PESHER (Heb. פֵּשֶׁר), word meaning "interpretation." It occurs only once in the Hebrew Bible: "Who is as the wise man? and who knoweth the interpretation of a thing?" (Eccl. 8:1). However, the Aramaic word peshar occurs 31 times in the Aramaic portion of Daniel, where it mainly refers to dream interpretation.
In Qumran texts, it usually occurs after a biblical quotation, introducing its interpretation. As such it refers to a particular technique of interpretation which may be paralleled to midrashic exegesis.
What is distinctive of Qumran is both the systematic application of such a technique to a given prophetic work and its specific purpose. On the one hand, it had the result of creating a fixed literary structure, mostly known from the "continuous" pesharim. Those works quote one "prophetic" book verse by verse, each verse being followed by its interpretation, aiming at giving the plain meaning of the Prophet's words as a whole. On the other hand, their aim is to read historical and eschatological events into the biblical prophecies, understanding them as describing their own sect's situation on the verge of the eschaton.
Such an attitude to the biblical text (i.e., God's words) is already exemplified by the book of Daniel, where the term peshar is linked to the noun of Iranian origin raz, which appears nine times in the Aramaic portion of Daniel. Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the great image of four metals is araz which cannot be understood until the pesher is supplied. Both the raz and the peshar are given by divine revelation; the raz is the first stage of the revelation, but it remains a mystery until the second stage, the peshar, is forthcoming.