Marisa Winter

Spring 2002

Introduction to my revision of Section E in the Gaster Index:

For my final project, I have updated Section E of Gaster’s Index. I changed the titles to the standards as presented in the Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, reformatted the numerals from Roman to Arabic, and standardized the notation for fragment, column, and line numbers. I also checked the existing refences for accuracy, added new references and made refinements to the existing categories, and added new categories. In addition, I changed many of Gaster’s references to references that take into account the new order given to fragments (especially in the Hymns). I hope that these changes will prove helpful to students in the future.

It might be argued that a few of my additions are not necessarily relevant to a section on Eschatological elements, but I think that I am justified in being liberal with regards to this category. For instance, although it states elsewhere in the Index that the phrase "Messiahs of Aaron and Israel" refers simply to "the anointed high priest and the anointed king," I decided to add a section on this to E simply because the phraseology surrounding these references (ie "when there comes" and "until there arises") sounded future-focused and therefore perhaps eschatological. Since so little is known about the authors of the scrolls, I added elements that sounded to my ear even possibly eschatological, in the hopes that by adding them others might have an easier job of discerning what exactly the end times ideas of the authors were.

My additions are in red. I did not mark the notations that I changed, only the ones that were not there at all originally.