A Farewell to the Hodayot of the Community

Abstract

Since the 1960s, most scholars have distinguished between two types of compositions in the Hodayot, those that represent the persona of the Teacher of Righteousness and those that represent the spiritual experience of the Community in general. This theory, however, was developed before scholars had access to a reliable reconstruction of 1QHa or to the fragmentary manuscripts of the Hodayot from Cave 4. While that evidence largely confirms the distinctiveness of the group of compositions associated with the Teacher, which are clustered in cols. 10–17, the evidence undermines the cogency of a category of “Community” hodayot. The presence of lmśkyl headings in several compositions, claims to leadership by the speaker, the appearance of an expression that implicitly compares the speaker to Moses, and other factors make it more likely that the non-Teacher hodayot should be associated with the Maśkîl rather than with ordinary sectarians.