The Habakkuk Pesher and the Kittim

The best preserved pesher, a running commentary on the book of Habakkuk found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, shows the method at work verse by verse. Habakkuk's original warning about the Chaldeans advancing to punish Judah becomes, in the commentator's hands, a warning about the Kittim, a code name most scholars read as the Romans, whose swift and terrifying army the sectarian author saw as the latest instrument of a judgment unfolding in his own generation. Other verses are turned toward the community's own internal history rather than a foreign threat: Habakkuk's complaint about the wicked surrounding the righteous is read as a description of a struggle between a figure the text calls the Wicked Priest, usually identified by scholars with a sitting high priest in Jerusalem whom the sect regarded as illegitimate, and the community's own founding figure, called the Teacher of Righteousness, whose authoritative interpretation of scripture the community believed had been divinely inspired to unlock what the prophets themselves could not fully understand. The commentary states this assumption almost as a rule of method: God told Habakkuk to write what would happen to the last generation, but did not make known to him the fulfillment of the prophecy, and it fell to the Teacher of Righteousness alone to whom God made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets. That claim, that the true meaning of ancient prophecy was sealed until the community's own teacher could open it, is what separates pesher most sharply from midrash's more open, ongoing conversation with the text, and it depends entirely on the community's conviction that it was living inside the very last days the prophets had described.