The Scope and Purpose of Encrypted Writing at Qumran

Among the Hebrew scrolls from Qumran, some 1% are written in a peculiar script, dubbed “cryptic.” This chapter surveys the scope of this phenomenon and the materials contained in the encrypted scrolls, summarizing a long project of re-editing these scrolls. The aim is to assess the function of this kind of writing within the large written corpus of Qumran and within the Yaḥad-writing community. In contrast to earlier publications that posited a large number of small scrolls, the chapter shows that only 8–9 scrolls were written in the cryptic script, some of them by the same hand. The phenomenon is thus quite limited in scope. Typology and dating of the Cryptic A script are not possible given the limited corpus and the irregular scribal practice. Nothing in the actual content of the scrolls is secret: some of the texts are known in non-cryptic, regular script, while other, unknown, texts are generically similar to non-secretive scrolls from Qumran. After comparing the find with other cases of secrecy and concealment in religious communities, it is suggested that encryption at Qumran was a means of conveying prestige to the initiated and build a hierarchy of knowledge rather than intending to conceal it. This idea is anchored in other statements about the hierarchy of knowledge in Qumran.