The Groningen Hypothesis Revisited Florentino García Martínez I. Introduction I am most honored and thankful to the organizers of this joyous celebration of the sixtieth year since the Discovery of the Scrolls for inviting me to talk about “the Groningen Hypothesis” in the session dedicated to discussing the “Identity and History of the Qumran Community.” When I first presented the core of what later became known as “the Groningen Hypothesis” at a symposium of Spanish Biblical Scholars in Córdoba in 1986, Florentino García Martínez, “Orígenes del movimiento esenio y orígenes qumránicos: pistas para una solución” in II Simposio Bíblico Español (ed. V. Collado-Bertomeu – V. Vilar-Hueso; Fundación Bíblica Española-Caja de Ahorro de Córdoba: Valencia-Córdoba, 1987), 527-556. only the first seven volumes of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Series had been published. Of course, the seven largest and most well preserved manuscripts from Cave 1 had been available for a long time, and many other fragments from Cave 4 were also known in preliminary form. But at that time, in 1986, not even a simple listing of all the materials found in the caves, which could have given us an idea of the collection as a whole, was publicly available. There was a list compiled by Elisha Qimron in the seventies, and a complete inventory of PAM photographs, Museum Plates, and compositions, completed by Strugnell in 1985, but those were not accessible to scholars. The first such list (culled from the most disparate sources) was the one I published in 1989 in the periodical Henoch. F. García Martínez, “Lista de MSS procedentes de Qumrán,” Henoch 11 (1989): 149-232. This was followed by the much more complete listing, published by Stephen A. Reed, first in 14 fascicles, starting in 1991, and then in book form in his The Dead Sea Scrolls Catalogue of 1994. The Dead Sea Scrolls Catalogue: Documents, Photographs and Museum Inventory Numbers, Compiled by Stephen A. Reed, Revised and Edited by Marylyn J. Lindberg with the collaboration of Michael B. Phelps (SBL Resources for Biblical Study 32; Atlanta: Scholars, 1994). This has been superseded since 1993 by the data-base prepared by Stephen Pfann and edited by Emanuel Tov in the Companion Volume to the Dead Sea Scrolls on Microfiche, E. Tov with the collaboration of S. J. Pfann, Companion Volume to the Dead Sea Scrolls on Microfiche (Leiden: Brill-IDC, 1993 and 1995). which, in turn, forms the base of the list published in DJD XXXIX and which gives an overview of the whole collection retrieved in the caves. E. Tov with the collaboration of S. J. Pfann, “List of the Texts from the Judaean Desert,” in The Texts from the Judaean Desert: Indices and Introduction to the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Series (E. Tov et al.; DJD XXXIX; Oxford: Clarendon, 2002). This simple detail (of the very partial availability of the contents of the corpus) shows how pretentious I was (or I should say, unaware) to offer in 1986 a general hypothesis to explain a set of data that was so poorly known at the time. And nonetheless, during the last twenty five years the Groningen Hypothesis has been a useful tool which has helped us to understand the makeup of the collection of manuscripts and the group which collected and preserved them, to the point that in the words of Albert Baumgarten, one of its critics, “it is probably closest to being the scholarly consensus.” A. I. Baumgarten, “Reflections on the Groningen Hypothesis,” in Enoch and Qumran Origins. New Light on a forgotten Connection (ed. Gabriele Boccaccini; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 257. The same volume also contains the critical remarks on the Groningen Hypothesis of Charlotte Hempel, Mark A. Elliot, Torleif Elgvin, Lester L. Grabbe, Benjamin G. Wright, Timothy H. Lim, Shemaryahu Talmon, Émile Puech and G. Boccaccini. Now the situation is completely different since we have all the preserved evidence at our disposal (the latest DJD with the second part of the Aramaic texts of Starcky’s lot has been recently published by the Clarendon Press). Émile Puech, Qumrân grotte 4. XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie (DJD XXXVII; Oxford: Clarendon, 2009). We are no longer unduly dependent on the first published manuscripts (many with clearly “sectarian” characteristics) and we can analyze the collection as a whole. And the study of the collection as a whole (while we are very much aware of the fragmentary and circumstantial character of the evidence that has reached us) has yielded two fundamental insights (at least to me) that were not available at the moment the Groningen Hypothesis was formulated: First, the change in the proportions of which categories contain the majority of the collection’s manuscripts (i.e., the change of proportions among the so-called “biblical,” “para-biblical,” and “sectarian” manuscripts), and the increased importance of “para-biblical” materials as compared with the two other categories, to the point where we may say without exaggeration that these sort of materials constitute the majority of the collection, adding up to more than the “biblical” and “sectarian” manuscripts together. I have developed this point in a recent contribution, F. García Martínez, “Qumrân, 60 ans après la découverte,” The Qumran Chronicle 15 (2007): 111-138. Second, the questioning of those same labels as anachronistic and inadequate to reflect the historical reality the manuscripts reveal to us. As I have also proved in a recent article, F. García Martínez, “¿Sectario, no-sectario o qué? Problemas de una taxonomía correcta de los textos qumránicos,” RevQ 23/91 (2008): 383-394. This second insight seems to me highly relevant because the labels we use are not neutral designations, but are highly charged (in a conscious or unconscious way) with value. In evaluating the Groningen Hypothesis in the twenty-first century, we must look critically at the “Groningen Hypothesis” with this new understanding of the collection as a whole, in order to test its validity as a global explanation of the Dead Sea Scrolls findings, and in this way try to answer the question put forth by Albert Baumgarten in his “Reflections on the Groningen Hypothesis”: Has the Groningen Hypothesis reached the limits of its explanatory powers, such that it is ripe for replacement by some alternative, the inevitable fate of all human attempts to make sense of complex and messy reality? A. I. Baumgarten, “Reflections on the Groningen Hypothesis,” 258. If the answer is yes, I will abandon it without regrets. If the “Groningen Hypothesis” has already lost its capacity to explain the data we now know, what better occasion to bury it definitively than this meeting in Jerusalem? But before we eventually chant the Kaddish and proceed to the Gehinnon valley for a solemn funeral, allow me to look at two basic elements of the Groningen hypothesis: the origins of the group as a break away from another group, and the general character of the collection, taking into account the two fundamental insights I have just have mentioned (the change of proportions of the compositions and the anachronistic and inadequate character of the labels). II. The Qumran Group as a Splinter Group What does the Groningen Hypothesis say about the identity and origins of the Qumran community? In the English version of my proposal published in 1988, I summarized the aspects related to the origins and history of the community in the following way: What we are here calling: “A Groningen Hypothesis” is an attempt (yet another) coherently to relate to each other the apparently contradictory data furnished by the Dead Sea manuscripts as to the primitive history of the Qumran Community. In essence, this hypothesis proposes: 1) to make a clear distinction between the origins of the Essene movement and those of the Qumran group; 2) to place the origins of the Essene movement in Palestine and specifically in the Palestinian apocalyptic tradition before the Antiochian crisis, that is at the end of the third or the beginning of the second century BCE; 3) to place the origins of the Qumran group in a split produced within the Essene movement in consequence of which the group loyal to the Teacher of Righteousness was finally to establish itself in Qumran; 4) to consider the designation of the “Wicked Priest” as a collective one referring to the different Hasmonaean High Priests in chronological order; 5) to highlight the importance of the Qumran group’s formative period before its retreat to the desert and to make clear the ideological development, the halakhic elements, and the political conflicts taking place during this formative period and culminating in the break which led to the community’s establishing itself in Qumran. F. García Martínez, “Qumran Origins and Early History: A Groningen Hypothesis,” Folia Orientalia 5 (1988): 113-136, reprint in Qumranica Minora I (STDJ 63; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 3-29. The Groningen Hypothesis was operating within the usual categories of the time, which were, if I may say, “pan-Essenic.” Charlotte Hempel, “The Groningen Hypothesis: Strengths and Weaknesses,” in Enoch and Qumran Origins. New Light on a forgotten Connection (ed. Gabriele Boccaccini; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 251, underlines the different use of the terminology in German scholarship: “essenich in the sense of sectarian and its counterpart vor-essenich, in the sense of pre-sectarian.” The core of the Hypothesis (if we disregard the labels, like “Qumran group,” “Essene movement” and “Apocalyptic tradition” I used at the time) was the consideration of the group who collected the manuscripts as a splinter group or offshoot from a parent group, taking seriously the indications of the beginning of the Damascus Document and the indications of some other manuscripts which mention the “Teacher” like the Pesher Habakkuk. And that this split was centered around a person to whom these manuscripts refer as “Teacher of Righteousness.” This element has been seriously criticized by the many colleagues (and with good arguments), who interpret the allusions to the rift that are present in the documents as a reference to the separation of the group from “all Israel” and not from a parent group. Some of the critics have been apparently misled by the dichotomist language of “sons of light” and “sons of darkness” in some of the manuscripts, although the three groups (the “we” group, the “you” group and the “they” group) present in 4QMMT should have given pause in the interpretation of the boundary fixing language used by the different documents. Others, like John Collins, have correctly insisted that the closest parallels with the classical description of the Essenes are in the Serekh Hayahad, and the yahad group should logically be considered the parent group. John J. Collins, “The Yahad and ‘The Qumran Community’,” in Biblical Traditions in Transmission: Essays in Honour of Michael A. Knibb (ed. Charlotte Hempel and Judith M. Lieu; JSJSup 111: Leiden: Brill, 2006), 93: “The identification of any group described in the Scrolls as Essenes rests primarily on the similarities between the Serek and the account in Josephus, and so if any group described in the Scrolls is to be identified as Essenes is the Yahad.” But, in spite of these criticisms, I think that it is precisely this element of the Groningen Hypothesis that has proved the most fruitful when dealing with the evidence published after its formulation. As I said at the beginning, the proportions of the categories of manuscripts have dramatically changed, and the so-called “sectarian” manuscripts are no longer a majority but a minority of the holdings recovered. Nonetheless, the new publications have brought to light some additional new “sectarian” texts previously unknown, and, what is much more important, many copies of the core documents, like the Damascus Document and the Serekh Hayahad. In the collection, thus, we do have some writings produced by a particular group, or groups, of Jews who were different from (and opposed to) what we may call the rest of the Jews of the time. Even if they do not form the majority of the collection, the so-called “sectarian” documents are a reality, and these compositions can tell us something about the group that produced them and lived according to the norms there recorded. The substantial copies of the Damascus Document, published in 1996, DJD XVIII. the equally substantial copies of the Serekh, published in 1998, DJD XXVI. and the single copy of 4Q265, known before as 4QSerekh Damascus and now as 4QMiscellaneous rules, published in 1999, DJD XXXV. have proved to us not only that the main “sectarian documents” have a long and complex redactional history of their own, but that, while addressing groups which are certainly different, they are all closely interrelated. Although the definition of the “other” in the Damascus Document and in the Serekh is clearly different, as I think I have proved elsewhere, F. García Martínez, “Invented memory: the ‘other’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Qumranica Minora II (STDJ 64; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 187-218. these “sectarian” documents clearly show that the opposition between the “us” and the “others” is not limited to “us” and the other Jews, but includes also a parent group from which the group that penned the document separated. Philip Davies has formulated this perspective as follows: Where the documents of the yahad are concerned with identity and difference, they are addressing not Israel as a whole, “Jewish society,” but the group that they have abandoned, or rather, as they see it, has abandoned them. Philip R. Davies, “‘Old’ and ‘New’ Israel in the Bible and the Qumran Scrolls: Identity and Difference,” in Defining Identities: We, You, and the Other in the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. F. García Martínez and Mladen Popović; STDJ 70; Leiden: Brill, 2008), 33-42, on p. 38. I do not pretend that the Groningen Hypothesis can solve all the problems posed by the different manuscripts of “sectarian” compositions, far from it. Many colleagues are intensively working to disentangle the web of relationships with which the documentation now available furnishes us, See, among others, John J. Collins, “Forms of Community in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Emanuel: Studies in Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, and Dead Sea Scrolls in Honor of Emanuel Tov (ed. Shalom M. Paul et al; VTSup 94; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 97-111, Eyal Regev, “The Yahad and the Damascus Covenant: Structure, Organization and Relationship,” RevQ 21/82 (2003): 233-262, the articles of J. J. Collins, “The Yahad and the ‘Qumran Community’,” Charlotte Hempel, “Maskil(im) and Rabbim: From Daniel to Qumran,” and S. Metso, “Whom does the Term Yahad Identify?,” in Biblical Traditions in Transmission: Essays in Honour of Michael A. Knibb (ed. Charlotte Hempel and Judith M. Lieu; JSJSup 111; Leiden: Brill, 2006), respectively 81-96, 133-156 and 213-236, and the book by Stephen Hultgren, From the Damascus Covenant to the Covenant of the Community (STDJ 66; Leiden: Brill, 2007). and I have no doubt that we will see more clearly in the future. My only point is that this central aspect of the Groningen Hypothesis (that the people who brought together this wonderful collection of manuscripts were an offshoot or break away group from a parent movement) has not been disproved by the new publications and the increase of “non sectarian” compositions now available; on the contrary, it has been somehow vindicated and is still a useful model to understand the evidence preserved. III. The Character of the Collection As a consequence of this basic insight, the Groningen Hypothesis took the diversity of origin and date of the materials preserved in the collection seriously. This diversity was evident since, from the beginning, everyone accepted the division of the manuscripts into “biblical” and “non-biblical,” as well as the further subdivision of the “non-biblical” manuscripts into “sectarian” and “non-sectarian” categories. But the Groningen Hypothesis took also very seriously the interconnection of all the materials as belonging to a “sectarian” Library, and that therefore all the texts, “biblical” and “non-biblical” alike, informed the thought of the group who collected, preserved and in certain cases wrote the compositions whose remains have reached us. In the presentation of the Hypothesis during the congress held in Groningen in 1988, I expressed this basic assumption in this way: One of the basic assumptions of our hypothesis is that all the manuscripts recovered from the caves of Qumran are remnants of the library of the group which used to live in and around Khirbet Qumran. Evidently not all the MSS found at Qumran are of Qumranic origin; nobody would ever dream of claiming a Qumranic origin for any one of the biblical MSS that make up a sizeable part of the remnants from the various caves; besides, the palaeographical dating of certain MSS formally rules out their having been composed or copied in Qumran, and the long editorial history of various works equally makes it clear that the oldest levels were written in a period prior to the establishing of the community beside the Dead Sea. But it is our contention that: 1) the texts found in the caves are not a disparate collection of loose elements without any connection; on the contrary, they are part of a whole and form a unity that we can describe as a religious library, and 2) that this library belongs to and reflects the interests of the group of Qumran, which amounts to saying that it is a sectarian library. F. García Martínez and A. S. van der Woude, “A Groningen Hypothesis of Qumran Origins and Early History,” RevQ 14/56 (1999): 521-541, reprint in Qumranica Minora I, 31-52, here, 31-32. In general terms, we may say that the first part of this basic assumption has been confirmed now that the publication is complete, since with the exception of a few documentary texts (some of them of uncertain origin) it can be asserted that the collection as a whole is a “religious library,” and the so-called “parabiblical” texts which now form the majority are as religious as the rest of the compositions (be it “biblical” or other). I am also convinced that the second part of this assumption (that the collection as a whole belongs to and has influenced the thought of the group) has proved true by the new publications, and in a much more radical way than I was able to imagine when I formulated it, since then I was accepting as evident the usual division in categories as reflecting the historical reality of the time when the collection was formed. Now, we are much more aware that the only historical context we can apply with any certainty to the collection of compositions previously known (some as “biblical” and some as “non biblical”) as well as to the compositions previously unknown (some labelled “sectarian” and others “non-sectarian”) is the Qumran context. For compositions previously unknown it is evident that the only context we can give them is the collection where they have been found, and while this context is independent of their origins it tells us at least that these previously unknown compositions were acceptable to and cherished by the group to a greater or lesser degree, in the same manner that the compositions which later will become “Bible” in Jewish, Christian or Ethiopic canons were acceptable to and cherished by the respective group to a greater or lesser degree. And now, since the work of Michael Stone, See, for example, Michael E. Stone, “Categorization and Classification of Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha,” Abr Nahraim 24 (1986): 167-77 Robert Kraft See, for example, Robert A. Kraft, “The Pseudepigrapha in Christianity,” in Tracing the Treads: Studies in the Vitality of Jewish Pseudepigrapha (ed. J.C. Reeves; SBL Early Judaism and its Literature 6: Atlanta: Scholars, 1994), 55-86. and Marinus de Jonge See, for example, Marinus de Jonge, “The So-Called Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament and Early Christianity,” in The New Testament and Hellenistic Judaism (ed. P. Borgen and S. Liversen; Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1995), 59-71.(among others), we are all well aware that the context in which a composition has been preserved and transmitted tells us as much or more about understanding this composition than its assumed origins. See the articles by Robert A. Kraft, Michael A. Knibb, Daniel C. Harlow and Christfried Böttrich, collected and edited by Jan Willem van Henten and Berndt Schaller in the monographic issue of the Journal for the Study of Judaism, JSJ 32 (2001): 369-470. For, as Baumgarten says, “discovering origins is not the ultimate objective of historical research. At best it is incidental and makes minimal contribution to understanding.” A. I. Baumgarten, “Reflections on the Groningen Hyothesis,” 257. I confess that with the Groningen Hypothesis I not only attempted to trace the origins of the Essene movement or the origins of Qumran, but I thought that the principle of compatibility or coherence with the thinking of the group could provide an instrument that would help us to determine the origin of previously unknown compositions found in the collection. I wrote: Our assumption implies that although the fact of its having being found in Qumran is no guarantee of the Qumranic origin of a given work, it does assure us that the work in question was understood by the community as compatible with its own ideology and its own halakhah, that is as coming from the Essene movement or from the apocalyptic tradition which inspired it. Which amounts to saying that the non-biblical literature found as part of the Qumran library may be classified as follows: * sectarian works, representing the thought or the halakhah of Qumran in its most developed and typical form * works of the formative period, presenting a vision still not so clearly differentiated from the Essenism which is its ultimate source but containing indications of future developments and offering an already characteristic halakhah. * works which reflect Essene thought and accord with what the classical sources teach us about Essenism or what can be attributed to it * works belonging to the apocalyptic tradition which gave rise to Essenism and which were considered as part of the common heritage. F. García Martínez and A. S. van der Woude, “A Groningen Hypothesis of Qumran Origins and Early History,” Qumranica Minora I, 35-36. This fourfold division was a first attempt at taxonomy of the so-called “non biblical” compositions found in the collection, proceeding from the core texts of the group to the works that we knew were much older than the group itself, like 1 Enoch or Jubilees. This attempt was later completed and developed in much more detail by the articles of Carol Newsom in 1990, Carol A. Newsom, “‘Sectually Explicit’ Literature from Qumran,” in The Hebrew Bible and its Interpreters (ed. William H. Propp, Baruch Halpern and David N. Freedman; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 167-187. and of Devorah Dimant in 1995. ‭ ‬Devorah Dimant,‭ “‬The Qumran Manuscripts:‭ ‬Contents and Significance,‭” ‬in Time to Prepare the Way in the Wilderness‭ (‬ed.‭ ‬D.‭ ‬Dimant and Lawrence H.‭ ‬Schiffman‭; ‬STDJ‭ ‬16‭; ‬Leiden:‭ ‬Brill,‭ ‬1995‭) ‬25-58.‭ ‬See now her more detailed article in Hebrew,‭ “‬Criteria for the Identification of Qumran Sectarian Texts,‭” ‬in The Qumran Scrolls and Their World,‭ (‬2‭ ‬vols.‭ ‬ed.‭ ‬Menahem Kister‭; ‬Between Bible and Mishnah.‭ ‬Jerusalem:‭ ‬Yad Ben-Zvi,‭ ‬2009‭)‬,‭ ‬1.49-86.‭ (‬Hebrew‭)‬. In my opinion, this attempt has proven to be of less lasting relevance, now that the publication of the whole collection has shown that the labels used to describe it were anachronistic and inadequate for reflecting the historical reality the manuscripts reveal to us. It is now generally accepted that the most basic division reflected in the official publication of the collection in DJD (that of “biblical” manuscripts and all other) is a clear anachronism, since it reflects a much later period and a very different set of values, and does not correspond to the historical circumstances of the collection. This appears clearly in the terminology used in DJD I to divide the manuscripts into three categories: “Ouvrages canoniques” “Ouvrages non canoniques” et “Ouvrages de la bibliothèque essénienne.” DJD I, 46-47. In fact, one of the things that the publication of all the manuscripts has shown us (and is evident in the work of Eugene Ulrich, George Brooke and many others) See the articles collected in Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (SDSSRL; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). is that, in as far as we can ascertain, there was no “Bible” at Qumran; what later will become the “Bible” in one or another of its “canonical” forms (be it the Hebrew Bible, or the Greek Bible, not to mention the Latin, Syriac or Ethiopic Bibles, each one with its own “canon” of books that are “in” and books that are “out”) was not yet extant. It was in a process of forming, an advanced process to be sure, but a process which was not yet completed. In the collections found in the Caves we do find many books which later will become “biblical books,” and in many different forms, be it in clear different textual forms, or in different editions, or re-written in the form of new compositions, and all of them used indiscriminately. And we do find some indications that two groups of books, designated as “Moses (or the Torah) and the Prophets” were already considered as different and more authoritative than the others, although we do not know for sure what books were included in these two groups, particularly in the group of the “Prophets.” What we do not find at Qumran is any indication of a closed list of authoritative books. We are still on the other side of the “Great Divide” as Talmon has put it. Shemaryahu Talmon, “The Crystallization of the ‘Canon of Hebrew Scriptures’ in the Light of Biblical Scrolls from Qumran,” in The Bible as Book. The Hebrew Bible and the Judaean Desert Discoveries (ed. Edward D. Herbert and E. Tov; London-New Castle: The British Library-Oak Knoll, 2000), 14. There were of course texts that were accepted as authoritative by the group of Qumran (and by other Jewish groups,) and some of these texts were much more authoritative than others. Their authority appears in the way they were used, quoted, interpreted, or rewritten in other compositions. But these authoritative texts were not identical with, nor limited to, those which later we will find in the Hebrew or in the Greek Bible. And many of these authoritative texts were present in very different textual shapes (short, long, revised, reworked, abstracted, versions) and even in very different editions. Which proves, as Ulrich has emphasized, that what was considered authoritative was the book itself (the scroll, to be precise), not the concrete textual form of the book, since all these forms and editions were kept harmoniously together in the same library and (to judge from the interpretations) were used indiscriminately. When looking at the collection of manuscripts found at Qumran we had best not use the labels “biblical,” “parabiblical” and the like, because they are clearly anachronistic in the collection’s historical context, and they imply a value judgment that may be ours, but certainly does not correspond to the group of people who brought the collection together. F. García Martínez, “Rethinking the Bible: 60 Years of Research on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Beyond” in Authoritative Scriptures. Judaism: Proceedings of the Groningen Qumran Institute Symposium, 28-29 April 2008 (ed. M. Popović; JSJSup; Leiden: Brill, 2009), forthcoming. The scholars of the so-called “biblical” scrolls found in the collection have tried to avoid the taxonomic impasse by focusing on the “authoritativeness” of the compositions within the collection as a whole. And I suggest that we can also come out of the impasse of the so-called “non-biblical scrolls” by giving more attention to the authority conferring strategies used in them and considering the collection as a whole. In an article recently published in the RevQ, F. García Martínez, “¿Sectario, no-sectario, o qué?” which originated as a response to two other articles by Dimant and Kugler proposing to change the generally accepted label of “non sectarian” to “sectarian” (Kugler for the Qumran Aramaic Levi Robert A. Kugler, “Whose Scripture? Whose Community? Reflections on the Dead Sea Scrolls Then and Now, By Way of Aramaic Levi,” DSD 15 (2008): 5-23.) or “non sectarian” to a new category “in between” (Dimant for the 4QApocryphon of Joshua Devorah Dimant, “Between Sectarian and Non-Sectarian: The Case of the Apocryphon of Joshua,” in Reworking the Bible: Apocryphal and Related Texts at Qumran (ed. Esther G. Chazon, Devorah Dimant and Ruth A. Clements; STDJ 58; Leiden: Brill, 2005), 105-134.), I have done precisely that and proposed that we abandon altogether our taxonomic differentiations. We should consider the collection as a whole in its historical perspective, a collection comprised of religious texts (in Hebrew or in Aramaic), whose origins in most cases cannot be determined, but whose formation has been influenced by other, preceding, religious texts considered as more or less authoritative. It is my contention that we will be better off if we abandon the basic labels of our taxonomy: “sectarian” or “non-sectarian,” because in the historical context of the collection they are as irrelevant as the labels “biblical” and “non-biblical.” And this, not because these labels correspond better to a group of people than to a group of writings, but because with these labels we try to determine the origin of the writings (which we do not know, and in most cases we cannot know), and this to the detriment of the only thing we do know, the context in which they were used, preserved and transmitted. And this context, both for the manuscripts we used to call “biblical” and for those we used to call “non-biblical,” is where the collection was brought together by a particular religious group of people who had peculiar ideas, some of them shared by other Jews of the time and some of them not. I think that the group which collected and preserved the manuscripts had appropriated and were influenced to a greater or lesser degree by all the compositions we have recovered, by those we used to call “biblical” as well as by those we used to call “non-biblical.” The fact is that the whole collection of manuscripts found at Qumran (with the exception of a few documentary texts) is formed by religious texts (in Hebrew or in Aramaic) whose formation has been influenced by other preceding religious texts that were considered as more or less authoritative. And the same authority conferring strategies are used in all of them. In the article co-authored with A.S. van der Woude already mentioned, F. García Martínez and A. S. van der Woude, “A Groningen Hypothesis of Qumran Origins and Early History,” Qumranica Minora I, 36-47. I pointed out the insurmountable difficulties of the hypothesis of those who, like Norman Golb, His different publications are summarized in Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret of Qumran (New York-London: Scribner, 1995) denied any coherence to the corpus of writings which forms the collection, assuming they represent all the literary production of the time, being the membra disjecta of the different libraries of Jerusalem. Although this interpretation has found little echo among most of the Dead Sea Scrolls scholars, who hold fast to the connection between the scrolls and the settlement, if I am not mistaken, it has become popular among the archaeologists who propose different understandings of the ruins, and not only attempt to interpret the archaeological remains by themselves but consider the Scrolls an obstacle to their interpretation. Hirschfeld, for example, asserts that “by suggesting that Jerusalem is the source of the scrolls, we liberate Qumran from the burden of religious significance that has clung to it.” Yizhar Hirschfeld, Qumran in Context. Reassessing the Archaeological Evidence (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004), 5. But I remain convinced that the collection as a whole can be defined only as a repository of religious literature, as rich and variegated as the different authoritative books on which it is based. And the complete publication of all that has reached us by sheer luck, even in its very fragmentary state, confirms this understanding. But it is time to close. To answer briefly my first question: should we proceed now to the burial of the Groningen Hypothesis? I do not know. The way it was formulated is certainly a product of the time in which it was written more than twenty years ago, and as such does not correspond to our present knowledge. But some of its basic insights are still helpful in making sense of the complex data we now have. At least, they have helped me (after my move from Groningen) to continue my quest to understanding “The Identity and History of the Qumran Community” and the Scrolls they collected and preserved for us.