From Ink Traces to Ideology: Material, Text, and Composition of Qumran Community Rule Manuscripts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study is a fresh analysis of a collection of scrolls and fragments grouped under the rubric, The Community Rule or Serekh ha-Yaḥad. As part of the manuscripts discovered in the Judean Desert, the Community Rule manuscripts are all fragmentary to various degrees, yet attest to important issues of legal dispute and community formation in the Second Temple era. Whereas the previous 70 years of scholarship bifurcated some of these scrolls into different "works," I argue for a process of compositional development which revolved around issues of legal authority and purity. It is my contention that textual similarities and differences—ink traces as it were—provide opportunity to probe into the legal ideology of the tradents, in terms of how anterior sources were configured to establish and project political authority in contradistinction to the tradents' opponents. Consequently, I propose a compositional hermeneutic model that accounts for textual stability and change with respect to disputes of legal authority and notions of textuality in the Second Temple era. In addition, I provide several new editions, most importantly a new edition of 4QSerekh ha-Yaḥade (+ olim 4QOtot), 4Q Serekh ha-Yaḥadb, and 1QS+ab (= 1QS, 1QSa, and 1QSb). These new editions were made by drawing on advanced manuscript studies in the digital humanities and material philology. Consequently, I provide a plethora of new textual readings and reconstructions. In short, this study observes and takes account of the various semantic and textual drifts in the compositional development attested in, among, and between the manuscripts of the so-called Community Rule at Qumran.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".