had some of their own writings, some of which predict a Messiah, and "the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness" -
Melchizedek was the King of Salem (generally believed to be an early city of Jerusalem) at the time of Abraham. His name means "King of Righteousness", and "Salem" means "Peace".
Genesis chapter 14 recounts how an alliance of petty kings, including the king of Sodom, rebelled against the chief king of the region. In the invasion that followed, Abraham's nephew, Lot, who was living in Sodom, was taken prisoner and all his possessions taken. When Abraham heard what had happened, he armed his servants and set out to rescue Lot. Abraham's small army put the invaders to flight, and rescued not only Lot, but everyone else who had been captured, and the goods that had been plundered. On the way back, Abraham was met by Melchizedek, King of Salem, who was also a priest of "The Most High God". Abraham gave Melchizedek a tithe of the plunder (thereby acknowledging Melkizedek's superiority), and Melchizedek pronounced God's blessing on Abraham, and shared bread and wine (which Christians later saw as a foreshadowing of Communion).
The New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews interprets Melchizedek as a foreshadower of Christ, and applies Psalm 110 directly to Jesus (Hebrews 4:5-6). The point to be made was that Melchizedek was not an Israelite, he was not of the family of Aaron (the family of Jewish priests), and indeed he predated Aaron and the Jewish priestly line by hundreds of years. Hebrews 7:1-22 develops the theme, referring to Melchizedek as being "without genealogy", meaning that the usual ascription "son of . . ." is missing for Melchizedek. So Melchizedek becomes a timeless figure, eternal, unlike the Jewish priests whose ministry is therefore inferior. To be "a Priest after (according to) the Order of Melchizedek" is timeless and eternal, and the ministry of such a Priest far exceeds the human ministry of the Levitical priests.
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