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Hello, welcome to the new book in Jewish Studies podcast. I am your host, Ari Bartolat. They, it is my blessing, my utter joy, and my hallowed honor to be in dialogue with Ariane Becker. We will be discussing his newly published book, The Secret of Time, Reconfiguring Wisdom, in the Densee Scrolls, published in Leiden, Netherlands by Braille Publishers 2023.
Ariane Becker is assistant professor of Hebrew Bible ancient Judaism at the University of Ronnegan. Ariane, I'm honored to be in dialogue with you today. So am I. To begin please tell us about yourself.
Where did you grow up? What formative events in your life catalyzed the scholar you become? So I grew up in the Netherlands, in the north of the Netherlands, in a small village, actually. And I grew up and went to school in a very secular environment.
I had no religious background whatsoever. It was something that was quite alien to the world I grew up in, in the Netherlands, in in in in in in in in in in And yeah, I was when I went for high school injury, no what to do, but I was interested in philosophy and history. And then in the end I decided to study religious studies at the University of Amsterdam, which was kind of funny at that time. People thought it was kind of strange.
I was interested in studying religion because I was considered something of the past really. But but for me that that really kind of drew my drew my attention to religious studies. University of Amsterdam was interested in philosophy. I was very interested in Judaism and Hebrew and I started doing research and studying philosophers like Spinoza and Hermann Kohan and that really drew my attention and my interest towards Judaism and to also towards ancient Jewish sources And then after I finished my degree at the University of Amsterdam, I continued studying at the University of London where there was then a program or an esteemed professor very learned it in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
His name is Bronte No Garcia. Martinez, so I went there to study with him and I got kind of a broader view on ancient Jewish texts on the Bible information and the whole textual world around it as we know it's from Dead Sea Scrolls. I spent some time studying the New Testament as well. And then there was an opening for a PGD in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
My supervisor there was a particular and he wanted to offer the project on and wisdom texts from Dead Sea Scrolls. So that's how I kind of rolled into it. And yeah, what motivated me in my studies was kind of an insight coming really from a very secular background very very little knowledge about religious traditions, how much of society in fact was was influenced by religions but also how much scholarship certainly the Western academic tradition has been forged within a Christian theological paradigm and later also in a secular context how that many of those elements of a Christian theological paradigm are implicitly present and I think that a kind of moment of self-reflect is missing what extended the case, what extended still influences the way people think and also how there are other traditions which have been equally important but sometimes not so much acknowledging particularly Judaism and here in archaeological finds such as the Dead Sea Scrolls but also have essentially earlier the Kaidoganes that really changed the discourse of scholarship on the history of the formation of the Bible for example since these are texts that somehow came back to us from this in history and offer us a way into understanding the formation of these texts a little bit outside of the paradigms and boxes that we're creating in modern scholarship and particularly biblical scholarship that's yeah, set everything on a new footing and I found that very relevant and exciting and interesting. What inspires you to write this book?
What message do you hope to convey to readers? So it inspired me in sense are the mysterious texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the fragments, the language and the ideas. Something that really was a big problem for me, I was wrestling already in the time I was writing my dissertation but also afterwards is this one phrase that comes up in these wisdom texts and a couple of other texts from Qumran, this phrase is Raz, Nihyya, the mystery of being the mystery of what is what will be I ended up translating it as the mystery of time because I think that somehow captures what this mystery is about and trying to understand that mystery and puzzling with it for hours and days and months and years and years and years and years was somehow kept going and the frustration of not being able to grasp what that meant at the same time I think also was an inspiration and I think the other part of the title of the book reconfiguring wisdom in the end was quite important for me for helping to unpack that mysterious phrase and grasp it in a better way in a sense I was dissatisfied with the ways in which some of the categories that are applied in scholarship do not really help us get a better understanding of many of the texts and ideas but rather by putting texts in separate boxes and not really reading alongside together with each other but putting them each in their own domain and territory makes it much harder for us to see connections between concepts and developments of concepts so kind of rethinking those categories and rereading texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls and a broader framework that is another thing that really inspired me to write this. What are the primary themes in this book?
Yeah, so there are a couple of I think relevant themes in the book. One of the themes is really at the level of scholarship and scholarly discourse namely to rethink some of the categories that we use in organizing the materials in situating the text and contextualizing the texts. So these involve for example one of the first categories that is this book addressing is the category of Comran, wisdom texts, wisdom texts are well, texts that are also identified among biblical texts a series of texts such as Proverbs and Job and Quelter and Chlyceastes and some texts outside the Hebrew Bible that are closely related to this such as Ben-Sireh, they've been grouped together because they share certain themes and concepts and literary forms and among the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially among the very fragmentary texts, some compositions share some of these features and have been grouped together as Comran wisdom texts which was helpful I think at some stage in the scholarship but I think now that we are a little bit further or some decades further I think these categories or these labels also sometimes prohibited us from seeing important connections with other texts in the corpus and another dividing line that has a lot of influence and that's in that sea scroll site is a division between local sectarian and non-sectarian texts that are attributed to the group or community living at Comran or at least being the owners of this scroll sometimes called the Yahats, the community and some versions of the steel are associated with the scenes and some versions, they are not in any case there's a particular group of the compositions of the texts that were found in Comran that are associated with this group that were composed of a dividing line and another group of texts that were not, that came from the outside, first of all those texts that later become known as the biblical texts which are presumed to be earlier older than the existence of this community but then also many other texts that are not in the Bible that are still considered to be not written by this community maybe because it was older, maybe it's in another language in Aramaic, some people would feel that Aramaic texts would not have been written by this community but they come from an earlier period and this kind of, yeah, the result of this categorization in terms of sectarian and sectarian texts that are separated off from each other when it's clear there are so many lines and connections, terminological, that bind these texts together so I think that that's one theme, rethinking some of these categories by looking for common themes or common concepts, common terminology and then I do that by looking at terms that are used for the sage, for the wise person across these categories of texts which includes a traditionally more well-known phrase for wise that people are more familiar with, the word ha-bam, a wise person which interestingly is not used that much in the scrolls, they use a lot of sub-iential terminology, terminology that occurs in these so-called wisdom texts but precisely not the term ha-ham or even for whom I have not used that much there are many other terms, so wisdom that are used Hebrew terms such as sechael or binah or dahat, but precisely chah-ham or po-hamah, not that much and then there are other terms for the sage that are quite prominent such as mevene, someone who has understanding or skill a wise person or a wise teacher, someone who gives insight to others, so I studied these themes for the sage and I also asked the question, so how do you become a sage, how do you become a wise person and I studied a practice of studying the way they are described acquiring wisdom which involves intensive study and searching for knowledge but then also a moment of revelation and then in the final chapter I look at this phrase, rasnihir, and I try to explain why and how this phrase is a very important connection to the theme of time, so those are some of the most important themes of this book How does this study advance our understanding of time? Yeah, so in terms of time, what my book contributes, I think the discussion of time, so there's quite some scholarship on time and antiquity in Judaism I think what in terms of calendars, in terms of identity, in terms of chronology, periodization, I think what my book particularly contributes something that's not really even seen before is how systematically people thought about time and the organization of time so we know that people were very much concerned with calendars, with all the difficulties of bringing the solar and the lunar cycles into a system that allows for proper calculation and celebration of festivals at the correct moment, we have various calendars and various schemes across multiple years that tries to develop a good system, so sometimes really unrealistic systems based on calculation, based on the number seven, for example that really will run out of any real solar, out of sync with any real solar or lunar cycles but so we know there's a lot of calculation thinking about calendrical order, we also knew that people knew, had knowledge of the zodiac, the trans-zodiac sign, the course of the suns through the zodiac signs across the solar year and we knew that there was a big concern for historiography and chronology and its context for periodization, dividing history in different periods but what we really did not know is that all these temporal features were also the subject of very abstract reflection that we can even call metaphysical so they're thinking about the organization of the cosmos and they use famous language from wisdom texts such as the book of Proverbs in which God uses wisdom to construct the heaven and the earth like an architect but these texts will come run also use the same language and the same metaphors in relation to time and temporal calculation so the cosmos is organized in terms of temporal structures, both calendar but also chronology and I argue that time here is seen as a cosmological or even metaphysical principle, the same way that some Greek philosophers thought in abstract terms of being as a bird principle, these wisdom texts think about time in relation to being and becoming as this race called the rasniene or what I kind of say as a secretive time how does your study shed light on interactions and continuities between Greek and Jewish wisdom traditions?
Yeah, so I think that what's interesting, what's important about these texts, what they show us that there was not only an interaction with Greek thought among Jews speaking and writing in Greek such as we know as we know already of a thinker probably living in the second century BCE, Arstabia, so Alexandria for example, of whom only some fragments were preserved but we know that he was explaining aspects of creation or divine being or the first week of creation and the Sabbath in light of Greek philosophy and he also used Greek philosophical terminology of course a few centuries later in the work by the Alexandria from the first century CE we have so much more elaborate works preserved and we can say much more about this but also there there's been a tendency to see this really as a Jewish author explaining the biblical texts in the framework of Greek philosophy trying to harmonize the Bible with philosophy and that this is somehow a distinctive or Hellistic Jewish or Greek Jewish traditions, I think what these texts from Conrad have shown us is that also in Hebrew and some extend in Aramaic already the second and first centuries BCE people were thinking along these quite abstract lines that there seems to be some interaction perhaps not a direct interaction, I don't want to say that the Red Plate or Aristotle but there is some forms of thinking looking for the first principles looking for a change of cause and effect in a sense throughout history throughout phenomena and then we see also in texts in Hebrew so this kind of changes the scope for how we look at interaction between Greek and Jewish with some traditions and I was I'm building here of course I'm working for your scholars such as John Collins who wrote about the heuristic context for that he's crossing especially also in the Neiman who wrote about the interaction across Hebrew and Greek registers in Judaism in the Hellenistic period so I think that this wisdom text kind of yeah take us one step further understanding how deeply also Hebrew speaking Hebrew writing communities were invested in developing new and innovative ways thinking that were in some sense in conversation with Greek thought so that this really gives us a new handle and a new frame for understanding these interactions between Greek and Hebrew thinking starting from the 3rd century BC to all the way to the 1st century as the inside of Alexandria and then on into into how does your study recontextualize the book of Jubilees in relation to and in the context of the Dead Sea's roles yeah so so maybe it's good just to say a little bit about what what what the book of Jubilees is for listeners that may not be entirely familiar so the book of Jubilees is actually a retelling of the stories of Genesis through Exodus up to the moment where Moses is on Mount Sinai and receives the tablets of the of the laws actually the book also starts there so it begins with Moses on Mount Sinai and there Moses hears from from God that in addition to the the commandments the written laws he will also receive an additional revelation namely that has been written on the tablets of Heavens from which the angel an angel will read to him and these things relate to the divisions of the time so correctly understanding why and how everything happened at a certain moment across history so it's actually a key of interpretation for the written Torah for the books of Genesis and Exodus and also further because other laws are also part of that so it offers a framework for understanding understanding the Torah I think what's very important about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they show us how in the 2nd and even the 1st century BCE the book of Jubilees is in progress is being written and this really has changed our perspective on jubilees and here's also important to know some of the background of the study of this book which was unknown in book and the Jewish tradition and in the Western tradition since antiquity it was it was forgotten mostly however it was preserved in Ethiopia in Ethiopian church based on translations probably from the Greek into G.S into classical theopic this book was preserved and copied as part of Ethiopian Bible sense is genuinely part of Ethiopian Bible until today so it's not until the early modern period that this book was first read by Western scholars and this is the only complete text that there is a book of jubilees in in the Arabic there are parts of a Latin translation dating back to the 5th or 6th centuries there are some Greek fragments but entire text of jubilees we only have in in the the topic in fact before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls we couldn't even be sure what was the original language of this composition but among the Dead Sea Scrolls many many fragments were found that actually corresponds to this to the theopic book of Enoch and this this the topic text which was then so the editions of the city of texts are based on early modern manuscripts was then also used as the basis for reconstructing these fragmentary manuscripts and putting them in places and so on actually the scrolls themselves display much more diversity so they even though the earliest scholars working on the Hebrew fragments of the book of jubilees kind of had a sense that this was a very accurate that the later medieval and later theopic manuscripts were an accurate a very accurate reflection of the book in second time period and then kind of projected that back into time and the reconstruction of the fragments were done in light of these later manuscript traditions with actually the scrolls the scrolls display more diversity so it actually seems that there are different versions of the book as especially our tickler has argued so we actually see a book in that scene development and I built on this insight and I started reconsidering the way in which jubilees relates to other texts on the scroll so scholars who had considered jubilees as a fixed text and also know that there were quite a large number of manuscripts of jubilees thought that this was a canonical text at kumran so it was part of the bible of the people at kumran so the saying it was interpreted in other texts from kumran we see some reflection of this book some corresponding elements from book of jubilees in other books so scholars thought that this book was being interpreted as an authoritative text but if we consider that this book was itself still in progress and was being rewritten and reworked in the same period it means that maybe we can see links with other texts as a conversation across compositions rather than a one way influence and this relates particularly to the term the divisions of the times how the times are divided in terms of the particular and special calendar that the book of jubilees has which is a pre-under 64 day calendar kind of ideal scheme of 52 weeks or four seasons of 13, 13 weeks and then also dividing time in terms of sabbatical years and jubilees years of 70 years and 49 year, 50 year periods for the calculation of all of history and we actually find this term the divisions of the times of the eblumachicotes in other texts from kumran as well so rather than saying that jubilees was a canonical historical data text that impacted later texts we can actually see this as a part of a larger framework of text and development of thinking in the period how are the approaches to wisdom in the books of jobe proverbs, ecclesiastes and benceira similar to and different from those examined here at the Dead Sea Scrolls so first of all maybe it's good to kind of point out that also among texts this is jobe and proverbs and ecclesiastes and benceira despite similarities also profound differences especially cohaled for example is really kind of a case on his phone, benceira is also quite different from proverbs and ecclesiastes though formerly maybe has some similar aspects of as the book of proverbs there are also some important differences also for jobe of course I think what holds all of these books, what holds for all of these books were proverbs for jobe and ecclesiastes also for benceira perhaps to a less extent is that they impose limits on the capacity of humans to acquire knowledge and wisdom so it's important for humans to know that they can and should strive for wisdom and knowledge but there are limits of what humans can ultimately know and a good example is the speech of god in jobe 38 when god is speaking to jobe from the world where you were you when the world was created do you understand what the foundations of the earth are you able to understand how the heavens and the earth were formed, can you count, drops of rain, can you measure the wind and so on we find this in jobe and also in other texts, this idea of a limit is quite essential for these texts, proverbs, cholistes, benceira although some one is there and also most beyond this and this is something where the cohran texts, wisdom texts but also text are not usually turned with texts but they are still very interested, very much interested in knowledge and understanding really go beyond those limits of the human capacity of knowing this drive to achieve this higher knowledge precisely also those knowledge, those aspects of knowledge that jobe and benceira for example say that humans cannot really attain the color of ancient Judaism, michael stone, as called this list of revealed things precisely those things that for according to these more classical wisdom texts are concealed for humans, humans are not able to achieve these are strived for are somehow being revealed in wisdom text and by being able to acquire knowledge that lies beyond the limits or the boundaries of what humans normally can achieve, this also means that humans in a sense have to change or transform, acquire a different nature or purify their nature in order to be able to attain such knowledge also the limited lifespan of humans is a problem here for attaining knowledge that is in a sense eternal and you also see in many texts from the scrolls this is attempt to reach beyond that limited lifespan or somehow participate in existence that is not confined by those limitations on page 131 you write as follows wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls is embedded in the turgical practice as the sage aspires to coordinate times of prayer with heavenly models, several texts consider human wisdom inferior or even dangerous, true wisdom, the other hand is found by participating in the choirs of angels who praise surclasses any knowledge that he might go to achieve by themselves for this reason it is essential to give blessing continually and in sequence with the divisions of the times that have been defined be measured and ordained this sequence, this liturgical sequence provides the performative context for the pursuit of wisdom whether the sage considers ancient histories as the generation holds or tries to comprehend the alignment of the stars in both cases the efforts of understanding are directed at the hidden organization of time the sage anticipates a future that looks quite differently from the present this vision emerges from continuous meditation on the secret of time can you sing more about this? yes, so what I'm trying to argue here is that wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls is very much integrated in liturgical practice and performance so the study of history the ambition to achieve a higher form of knowledge or the highest form of knowledge that is in the end associated with angelic prayer with heavenly prayer with heavenly prayer with the proper form of giving praise that is exemplified by angels and the highest form of prayer or praise that humans can achieve according to this text is when they participate in these angelic choirs shows how much the aspiration for knowledge is at the same time embedded in practices of prayer and liturgy and on the one hand we see this in the way times are marked with prayer so there is an attempt to align prayers with heavenly structures of cycles of day and night the coming of light and darkness the seventh day the Sabbath which is also in a text like the son of the Sabbath sacrifice the angels are invoked to give praise and of course this is a text that is written right and performed within the human community that imagines the seventh day as a fixed moment here also in the scheme of a freedom of 64 day year as the right moment of praise according to heavenly ordained structure cycles of the moon of the new moon of annual festivals new years sabbatical years of jubilee years each of these moments of time are marked by the sage appearing in some of the texts as they appear in some of the texts from from kumran and that yes as as as scholars much earlier already have pointed out a motion venge vowels for example in article back in the 70s or the 70s perhaps arguing that also the later Jewish laterical traditions in particular prayers about the luminaries in the morning prayers are already there seems to be some some hint at those or some yeah elements in these texts from kumran that already perform some of those liturgical practices and what we would we see here is that this dividing of time this marking of times with prayers at the same time also company by reflection contemplation on what it means that times are organized and structured how does your studies check new light on daniel and enoch as they are depicted in the Dead Sea Scrolls? what enoch is another book that's prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls we know mainly from thanks to idiopic manuscript traditions as well as some fragments here and there from ancient writings in greek and some larger manuscripts but here with the Dead Sea Scrolls we also found Aramaic fragments of the of the books of Enoch and I think that yeah what my book shows is how many of these concerns in the idiopic in the Aramaic Enoch writings are very much present also in this this Hebrew with the writings and the writing especially issues relating to astronomy and calendar so it's one part of the one of the Enochic books also known as the Astronomic book describes cycles of the sun and the moon and the calendar but also hidden structures of history as they appear especially in the in the part-lips of weeks in the pistol of Enoch and also notions of Emily tablets and angelic revelations so it shows I think how much those aspects that are so central to the Enochic books are also essential to Hebrew wisdom writings and perhaps another thing to say is that the way in which the figure of Enoch is used as another to which books are tribute so Enoch being the seventh generation after the fourth or second generation of humanity living before the great grandfather of Noah living before the flood and actually having these visions of what will happen much much later in history and seems like this book is written in the third second century BCE so some authors in this period found it helpful to write from the perspective of an author living thousands of years back in history and for seeing the future and for seeing about their own period which somehow allows for a collapsing of time that this is the way Hindinaimin has described it when she speaks about pseudopigraphy as a literary construct that what it allows authors to do is in a sense turn to the past to to to to reject to imagine a new or changed future and that's very much also the way in which I argue this phrase that has in here operates with people studying the past studying the distant past trying to understand that past trying to understand in generations ultimately with an aspiration to change something in the present and towards the future and I think that the book of Daniel doesn't think that are very very similar of course in Daniel the theme of time is very essential and that's terminology relating to time time times and half time appear throughout the book as as a terminology of mystery or of ras actually and I argue that also in Daniel in chapter 9 of Daniel and Daniel is reading the prophecy of so Daniel was in exile at that point in Babylon reading the prophecy of Jeremiah concerning the desolation of Jerusalem so that Jerusalem will be desolates for 70 years this time is coming to an end and Daniel doesn't understand why why this is still the case and he he he starts to pray and confesses the transgressions of his ancestors and yeah through this long prayer and supplication that an angel comes to him who gives him an explanation of the prophecy of the knowledge that he wants to have and then suddenly this is not at all related anymore to Daniel's own time or to Daniel's own understanding but the angel actually gives him an understanding of this prophecy relating to a hidden structure of time that goes far into the future and then reaching the time in which the authors of the book of Daniel actually lives so this kind of technique of returning to the past in order to see a different future and understanding in a sense the structures of time is something that we see in Daniel anything now can I think that this wisdom text from Kumaan that speak about the Raz Nihyeh the secret of time help us put that into a broader framework of texts and thinking in that Can you explain and elaborate on the term Raz Nihyeh? Yes so I've already been referring to that term quite a bit maybe to explain some of the basics so that's sort of two words Raz Nihyeh Raz is actually a Persian long word that kind of probably came through Aramaic into the Hebrew language you find in some Aramaic texts from Kumaan or probably the earliest occurrences but it's still still today still a Persian Iranian word which means secret or a mystery in this context it often refers to a hidden rule or hidden law the phrase Nihyeh is a participle of the Hebrew verb Hayah to be it means something like mystery that is becoming that is happening or the mystery of what is becoming scholars have argued that it relates to the past could be the mystery of the past according to other scholars the mystery of what will come the mystery of the future going to other system is to the present according to other system is to the past in the present and the future some of our have translated this as the mystery of existence I think that it refers to kind of an underlying mystery of what happens and that it ties together both the Landricle and chronological speculation it's very closely related I argue in the book to this phrase from the book of Jubilis divisions of the times the way the times are divided in terms of calendar in terms of the times as the luminaries have any bodies indicate them at the same time also chronology, some division of time in weeks and months and seasons and years but also sabbatical years and Jubilee years through can correct study of ancient writings of holy writings and through a close observation of more recent history or also the present you can somehow come to underlie a hidden structure of how everything comes into being and here yeah some very typical and relevant phraseology in some of the other texts from the cross cross closely relate to this phrase for example the phrase from the God of Knowledge comes everything that is and that will be called the Yevanishia so somehow the world and everything that happens proceeds from divine knowledge it comes into being through the divine wisdom and the secret principle by which it is set into motion the secret of what comes into being or the secret that comes into being is about understanding time is how things come into being and come to pass and hit an organization behind everything that happens especially as it is related to temple organization calendar and chronology that are part of the same system as in Jubilees so that's also the reason why I translated it as a secret to how does your study shed new light on the text instruction?
yeah so instruction is a very fragmentary text that was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls it exists in different manuscripts seven or eight manuscripts found in different caves from Quran we miss most of the texts there are some recent attempts at further reconstruction using modern digital tools for reconstructing texts or gaining actually more insight into the original structure of text but still most of the text is missing I think what might work in particular contributed to the study to the text instruction which has been called wisdom text because it uses quite some phraseology and literary forms that we associate with wisdom instruction and so on the person spoken to most of the text in the second person singular so someone is addressed and the person's address has been called an understanding one that may be in it says and you understanding one of them all kinds of instructions follow and in this instruction there's a very strong focus on study and the need to to inquire need to acquire wisdom and knowledge and to study continuously so I think that's I think one of the contributions from my book that I further showed how important that focus on obtaining knowledge is in his text and that there are also in the sense some Greek elements that are expressed in Hebrew here so there's some systematic abstract speculation that are in some sense reminders of of Greek philosophy in this and is thus set apart from other texts in the corpus there I've shown also another section of many connections to other common texts in terms of terminology and concepts so concept so it's not really a separate text that belongs to a separate group or school but there's something very specific in the text and the way it themeethizes knowledge and pursuit of wisdom and the continuous pursuit of wisdom and strong motivation to do that in a sense to change one's life or to entirely adapt one's life to this pursuit of wisdom even when sleeping patterns and staying awake at night in order to study and gather knowledge as we focus on this practice is what I've paid much attention to in my book and also that it expresses the need to think in abstract terms and search for causes and effects of events in the course of history and in the current world so there's I think some of the things that my book contributes to study of this text how does your study offer new insights regarding angels as depicted in the scrolls? yeah so I think one of the themes that is quite prominent in the Dead Sea Scrolls and that scholars have discussed at length is the theme of the angels as praying or giving praise there are kind of supreme ability to give praise and the ideal of humans for their praise to be coordinated with angelic praise or even for their prayers to be absorbed in inject praise in ways participating in the in phrase of the of the angels so I think what another aspect not unrelated but certainly kind of a different angle that I have spoken about in my book is that angels are also depicted as studying or chasing after knowledge or aspiring to reach knowledge as a topic maybe coming up much later in in rabbinic literature angels studying or that in heaven there is study but this was not seen before in the scrolls or in or in second temple literature and we have here in some of the texts the angels who are being presented as a model for humans to emulate the set the angels are constantly chasing after knowledge or after the roots of knowledge this is something that humans should be striving towards as well to forget about being hungry to forget about becoming higher but actually continually without interruption studying and studying and chasing after knowledge so there's a kind of model of angels but also heavenly bodies the luminaries that are intelligent and that are associated with uninterrupted movements or the movement of the heavenly bodies the way we find it in the Greek philosophy and also here so these angels and they're in their uninterrupted quest for chasing knowledge is also associated with the uninterrupted movement of the heavenly bodies in some of these texts so that's really I think a new angle that comes up in these texts that I've presented in my book what does this monograph teach us about studying and the act of study? Yes, so I think for this this focus on continuous study or the sage for the students of wisdom who are as excited to study always and continually is in a way presented as a kind of aesthetic practice this continuous study that they have to perform both day and night studying by night keeping watch at night in order to study continues also presented as a way for the students of wisdom to improve themselves and to go beyond their own limits and to train train themselves so there's a kind of aschases a training of these students of wisdom by continually performing a study in the sense going beyond human limits but also there are in the end limits and that's another aspect I speak about in the fourth chapter that there also needs to be according to some form of revelation or heavenly revelation that's associated also with angels or spirits or with an experience of light to reach these higher forms of knowledge on the one hand there's a continuous pursuit and training to achieve this knowledge on the other hand there's this aspect of heavenly revelation and mystical experience On page 30 you write as follows at this point we should ask ourselves the question whether the categorizations we have developed for organizing the material are not blocking blocking or access to the text informing and obstacle to academic discussion in the case of generic categories scholars generally agree that these are not native concepts and that we should be careful not to use them as pigeonholes in which we deposit texts but the risk that the sectarian non-sectarian division causes us to strike jacket a rich variety of texts is even more serious because we take these to be historical categories that correspond to an external reality that actually existed namely the sectarian community that owned the scrolls but first of all the nature and organization of the groups or networks beyond the manuscripts continue to be the focus of research and discussion and there is nothing like a consensus in view and second the qualification sectarian is as much as a national and a position as the concept of the biblical which only gained meaning in a period several centuries later when there is a clear notion of what was not biblical can you elaborate on this insight? Yeah so one point I'm trying to do is to bring two categorizations that have a lot of impact on the way we think about these texts and the scholars think about these texts from the scrolls to gather namely the categorization of texts as either biblical or non-biblical and the categorization of texts as sectarian or non-sectarian and these categorizations can overlap to some extent namely the biblical texts are generally considered to be not sectarian as well so scholars know for a long time that that's the concept of Bible or biblical is really something that develops only much later and even the concept of canon is not something that exists as such in the second book period you have certain books that are more considered more important more authoritative than other texts and to quite a large very large extent these books correspond to books that are later incorporated also in the Bible but still that's not really the same as saying that a text is biblical because the notion of a biblical also assumes that there are certain books that are not biblical that do not belong to this distinct category and that's really not something that we can say for text from this period because we can say perhaps certain texts are more authoritative they're read more they're copied more but there are new texts are written on the basis of these texts but you really cannot say about other texts that they have that they are not considered as not being worthy to be part of that category there's not something as non-biblical in this spirit in the same way I argued that the sectarian category is also anachristic so we have texts of various groups in this period and some texts speak of type procedures for inclusion and exclusion as well as polemics with other groups so scholars have argued that sociologically there are aspects of sectarianism that can be but the label of sectarian also has insensitive category it says that these texts belong not to the center but to the margin of society are somehow strange or somehow alien to normative tradition to what's at the center the problem is that from this period we really do not have any other texts so we have no non-sectarian texts from the later second century and first century BCE against which we will be able to measure texts that are sectarian so if we cannot say what is non-sectarian then really saying that certain texts are sectarian because they do not fit the picture that scholars have would be normative that really remains kind of a hollow concept and then what happens is that scholars use concepts and notions from later periods later in the day which then brought back into the spirit and understand this to be the mainstream and this text is sectarian to be to be as one different or distinct and that's really I think a pity in scholarship because we have such a rich collection of sources that can tell us so much about Judaism in this in this period the way it reads ancient text the way it composes new text the way it develops the innovative ways of thinking interacts with other cultural traditions with Greek culture for example and we really lose that out of sight if we say that much of these materials belong in a small corner in the desert where it happens to be that these texts were discovered in caves in both ways to the insights presented in this monograph incorporate new trends in scholarship on the scrolls so this what I've just described rethinking what sectarianism means or rethinking these categories this genre category especially relating to apocalyptic and wisdom I think that's a recent trend which scholars like in the nymen in particular that was also Carol Newsom and others have presented with introducing scholarships I think that's work that my book incorporates and tries to contribute to rethinking categories and another important trend in academic scholarship that I refer to is also focused on the concept of time which in work my scholars like Sashistan and Yonatan Vendov also read Catherine Griffiths have written about time in ancient Judaism as somehow a concept that can help us understand the way various aspects of Jewish thinking and practices are linked to one another so that's also I think a recent trend to which my book relates as we bring today's dialogue to a close can you tell us about where your time and attention has gone since completing this book?
Yes so I'm currently working on a new project on the dynamics of time and reading practices in the final of Alexandria so where I look for interaction of Jewish and Greek thinking in the context of Hebrew writings from the second and first centuries that's where discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls a new project is taking a step further and looking at how we see some of these concepts also being developed in a Jewish thinker writing in Greek so I'm studying Jewish concepts of time emerging from the encounter between Jewish and Greek culture in antiquity and particularly I'm looking at various interpretation of creation on the one hand in line with philosophical and astronomical insight that he develops through allegory for allegorical reading of the text but at the same time how he's thinking is integrated in liturgical practices especially sub-gatherings and synagogues in early liturgy and I look at how these are integrated and this gives insight both to the ways in which bio engages in philosophical debates and is also a participant of synagogues practices in early liturgy and how he develops really an innovative way of thinking about time and how he creates these various cultural and performative traditions and that's an step to a larger project on liturgy and prayer across Hebrew Aramaic and Greek traditions As we print today's dialogue to a close I'd like to convey my heartfelt gratitude to you for the time and generosity you devoted to this conversation That was a great pleasure, thank you. As we end today I'm signing off as Ari Barblet, your host on the New Books & Jewish Studies podcast Today I've been in dialogue with Ari and Bacher, he is a assistant professor of Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism at the University of Groningen We've been discussing is newly published book, The Secret of Time, Reconfiguring Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls Published in Leiden Netherlands by Braille 2020. Thank you.