Pesher is a Hebrew word meaning "interpretation" in the sense of "solution". It became known from one group of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The pesharim (plural of pesher) take a book of the Old Testament, such as Habakkuk, Nahum, Psalms, quote it phrase by phrase, and after each quotation insert an interpretation, preceded by "its pesher is". The interpretations claim to be solutions of a mystery that is concealed in the biblical text. These books, they believed, are really giving accounts of the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest, two figures who were contemporaries of the pesharists, hundreds of years after the biblical books were written. Details of what these figures did are given, arbitrarily read into the biblical words. Jump to: navigation, search Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by 6 million people mainly in Israel, parts of the Palestinian territories, the United States and by Jewish communities around the world. ... Jump to: navigation, search Fragments of the scrolls on display at the Archeological Museum, Amman The Dead Sea Scrolls comprise roughly 850 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves in and around the Wadi Qumran (near the ruins of the ancient settlement... Jump to: navigation, search The Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures (also called the Hebrew Bible) constitutes the first major part of the Bible according to Christianity. ... // The Prophet There is not much biographical information on the prophet Habakkuk; in fact less is known about this prophet than any other. ... The book of Nahum is a book in the Bibles Old Testament and Jewish Tanakh. ... Psalms (Tehilim תהילים, in Hebrew) is a book of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, and of the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. ...

The pesharim are a new genre, known for the first time from this group of Dead Sea Scrolls. Their value to scholarship is that they give a theory of scripture, previously partly known, but now fully defined. They believe that scripture is written in two levels, the surface for ordinary readers with limited knowledge, the concealed one for specialists with higher knowledge, that taught in the Essene schools. They also are the main source for the history of the Teacher of Righteousness and his rival the Wicked Priest. Jump to: navigation, search The Essenes (es-eenz) were a religious sect of Judaism that flourished from the 2nd century BC to the 1st century AD in Qumran, a plateau in the Judean Desert along the Dead Sea. ...

Interpretation of Barbara Thiering

The term pesher technique refers to the interpretive technique of Barbara Thiering, which she discusses in her books and scholarly articles. She identifies the four Canonical Gospels, Acts and Revelation as being written using the pesher technique, wherein historical facts are embedded into the text which give crucial details of the early history of Christianity. Barbara Thiering ( 1930 – ) is an Australian scholar with an international reputation. ... For the genre of Christian-themed music, see gospel music. ... The Acts of the Apostles (Greek Praxeis Apostolon) is a book of the Bible, which now stands fifth in the New Testament. ... Jump to: navigation, search Visions of John the Evangelist, as depicted in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. ... Jump to: navigation, search Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the New Testament writings of his early followers. ...

External links

• The comments of the Pesher to Habakkuk – A discussion of pesher commentary in the Dead Sea Scrolls—particularly to the transcription of Habakkuk.
• The Pesher Technique – An excerpt from one of Thiering's books.
• Barbara Thiering's books on Amazon.com
• The New York Review of Books: THE PESHER TECHNIQUE – A discussion between Thiering and a book reviewer.
• Pesher of Christ website of Dr. Barbara Thiering.