Introduction

Abstract

In early December 2019 an international symposium was held at Trinity College Dublin on the theme: Jewish Wisdom from the Judean Wilderness to Diaspora.1 The present September 2020 edition of the Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha and the next one in December 2020 contain an ample selection of the papers which were presented and discussed on that occasion. We are deeply grateful to Matthias Henze, the general editor of the Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, for his support and invaluable guidance in the production of these two thematic editions. At the heart of the symposium was the problematic differentiation between the sapiential traditions found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and Hellenistic Jewish traditions. Is it always the case that philosophical issues found in the texts discovered at Qumran radically differ from those found in texts originating within the Greek Jewish traditions? Across early Jewish sapiential literature is concern to frame, one way or another, views on universalism and particularism, which is typically done in relationship to the created order and wisdom instruction. However, if we turn to scholarship from the 1990s and earlier it is common place to find views to the contrary with examples of summaries about the “the Dead Sea Scrolls” as being uninterested in natural law and unconcerned for philosophical questions as found in Hellenistic Jewish writings.2 We may ask whether it is indeed the case that the sapiential traditions found at Qumran are universally focused on the study of Mosaic Torah without regard for more theoretical ethics from creation. The contributions to the discussion found here focus in different ways on the topic of continuity between Jewish compositions found in