This volume, the latest in this pathbreaking series, contains a collection of compositions from Cave 4 at Qumran, written during the Second Temple Period and linked to the Hebrew Bible through text, characters, themes, or genre. Some were completely unknown before their discovery here. The documents greatly enhance our understanding of biblical interpretation at this period.

Scholars of Hebrews have repeatedly echoed the almost proverbial saying that the book appears to its reader as a "Melchizedekian being without genealogy." For such scholars the aphorism identified prominent traits of Hebrews, its enigma, its otherness, its marginality. Although Franz Overbeck might unintentionally have stimulated such correlations, they do not represent what his dictum originally meant. Writing during the high noon of historicism in 1880, Overbeck lamented a lack of historical context, one that he had deduced on the basis of flawed presuppositions of the ideological...