ABSTRACT
It has long been recognized that the foundational documents of the Qumran library-works such as the Community Rule, Damascus Document, and Thanksgiving Hymns-contain wisdom elements. Likewise, it has long been known that small fragments of the biblical wisdom books-Proverbs, Job, Qohelet, and Sirach-were discovered at Qumran. But the Qumran library has yielded still other Jewish wisdom texts from the Second Temple period (537 BCE to 70 CE). A few of these were previously known in ancient translations, but most of them were previously unknown. The focus of this study is the corpus of newly discovered (since 1947) wisdom texts from Qumran, though it will also relate these texts to the biblical wisdom books and to what are regarded as “sectarian” works in the Qumran library. Finally, it will consider what contributions these Qumran wisdom texts might make to illumining the development of early Judaism and the place of the Qumran community within it, and the development of early Christianity and the figure of Jesus.
