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Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, Vol. XVIII: Qumran Cave 4 • XIII, The Damascus Document (4Q266-273)

Joseph M. Baumgarten, on the basis of transcriptions by J. T. Milik, with contributions from Stephen Pfann and Ada Yardeni (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 236 pp., 42 b&w plates, $135.00 (hardcover)

Solomon Schechter called them the Zadokite work—the two partial copies he found in 1897 in the genizah^a of a Cairo synagogue. Today some call them the first Dead Sea Scroll.^b In scholarly circles the Cairo copies became known by the siglum CD, for the Cairo Damascus document, because they referred to the group’s having been in Damascus. Even though the copies from the Cairo Genizah dated to the 10th and 12th centuries, Schechter speculated that they were the compositions of a Jewish movement that existed before the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. He was proved correct when ten fragmentary copies turned up in the caves of Qumran.