"The First Dead Sea Scroll"?

The Genizah collection includes a number of apocryphal, pseudepigraphical, apocalyptic and mystical texts that are not part of the standard canon of rabbinic literature, at least as later conceived. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in 1947, important parallels were quickly noticed. The most significant was the Damascus Document, discovered by Schechter and published by him in his Documents of Jewish Sectaries (Cambridge, 1910), and often puzzled over. It was already clear before 1947 that this document witnessed to an otherwise-unknown Jewish sect.

As scholars began to translate the Dead Sea materials they discovered several fragmentary copies of this very same document; suggesting that it must have been held in high regard at Qumran. Hence the term "the first Dead Sea Scroll" sometimes applied to the Genizah's Damascus Document. It remains by far the most extensive copy of this work.

Fragments of Ben Sira have also been identified from the Genizah, and one of the manuscripts (MS "B") is particularly close to the version discovered by Yadin at Masada.

How are we to account for these links between a second-Temple Jewish sect which was supposed not to have survived the Jewish War of 70CE, and an apparently conventional synagogue nearly a millennium later? It is of course possible that these documents were merely curiosity-pieces and not at all part of the religious life of mediaeval Cairo. There are both Christian and Karaite traditions about mediaeval discoveries of documents from a cave near Jericho (see Kahle, The Cairo Genizah 13--28). If such traditions have a basis in fact then it is plausible that such texts, or copies of them, may have found their way to Cairo and thus to the Genizah.

But we may conceivably be nearer to the mark in supposing that these texts witness to a much greater breadth of religious and theological perspective, not only in the Judaism of the second Temple period but also in its later developments and consolidation.