The Dead Sea Scrolls (post #5 and last)

[lethargic_man]

Passages reminiscent of the Yom Kippur liturgy

1QS (Community Rule) Col II (p. 71):

All those who enter in the Rule of the Community shall establish a covenant before God [...]. When they enter the covenant [...] the Levites shall recite the iniquities of the Israelites [...] [and al]l those who enter the covenant shall confess after them and say: "We have acted sinfully, we have [trans]gressed, we have [si]nned, we have committed evil, we and our [fa]thers before us [...]."
נעוינו [פ]שענו [חט]אנו אנו ו[א]בותינו מלפנינו (I'm not quoting the Hebrew/Aramaic here much, because it's more of an effort for me to transcribe.)

Suggestive of the modern Vidui (confession).

Col XI (p. 99):

What, indeed, is the son of man among all Your marvellous deeds? Shaped from dust has been been, maggots' food shall be his dwelling; he is spat saliva, moulded clay, and for dust is his longing.

Reminiscent of כי הנה כחומר, though that is in at least some cases referencing Biblical metaphors, e.g. the moulded clay reference comes from Jeremiah 18:6. What this of course has in common with כי הנה כחומר is that it puts them all together.

1QHa IX (p. 159):

What can I saw which is not known? Or declare which has not been told? Everything has been engraved before You with the stylus of remembrance for all the incessant periods and the cycles of the number of everlasting years in all their predetermined times, and they will not be hidden, and will not be lacking from before You.

1QHa XV (p. 179):

For You know the inclination of every creature, and scrutinise every reply of the tongue.

4Q185 Sapiential work (p. 379)

[Man] sprouts like grass from the earth and his loveliness blooms like a flower. (But then) the wind blows [over him], his root shrivels, the wind scatters his leaves, until hardly anything remains in [its] pla[ce], and nothing but wind is found. They will look for him and not find him, and no hope remains; as for him, his days are like a shadow on the ea[rth].

4Q504 Words of the Luminaries (דברי המאורות), Col. VI (p. 1017):

all who are in written in the Book of Life

כול הכתוב בספר החיים

I've just seen, checking, that there are a handful of references to the Book of Life in the NT, so the concept, though still post-Biblical (from the Jewish perspective) clearly pre-dates the modern High Holydays liturgy by a long way. The Words of the Luminaries is listed here as Herodian, so antedates the NT.

Laws of Shabbos

CD-A Damascus Document, Col. XI (= 4Q270 6 v; 4Q271 5 1), where the angle brackets contain text suggested by the editors:

No one should remove anything from the house to outside, or from outside to the house. [...] He is not to open a sealed vessel on the sabbath. No one should wear perfumes, to go out <or come in> on the sabbath.

The Torah says one should not do any work on the Sabbath, but does not specify, with few exceptions, what exactly constitutes work. The first rabbis inherited a tradition of prohibited activities and, trying to understand the reasoning behind it, used hermeneutical reasoning to conclude that, because the Torah mentions not doing work on Shabbos immediately after describing the construction of the Tabernacle in the wilderness, the work that is forbidden on Shabbos is that which went into the construction of the Tabernacle.

However, pre-rabbinical texts give different lists of what is forbidden on the Shabbos. For example, the consensus has emerged in modern Judaism that sex on Friday night (within, of course, a marital context) is meritorious; however the Book of Jubilees forbids it.

I find this text interesting because it shows the prohibition on opening a sealed container goes back to earlier than rabbinical Judaism; possibly it goes back centuries further still.

Relics of polytheistic theology?

Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (p. 805): Mas1k, Col 1; 4Q402 4

And when he acts, none of the [god]s can understand what he plans. For they are part of His glorious deeds, before they existed, [they are part of] His [pla]n.

ובעשותו לא ישכילו כול [אלוהי]ם מה יזום כיא ממעשי כבודו הם לפני היותם [ממחשב]תו

I don't know why the editors are certain that the reconstructed word is אלוהים; from here it is clear that there is absolutely no way to identify this word as such. The rest of the text refers to the God of gods and the Powerful One who is above all gods, but not in a way that definitively acknowledges their existence. However: 4Q400 (p. 807), also 4Q401 15:

Praise [the God of ...], you, gods of all the most holy ones

הללו [לאלוהי ...]ה אלוהי כול קדושי קדושים

...though there אלוהי could also mean God, but there's a clearer example in 4Q402 (= MasShirShabb 1) (p. 815):

the gods run to His muster אלוהים ירוצו לפקוד[תו]

Terminology

4Q529 Words of Michael (pp. 1061-3)

This page says this is Hasmonean period. It makes multiple references to God as רבי מרא עלמא, which looks like it ought to mean "my teacher, the Master of the Universe" (though the translation gives it as "my Great One, the Lord Eternal"). What's interesting is that the word used for "my teacher" is rabbi (first vowel uncertain). (Recall that rabbi is in Hebrew an honorific meaning "my rabbi"; the Hebrew for "rabbi" is actually rāv.) The term rabbi wasn't used until the mid first century CE; is this an attestation that the term was in use, and for a quite different referent, at an earlier stage (deadseascrolls.org.il gives the date of this text as Hasmonean)?