ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the methodological issue of how people can interpret texts as expressions of specific socio-historical contexts. It also addresses the challenge of determining the socio-historical contexts of composite works. The sociologist and cultural memory theoretician Maurice Halbwachs's notion of tradition displays how vital communal functions have been fulfilled in the past, and it does so in order to endow the representatives or functionaries of this tradition with an aura of good virtues in present. The chapter seeks to uncover role of non-representational meanings attached to constituent parts of a composite work, that is, their meaning in the eyes of composers. 4QMMT is a case in point. This composite work is usually handled as an epistle or a tractate, written shortly before or after the Dead Sea Community established itself apart from the religious establishment in Jerusalem. 4QMMT is a composite text, divided by the first editors into three parts due to differences in genre, themes, and linguistic features.
