Pseudo-Ezekiel
Also known as 4QPseudo-Ezekiel, and referred to in older reference sources as 4QSecond Ezekiel, Pseudo-Ezekiel is a fragmentary, pseudepigraphic Hebrew text found in Cave 4 at Qumran, and therefore belongs to the cache of manuscripts popularly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is also classified as "parabiblical" and considered, in some accounts, as "apocalyptic" as well. Not known even in the scholarly world until the late 1980s, and not published until 2001, Pseudo-Ezekiel has emerged as one of the most controversial texts among Qumran finds in the early years of the twenty-first century.
Sources
At first, all of the Cave 4 fragments from 4Q385-4Q391 were identified as belonging to Pseudo-Ezekiel, but ultimately this was revised, separating out 4Q385a, 4Q387a, 4Q388a and 4Q389 as belonging to a "Pseudo-Moses," 4Q390 as a "Pseudo-Moses Apocalypse" with 4Q385b and 4Q387b identified as sections "C" and "D" of an Apocryphon of Jeremiah also partly preserved in 4Q383. Later, this was revised once again, reassigning most of the proposed Mosaic fragments to the Jeremiah Apocryphon. That leaves six fragments—4Q385, 4Q385b, 4Q385c, 4Q386, 4Q388 and 4Q391—as belonging definitively to Pseudo-Ezekiel. 4Q391 is different from the others in that it is a Papyrus dating from the end of the second century B.C.E., at least a hundred years older than the others, which appear to be copies.
Content
4Q385c is illegible, and the remaining text is described as being "in poor condition," but all told the fragments yield four to six columns of text, with some measure of overlap among the various fragments. Other than the obvious flow of the text from Column 1 to Column 2, it is not known how they rightly fit together, although editor Devorah Dinant, who published the text in 2001, has suggested that the sequence of events in the canonical Book of Ezekiel provides a basis for the order currently observed.
The text as a whole appears to be a discussion between Ezekiel and YHWH, beginning with YHWH promising to Ezekiel that the dry bones will be raised and knitted together again to resurrect the kingdom of Israel. The author has taken the biblical account of Ezekiel 37 as his source, but whereas the resurrection of Israel in Ezekiel 37 is a metaphor for national restoration, Pseudo-Ezekiel describes the resurrection of the righteous dead of Israel. Pseudo-Ezekiel therefore takes its place alongside 4Q521 as one of the only two texts found at Qumran which clearly refer to resurrection. This is followed by a prophecy that a "son of Belial" will come to oppress the Israelites, but he will be defeated and "his dominion will not exist." In remaining fragments, Ezekiel asks YHWH if time itself could be made to accelerate so that Israel may reclaim the promised land sooner rather than later. There is an stray segment which redresses the theme of resurrection, followed by a final evocation of the Merkabah, the chariot of YHWH mentioned in Ezekiel 1.
Origin
Although a very small minority of scholars do not concur with this view, the general consensus on Pseudo-Ezekiel is that it is a non-sectarian work that did not originate with the community at Qumran. The early date of 4Q391 indicates that the text existed before the establishment of the Qumran library held in Cave 4. Barry Smith has suggested that if Pseudo-Ezekiel can be dated back fifty years prior that the "son of Belial" indicated in the text may be identified as Antiochus IV Epiphanes (215 B.C.E. - 164 B.C.E.). However, Dimant has suggested the late second century date of 4Q391 indicates a terminus ante quem for the composition of the work itself, in addition to that of its source.
Proposed concordances with other texts
At the outset, it should be stated that there is no known Biblical or other concordance for Ezekiel requesting that time should speed up so that Israel may reclaim the promised land sooner; likewise, there is no other text at Qumran that expresses an interest in resurrection, and it is likely that the Qumran community didn't believe in it. Outside of these strictures, there are many proposed connections to other texts, which is what has led to the great interest in Pseudo-Ezekiel, most significantly The Apocryphon of Ezekiel, a Christian work in Greek known only from short citations in the Patristic literature and a surviving, poorly transcribed section preserved in Chester Beatty Papyrus 185. Some scholars have suggested that the Pseudo-Ezekiel material might fit in somewhere among the brief, scattered, surviving bits of The Apocryphon of Ezekiel, but there is nothing in either text that suggests a common sequence, and the clearly Christian orientation of the material from the latter discourages such a connection. While a date range of 50 B.C.E. to 50 C.E. has been generally accepted for the Apocryphon, some sources state that the book was probably written around 70 C.E., at the end of the Second Temple period.
However, in his Antiquities of the Jews (94–95 C.E.), Flavius Josephus noted that there were indeed two books of Ezekiel, without providing any additional clues about the second book. Clement of Rome, in his First Epistle written ca. 95 C.E., quotes from the Apocryphon of Ezekiel and, coincidentally, carries over some literal turns of phrase from Pseudo-Ezekiel, suggesting that at one time there was a version of the Apocryphon of Ezekiel that was at least partly derived from the Hebrew Pseudo-Ezekiel, or perhaps the early Christian church had access to a copy of the Hebrew text itself. Other early Christian texts that may bear witness to specific phrases in Pseudo-Ezekiel include the Epistle of Barnabas (80 C.E. – 130 C.E.) and the Second Century The Apocalypse of Peter. Given the tortured and divisive scholarly history surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls since their discovery, any link between the library of the Qumran community and early Christianity is an extremely sensitive matter, but in this case it is generally accepted by both Hebrew and Christian scholars.
Charles Torrey's Pseudo-Ezekiel
In his 1930 book, Pseudo-Ezekiel and the Original Prophecy, Charles Cutler Torrey coined the term "Pseudo-Ezekiel" to describe a proposed predecessor to the canonical Book of Ezekiel. In Torrey's claim, he stated that the Book of Ezekiel derived much of its prophecy from a pseudipigraphic work dating from about 230 B.C.E. which was then edited around 200 into the canonical book that we know. Torrey also proposed that elements regarding the Exilic Period in which the historical Ezekiel lived (ca. 623 B.C.E. - ca. 571 B.C.E.) were added in the second round of editing to make the text appear as though it belonged to the Sixth century, rather than the Third. This view was violently disputed by most Rabbinic scholars and has not taken hold; however, if such a book as Torrey describes did exist, 4QPseudo-Ezekiel is certainly not that, as the line of derivation runs from The Book of Ezekiel to it, not the other way around.
References
- Devorah Dinant—XXI: Parabiblical Texts 4, Pseudo-Prophetic Texts DJD 30. Oxford, Clarendon 2001