Pesher

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Pesher is a Hebrew word meaning "interpretation" in the sense of "solution". It became known from one group of texts, numbering some hundreds, among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The pesharim (plural of pesher) take a book of the Hebrew Bible, often from the prophets, such as Habakkuk, Nahum, or from the Psalms, quote it phrase by phrase, and after each quotation insert an interpretation, preceded by "its pesher is". The procedure is closely analogous to the Medieval technique of the Glossators, who provided, following each passage, a reading or gloss that was "fraught with significance to the ideology or history of the... Community", Robert Eisenman noted (1997 p 81), though the community he was referring to was the Essene community that produced the Scrolls as well as these commentaries—pesharim—in a rich apocalyptic literature of the last century BCE and the first century CE.

"Often this takes the form of citing a biblical passage or quotation out of context or even sometimes slightly altered, followed by the words, "peshero" or "pesher-ha-davar", meaning "its interpretation" or "the interpretation of the passage is". ...The process is a familiar one to those conversant with the New Testament, particularly the Gospel of Matthew." (Eisenman p 81)

At Qumran, the same imagery and personifications are consistent from document to document, some also familiar to modern readers from the New Testament: the "Righteous One", the Poor, the community as temple, the holy spirit, the star prophecy, the End times and other messianic images. These allusive images are tied in an apocalyptic manner to selected prized biblical texts.

The interpretations of the pesharim claim to be solutions of a mystery that is concealed in the biblical text. These books, they believed, are really giving prophetic accounts of the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest, two figures who were contemporaries of the pesharists, hundreds of years after the biblical books were written. Details of what these figures did or meant are given consistent (though arbitrary) readings applied to the biblical words.

The pesharim are a new genre, known for the first time from this group of Dead Sea Scrolls. They give a theory of scriptural interpretation, previously partly known, but now fully defined. The writers of pesharim believe that scripture is written in two levels, the surface for ordinary readers with limited knowledge, the concealed one for specialists with higher knowledge, those that taught in the Essene schools. They also are the main source for the history of the Teacher of Righteousness and his rival the Wicked Priest.

1 Barbara Thiering's use of pesher techniques
2 External links
3 References
4 Further reading

[edit] Barbara Thiering's use of pesher techniques

The term pesher technique refers to the interpretive technique presented by Barbara Thiering, which she discusses in her books and scholarly articles. According to her view, in the four Canonical Gospels, Acts and Revelation historical facts have been encoded into the text in the form of parables and accounts of "miracles" and can be recovered by applying the pesher technique.

To support her claim of cryptic references, Thiering cites a passage from Mark's Gospel (4: 10): "And when he was alone, those who were about him with the twelve asked him concerning the parables. And he said to them 'To you has been given the secret (Greek mysterion) of the Kingdom of God', but for those outside everything is in parables; so they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again and be forgiven."

Hellenistic literature, especially Jewish Hellenistic literature, has many examples of such a theory of scripture. Her method uses the "rule of consistency", whereby each term in the common text always refers to the same "hidden message" throughout all these books. Thiering uses this technique to find an alternative account of the history of early Christianity and also to connect it with the Qumran community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Although Thiering has stated, "It is the method, not the results, that must be discussed", [1], her method and her findings have found little support from mainstream scholars and were criticized by Geza Vermes, in a review of Thiering's Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls in New York Review of Books [2].

[edit] External links

The Pesher to Habakkuk – A discussion of pesher commentary in the Dead Sea Scrolls—particularly to the transcription of Habakkuk.
The Pesher Technique – An excerpt from one of Thiering's books.
Barbara Thiering's books on Amazon.com
Brief encapsulation of the pesher technique from Barbara Thiering Jesus of the Apocalypse: the Life of Jesus after the Crucifixion (1995) pp. ix - xi
The New York Review of Books vol. 40.6: THE PESHER TECHNIQUE – A discussion between Thiering and reviewer Geza Vermes.
Pesher of Christ website of Dr. Barbara Thiering.

[edit] References

Eisenman, Robert, 1997. James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls, pp80–86 et passim