Lying open along its whole length in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem is a scroll a little under a metre and a half long, and the eye has to travel sideways across it: thirteen columns, each some fourteen centimetres tall, written in neat Hebrew letters with no ornament, no pictures and almost no abbreviations. It is the earliest biblical commentary surviving from any Jewish library, and it does not begin with an argument. It begins with a loss. The first column has gone almost entirely, surviving only in a few letters near its foot; a hole burns clean through the middle of the second column; the bottom lines of most of the columns have dropped away. What does survive is nevertheless legible, because this is not the shattered remnant of a book but a nearly complete copy of one, and because what it copies \u2014 the prophet Habakkuk \u2014 had been written down for centuries before the pen that commented on it was lifted. Two sheets of skin sewn together with linen thread. Thirteen columns. A running commentary on the first two chapters of a minor prophet. And the rest of Habakkuk, including the closing psalm, left stubbornly, deliberately uncommented.<\/p>\n
Begin with the circumstances, because they have been muddled in popular telling, and the muddling matters. The Habakkuk Commentary, conventionally shelved as 1QpHab \u2014 the leading 1 for Cave 1, the p for pesher<\/em>, the book \u2014 did not come out of Cave 11. It came out of Cave 1, at Qumran on the western shore of the Dead Sea, in 1947, and it was one of the first handful of scrolls recovered from that cave, the group usually counted as the original seven. The Israel Antiquities Authority’s account of the discovery sites states that Cave 1 was found by a young Bedouin shepherd in 1947 and was excavated archaeologically in 1949; the Israel Museum’s own description of the scroll repeats the formula without embarrassment: one of the seven original Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered at Qumran in 1947. The Hebrew University’s Orion Centre, which publishes images of three sections of it, lists Cave 1 in the same way.<\/p>\n Cave 11 has a genuine claim on this subject, but not this scroll. Excavated later than Cave 1, Cave 11 yielded its own commentary \u2014 the Melchizedek midrash, 11Q13, a thematic pesher on Leviticus 25 and Isaiah 61 that is now catalogued in the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. It is easy to see how the two get crossed: both are commentaries, both are famous, and the number eleven travels from one shelfmark to another. But the Great Habakkuk Commentary is a Cave 1 manuscript, and the confusion is worth naming because the popular story of 1947 as well as the popular story of “the seven original scrolls” is itself the version that most needs checking.<\/p>\n What the 1950s did, though, was to put the scroll into print, and here the conventional account also needs a small correction. The first edition was not the 1955 volume of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert<\/em>, though that series became the standard edition for the rest of the Qumran material. The scroll was published first by Millar Burrows in The Dead Sea Scrolls of St. Mark’s Monastery<\/em>, issued in New Haven by the American Schools of Oriental Research in 1950; the digitised copy now in circulation carries the fuller volume title, Volume I: The Isaiah Manuscript and the Habakkuk Commentary<\/em>. Some summaries give 1951 as the publication year of the commentary, a discrepancy that is easy to understand and easy to resolve in favour of the 1950 imprint. Burrows was therefore its first modern editor, working from the material that had reached Jerusalem almost immediately after the discovery. Accounts of the exact chain of custody vary between sources, which is normal for the 1947 finds; what is not in dispute is that the scroll has been in Jerusalem ever since. The Israel Museum records it as Government of Israel, accession number 95.57\/28, measuring 148 centimetres in length and 14 in height, in what its catalogue calls parchment. Other published descriptions give a length nearer 141 centimetres and call the supports leather. The differences are trivial and worth remembering anyway, because they are a fair measure of how much of what gets repeated about this manuscript is repetition rather than observation.<\/p>\n Now the object itself. The Israel Museum and the standard descriptions agree on the shape: thirteen columns of clear, square Herodian script \u2014 the formal book hand of the late Second Temple period \u2014 with one notable irregularity that any reader of a Hebrew scroll will look for first. The divine name, the four-letter name that later tradition would write with points and which later scribes would avoid altogether, is written here in the older Hebrew characters, long before that convention hardened. The same name appears in the same archaic script in the Qumran biblical copies, and the fact that a sectarian commentary reproduces it rather than modernises it tells you something about how conservative the copying could be.<\/p>\n Structurally, the two sheets of skin were sewn together to make what the Israel Museum calls a tev<\/em> and what editors in English often call a quire: a set of leaves joined at one edge, so that the scroll could be rolled from one side to the other and a reader could unroll only as much text as he needed. The sewn join is fragile, and a good part of this scroll’s damage is damage along it. Most columns have lost their lowest lines, where the fibres that carried the ink on the sheet’s inner edge gave way first. Column one is a fragment; the hole through column two has taken out a lemma and its interpretation together. A lacuna<\/em> is simply a gap where material is now missing, and in a scroll this old there are many, but the losses here are systematic rather than catastrophic: editors have been able to restore the missing lines with reasonable confidence because the biblical text they carry is a text they already know almost by heart, and because the interpretation that followed each quotation is grammatically and structurally predictable. That is the peculiar consolation of reading a commentary: the holes are mostly holes in the scaffolding.<\/p>\n The most striking damage is not damage at all. The scroll runs thirteen columns, but the text stops where Habakkuk 2:20 stops, and most of the last column is blank. Chapter three of Habakkuk, the psalm that moves from threat to complaint to an astonished confidence that the living God is in his temple, was not lost to age and was not torn away. It was never written. Whatever the community made of it, the decision not to comment was taken while the scroll was still whole.<\/p>\n The form has a name, and the name is a Hebrew word: pesher<\/em>, from the root behind “interpretation”, a term the Hebrew University ties to the vocabulary of dream interpretation. To take something as a pesher is to treat a scriptural text as an encoded deposit: you do not ask what Habakkuk meant in his own century, you ask what Habakkuk was transmitting to you. The scroll’s method is mechanical to the point of being almost hypnotic, and its mechanics are worth setting out, because everything else in the manuscript depends on them.<\/p>\n The unit of commentary is a lemma<\/em>: a short stretch of the prophet’s actual words, quoted in biblical order. Immediately after it comes the interpretation, and the interpretation is nearly always flagged by a formula. The Israel Museum’s catalogue gives two of them in Hebrew, and they are the whole grammar of the genre in miniature. The first is pishro<\/em> \u2014 “its meaning”, “its interpretation”, literally “the thing of it is”. The second is longer, pesher hadavar al<\/em>, “the meaning of the matter concerns”, “the interpretation of this word falls on”. Modern translators smooth these into a single English formula, usually “its interpretation concerns”, but it is worth noticing that the Hebrew is doing something quietly assertive: it does not say “perhaps this means”, and it never offers an alternative. A second form, peshru<\/em>, is used where the commentary is attributing an interpretation to others rather than giving its own. And when the hand returns to the prophet’s text for the next lemma, it marks the return with another stock phrase, asher omer<\/em>, “where he is saying”.<\/p>\n So the rhythm is: quote, formula, application, quote, formula, application, across thirteen columns, with the biblical text never reordered and never summarised. The Israel Museum describes it exactly this way \u2014 the verses are copied paragraph by paragraph in their original order, and each paragraph carries its own contemporising comment. There is no prefatory argument, no table of contents, no attempt to state a thesis in the modern sense. The argument is the cumulative effect of a hundred small reassignments.<\/p>\n The reassignments are startling. Take the fourth verse of the second chapter, the verse that Paul would later make famous in Romans and that the pesher must have heard discussed constantly in its own community: the righteous one shall live because of his faithfulness. In the standard editions, the comment glides past the obvious future tense and turns the line into a description of a present company \u2014 those who serve the truth in this house, whose days will not be brought to an end by being deceived by the falsehood of the wicked priest. A verse about survival becomes a membership test. That is the whole art in a single move, and the scroll performs the move dozens of times.<\/p>\n The second chapter’s second verse gets the famous treatment. Habakkuk is told to write the vision plainly so that a later reader may run to it; the commentary’s answer, quoted by the Hebrew University’s virtual tour, is that God told Habakkuk to write down what was going to happen to the generation to come, but that when that period was complete he did not make it known to him \u2014 and the interpretation refers instead to the Teacher of Righteousness, to whom God made known all the mysterious revelations of his servants the prophets. The prophet’s frustration becomes the community’s credential. The proof-text about unreadability is converted into a claim about authority, and the man who holds the key is named.<\/p>\n The fifth verse of the first chapter, where Habakkuk is told that the work will be done in the readers’ own days and not believed when reported, is answered by an interpretation that splits its target in two. Those who were unfaithful together with the Liar did not listen to the word received by the Teacher of Righteousness from the mouth of God; and the same verse concerns the unfaithful of the New Covenant, who did not believe in the Covenant of God and had profaned his holy name. One scriptural sentence, two kinds of apostate. The verse about disbelief has become a list of who is outside.<\/p>\n Elsewhere the substitution is cruder and easier to follow. When Habakkuk names the Chaldeans as the instrument of God’s judgement, the commentary replaces them: the invader is the Kittim, and the Kittim are, in the reading that most scholars accept, the Romans. The spelling of the word gives the game away, since the community writes it with the same doubling and elongation marks it uses for nationality, and the IAA notes that the scroll’s enemies are called both Chaldeans and Kittim. The word Kittim comes up seven times across the columns of this scroll alone, and it is used for the horsemen who come up like the wind to devour Israel.<\/p>\n Structure: the commentary divides into sections that follow the shape of the prophet’s book. Habakkuk’s speeches open with cries of woe<\/em>, and the pesher’s divisions key themselves to those laments, one stretch of the book at a time, so that the laments become the section headings of a running exegesis. Editors conventionally label those divisions with letters \u2014 A to F, running from the opening lament through the woes on the plunderer, the builder, the debaucher and the idolater \u2014 and readers of any edition will find the lettering used that way. The exact boundaries differ a little between editions and should not be pressed; what is not in doubt is the governing instinct. The commentary does not take Habakkuk as a set of parallel prophecies to be sorted into columns. It takes him as a single argument, and it walks him.<\/p>\n Two further features deserve notice because they are easy to overlook. First, the commentary quotes its lemma from a text that is very close to the Masoretic Bible \u2014 close enough that the differences are mainly word order, minor grammatical variants, added or dropped conjunctions, and spelling, without changing the sense. Some descriptions put it more bluntly, saying that the scriptural text underpinning the commentary departs from the Masoretic text from time to time. Both are true of different moments in the manuscript: this is a second-century BCE witness to a Hebrew text already in a fixed state, and it is a witness that quotes rather than paraphrases. Second, scholars continue to ask whether a commentator like this ever adjusted a quotation to make his point land more neatly \u2014 whether the pesher’s lemmata can contain deliberate exegetical variants. The Habakkuk Commentary is one of the places where that question is being argued in detail.<\/p>\n Two figures do most of the work, and neither is given a personal name. The scroll’s technique requires it: an allusion that named Jonathan Apphus would be useless as a code, and a code has to remain readable to insiders and opaque to everyone else. The titles are therefore the characters, and they are titles of function. The Teacher of Righteousness is the man to whom God has made known the secrets of the prophets; his name survives in the surviving columns at about the first, the fifth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth and the eleventh. The Wicked Priest is his opposite number, and his name survives in the seventh, ninth, eleventh and twelfth columns, at exactly the point where the commentary stops talking about the community’s internal quarrels and starts talking about a man in authority at Jerusalem.<\/p>\n The relationship is drawn in the most personal terms imaginable. The Teacher’s authority is shown to come from God’s own mouth; his enemies’ fault is precisely that they would not listen to what he had received. The Man of the Lie, the Man of Mockery and the House of Absalom belong to that same internal quarrel, and the commentary treats them as apostates rather than as opponents. It is worth sitting with how completely the genres differ from anything modern: there is no sense of a good-faith rival reader, no acknowledgement that a different construal of Habakkuk could be sincerely held. In this world a false reading is not an error but a moral condition, and the commentary’s function is to certify that.<\/p>\n The second stretch of woes, from the fifteenth verse of the second chapter onward, is where the priest is placed under a searchlight. Woe to him who gives his neighbour drink to make him see his nakedness \u2014 the commentary, in the phrasing of the standard editions, takes the crooked one who led the faithful astray, and gives him to the priest who led the faithful astray with words of vanity. Woe to him who gets evil gain, woe to him who builds a city with blood and founds a town on falsehood \u2014 the city that cannot be rebuilt, or the community that cannot be restored, is held against those who stood aside. Woe to the covetous who builds a city in vain \u2014 the treasure that cannot be kept goes back to whoever gathered it. And then the idols, and the closing line that the LORD is in his temple, which the commentary turns into a judgement on all who worship idols and the wicked from the earth. A prophet’s mockery of a wooden statue becomes, in the hands of the sect, a sentence passed on every nation that bows to stone and metal.<\/p>\n The most quoted single image in the manuscript comes from the twelfth column, where the commentary deals with the second chapter’s eighth verse and the man who plunders the plundering. In the standard editions the Wicked Priest is shown refusing to walk in the mud, and being held up to ridicule for it. The mud is not random: it comes from the plaster of the verse before, where the house is plastered over with clay. To refuse to walk in the mud is to refuse to go along with the cheap, flattered building project of a corrupt city. It is an image of moral squeamishness, and it is precise enough to have been a jab.<\/p>\n Here the discipline has to be firmest, because this is where the scroll has been made to say more than it says. No personal name appears. No date appears. The scroll does not tell you which year a priest ruled, or that he ruled at all, or that his career ended the way Josephus says a particular Hasmonean’s did. What happened in the 1950s and 1960s is that scholars proposed the identification \u2014 Cecil Roth argued for Jonathan Apphus, and F. F. Bruce’s 1959 study of the scroll, published in the Annual of the Leeds University Oriental Society, took Roth’s identification of the Wicked Priest as something to criticise rather than accept. Others have favoured Alexander Jannaeus, with the Wicked Priest usually described as a Hellenised Hasmonean ruler; at least one reconstruction pairs Jonathan Apphus with his end at the hands of Diodotus Tryphon in 142 BCE, and reads the scroll’s description of the priest’s terrible fate as matching. Every one of these is a scholarly reconstruction built on a title and a jab, not a datum in the manuscript. The names are not in the scroll; they are in the readings of it.<\/p>\n The same applies to the Teacher, with an extra layer of difficulty. He has never been securely identified with any historical figure at all. Some scholars have looked to the Maccabean period; others to the Herodian; a few to figures outside the conventional chronology altogether, and at least one influential book identified the Teacher with James, the brother of Jesus \u2014 a proposal that stands well outside the scholarly mainstream and is worth naming only to show how open the question is. Some have even suggested that the Teacher wrote some of the community’s own hymns. What everyone agrees on is the shape: a teacher who taught, a schism that followed him, a high priest who moved against him, and a movement that afterwards told its story in his vocabulary.<\/p>\n On dating, the manuscript is less ambiguous than the history inside it. Palaeographically the scroll is placed in the first century BCE, and the Israel Museum is more specific, dating it to the second half of that century; the wider pesherim group is generally dated to the Hasmonean and Herodian periods. That dating describes the copying, not the events. Whether the events belong to the mid-second century or the first is a live argument, and it matters because the two options produce entirely different histories of the movement. The honest position is that the scroll tells you how a community understood its own past, not when the past was.<\/p>\n Why write such a thing at all? A commentary is usually imagined as an attempt to understand a text better. This one is plainly something else, and understanding it as something else explains why it has a form at all.<\/p>\n Consider what a movement needs when two people read the same verse differently and only one of them is right. Left alone, scripture is a shared resource and a standing invitation to argue. The pesher removes the standing invitation. Because the meaning has been settled in advance \u2014 by a man who received it from God’s own mouth, and who has now written it down \u2014 a rival reading is not a fresh proposal but a symptom. The verse about those who did not believe the word received by the Teacher from the mouth of God is the clearest statement of the principle in the whole library: unbelief here is a diagnosis, and the diagnosis has a name. Anyone who arrives at a different meaning of Habakkuk has not found something new; they have located themselves.<\/p>\n So the commentary is a membership document. It teaches, to anyone who can read, who to follow. That is why the genre is not a summary of doctrine but a chain of small certainties, each attached to a verse the reader already knew by heart: here is the proof, here is the man who has the key, and here is what happens to the priest. It is a technology of belonging, and it is also a way of controlling what counts as evidence. Once prophecy is decoded into contemporary events, the decoded events become the only events, and the interpretation becomes its own proof.<\/p>\n This is where the form is most instructive about the difference between a closed and an open scripture. In an open textual practice, the meaning of a verse is argued for, refined, and revised by successive readers, and the readers are its authors. In the pesher’s world, meaning is stored. It was received once, by one man, and it is now accessible only by parsing the record of his receiving. The scroll is not scripture; it is a keyring.<\/p>\n That brings the comparisons, and the comparisons need handling carefully, because they are routinely overstated in both directions.<\/p>\n The Jewish comparison is the easiest and the safest. The word pesikta<\/em>, as in the later collections of homily, comes from the same root. When a rabbinic compiler quotes a verse and asks what it refers to, or what this one teaches, the technique has an obvious ancestor in the form of the Qumran commentary, and the likeness of technique is not in doubt. The differences are just as clear. The rabbinic collections gather disagreement rather than settling it, attribute competing readings to named teachers, and are compiled for a public that has no need of a code. The pesher is continuous, one-directional and initiatory. It is written for people inside, and it is written to be of no use outside. The midrash-pesher study by Yael Fisch, published in the Revue de Qumran<\/em> in 2020, puts the kinship precisely: the same technique appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in Romans 10:6\u20138, and in tannaitic texts, splitting a passage into building blocks and lacing the interpretation through the citation so that lemma and comment are joined by nothing more than a pronoun \u2014 but used by each of the three for different ends and different publics.<\/p>\n The Christian comparison is the one that gets oversold. The patristic form does resemble this one. Justin Martyr and his successors quote a scripture, ask what it seems to intend, and apply it to their own hour \u2014 that is precisely the shape of a lemma followed by a pesher, and the early Christian use of Old Testament prophecy as a running commentary on current events is, in mechanical terms, the same act. Where the resemblance stops is more instructive than where it begins. The pesher’s application is to a closed circle whose standing it secures; the patristic application is offered in the open, to a mixed audience, and is meant to win them. The pesher codes its reference; the Christian writer codes nothing, because the whole point is that the reference be recognisable to strangers. And no document has ever been produced that carries the genre out of Qumran into a church. The line of descent from this form to Christian testimonia is argued far more often than it is demonstrated, and the responsible way to put it is that these communities shared a set of habits of reading, not that one handed the other a manual.<\/p>\n That said, the resemblance is not nothing. Before the Christian churches settled the question of the Old Testament in practice, they read it as a live prophecy of their own situation \u2014 and they were doing it, in the decades after this scroll was copied, with the same cadence. Anyone who wants to understand how a Jew of the first century could read a verse and find, in it, the fate of his teacher, will find an unexpected ally in a Christian apologist doing the same thing with different materials.<\/p>\n The Habakkuk Commentary is the best-preserved and most discussed of a genre, and the genre is small. The Hebrew University’s survey counts fifteen continuous pesharim \u2014 commentaries that work through a biblical book in order \u2014 including five on Isaiah preserved as 4Q161 to 4Q165, three on Psalms, and seven on the Minor Prophets, among them this Habakkuk commentary, one on Micah, two on Zephaniah, two on Hosea and one on Nahum. Alongside them sits a second group, thematic pesharim, which quote from several books and organise the material around a theme or a text: the Florilegium, 4Q174, which gathers passages across Samuel, Psalms, Exodus, Ezekiel, Isaiah and Amos and reads them messianically; the Melchizedek midrash from Cave 11; and a handful of others, including 4Q252 and 4Q177. Catalogue lists differ in places \u2014 the numbering of the Hosea and Zephaniah witnesses varies between surveys \u2014 but the shape of the library is not in dispute, and it is a small library. One surviving commentary on Habakkuk, a handful on Isaiah, a few on the Psalms, a scatter on the prophets.<\/p>\n One of them is dated by name. The Pesher Nahum mentions Antiochus and Demetrius, which anchors it to the late second century BCE, and pesharim on Nahum and Hosea refer to a ruler by the sobriquet the Lion of Wrath. Where a pesher names its figures, it can be dated; where it codes them, as in Habakkuk, it cannot \u2014 and that trade is the whole price of the secrecy.<\/p>\n Then the genre stops. There is no pesher tradition after Qumran. Whatever happened at the site when it was abandoned, the form itself did not travel, or travelled and died; the later Jewish tradition of scriptural commentary runs in other channels, and the Christian tradition took its own. The usual explanations are that the genre required a particular social setting \u2014 an authoritative teacher, a closed group, a habit of coded allusion \u2014 and that when the setting disappeared, the form had nothing to attach itself to. That is a reasonable account and should be given as one: the disappearance is not fully explained.<\/p>\n The reason to care is not the disappearance but the contrast it exposes. The scroll shows a second-century community reading a closed text, with a fixed meaning held by a single man and a fixed future laid out in advance. The textual tradition this journal follows did something else, over centuries: it multiplied manuscripts, recorded variants, counted words, argued about accents, and produced the Masoretic Bible, a document whose authority rests on being endlessly checkable rather than on being decoded. The pesher is the sharpest available demonstration of what the alternative looks like \u2014 scripture treated as a code with one key \u2014 and it is a reminder that the openness of the Masoretic tradition was a choice, argued for over centuries, not a default condition of reading scripture in antiquity.<\/p>\n Return to the last column, which is nearly empty. Habakkuk 2:20 ends with the prophet declaring that the LORD is in his temple, and the commentary takes that as its own final word before stopping. Chapter three does not get a line. It is the psalm \u2014 the prophet’s move from complaint to wrestling to trust, the section most likely to invite devotional use and least suited to being read as a code about a priest and a teacher. The community had a technique that worked on almost everything and chose not to apply it here.<\/p>\n That silence is a datum, not a gap. It marks the exact boundary of what this group claimed the right to decode. Everything the community needed settled about its enemies, its teacher and its approaching war was in chapters one and two; nothing in chapter three could be made to serve, so it was left alone, and the blankness is visible now as a piece of evidence about a second-century group’s relation to its own scripture.<\/p>\n It also leaves the reader with an odd final impression. For thirteen columns the scroll says, over and over, that the prophets wrote for this generation, and the generation has been identified in detail \u2014 the enemy named to the syllable, the teacher identified by the secret he holds, the end dated. Then the manuscript stops in the middle of a book. The technique that promised to remove every ambiguity about scripture runs out of manuscript. The blank column is the one place where the code admits, silently, that it has limits, and it is the reason the Habakkuk Commentary still reads as a document about people rather than a machine for producing certainty.<\/p>\n Lying open along its whole length in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem is a scroll a little under a metre and a half long, and the eye has to travel sideways across…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":617,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[590,46,588,195,589,100,591],"class_list":["post-612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripture-interpretation","tag-commentary","tag-dead-sea-scrolls","tag-habakkuk","tag-hebrew-manuscripts","tag-pesher","tag-qumran","tag-teacher-of-righteousness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What a pesher is<\/h2>\n
The Teacher and the Priest<\/h2>\n
Commentary as an act of control<\/h2>\n
The corpus and the afterlife<\/h2>\n
The blank column at the end<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
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