Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Moshe Shulman <mshulman AT ix.netcom.com>]

At 09:26 AM 12/29/1999 +0100, you wrote:
>> Outside of the Biblical books, and Jubilees there is no valid argument
>> from
>> the DSS that other works were considered 'authoritative.'
>       [Niels Peter Lemche]  
>       Jesus Sirach?

Not from there. It appears there, but is not used in exposition/exegises.
They certainly read it, but whether they used it for theology cannot be
proved from there. I would assume that they did, but the argument is one of
projecting back from the view of the talmud. (The argument is as follows:
In the talmud the work is banned, but clearly at one time earlier it was
acccepted since there are intepretations of that work. This indicates that
the work was first accepted then went out of favor. This means that earlier
generations considered this work more highly then later ones. Being that
this appears the case, the appearance of this work would make the
supposition that the DSS community considered it 'authoritative' more
likely. Of course this has a clear counter, from the situation of the
'testements'. These do appear in the DSS, but do not appear to have ever
been considered 'authoritative'.)

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