Incidental Biblical Exegesis in the Qumran Scrolls and Its Importance for the Study of the Second Temple Period

In a recently published article, Moshe Bernstein introduces the contribution of the Dead Sea Scrolls to our understanding of ancient biblical exegesis.' In a comprehensive study he deals with a variety of genres of interpretation and emphasizes the important roles which the Bible played in Jewish intellectual life and creativity in Second Temple times.2 Bernstein includes in his study genres of explicit interpretation as well as some hints about a large amount of implicit exegesis that can be detected in the scrolls. In this article I am going to introduce a special kind of implicit exegesis that can shed more light on Jewish worldviews in the Second Temple period. In an article published a few years ago, James Kugel showed that in addition to the known interpretation methods, like the pesharim,