The essays collected in this volume originated out of the 11th meeting of the International Organization for Qumran Studies, held in Zürich in August 2022 and centering around a theme of “Liturgy, Ritual and Performance in Second Temple Context.” The theme was chosen in order to highlight the important questions being asked in recent scholarship around embodied religious practice: how the Qumran texts imply or assume certain behaviors and actions on the part of their users, or imply a (real or imagined) world of liturgical or performative action. The wide range of the resulting papers indicates both the richness of a ritual lens and its multivalency: a concern for ritual can lead in a variety of different directions. The essays collected here, while attesting to this variety, form several clusters that exemplify some key aspects of ritual—resulting in the volume’s title, Performance, Space, and Time in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The first four essays all engage performative dimensions of ritual. Jutta Jokiranta focuses on the important concept of ritualization, examining the various functions of ritualized behavior and the complex interplay between the individual and the social in explaining such action. Within ritual studies, the social body is often understood as “luring” the individual to behave in ritualized ways, such that the social body is viewed as structuring individual behavior. By contrast, the individuals may experience ritualized behavior as a “relief” to different threats and anxieties; individuals may create ritualized behavior themselves. Jokiranta argues that these levels, the social and the individual, must be seen as interacting, and proposes that an integrative model may assist the inquiry into ritualized behavior. She uses the ritualization of the covenant as an example, since the Scrolls attest to various ways in which the covenant becomes ritualized. The Community Rule’s covenant ritual is a famous case. While previous studies have highlighted its symbolic dimensions and liturgical elements, Jokiranta explores three perspectives from ritual studies to explain it as action: efficacy, effervescence, and enhancing credibility. She argues that this unique representation of the covenant ritual suggests the possibility of enhancing both members’ credibility and priestly credibility, while a goal of energizing communal effervescence seems less central. More broadly, Jokiranta’s essay issues an important call for scholars of ancient Judaism to engage more deeply with scholarship on ritual from other perspectives across the social and cognitive sciences.
With Jonathan Darby’s essay, the volume turns to more concrete consideration of the modes of performance implied by the texts. Darby examines the meanings of the verbs
Michael Johnson’s contribution introduces the question of how intended ritual function can impact material features of a text, in this case the differing arrangement of poetic units in 1QHa and 4QHa. According to Johnson’s analysis, the differences suggest that the two collections were intended for different sectarian audiences and performative purposes. 1QHa includes more pedagogical material to educate less experienced members about the role of the maskil and how to properly engage in communal praise under his guidance. 4QHa, in contrast, lacks these instructional elements. Instead, it is more focused on liturgical performance, perhaps indicating that it may have been intended for a more advanced and experienced audience. The settings for these collections also likely varied, with 1QHa potentially used in larger public ceremonies and 4QHa in more intimate, elite gatherings. Both collections, Johnson argues, aim to lead their audiences to praise God with the angels, but through different approaches suited to varying levels of sectarian experience.
In a final essay engaging the idea of performance, Noam Mizrahi analyses the content and poetic form of the central seventh song in Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. Mizrahi focuses on a distinctive poetic unit (best attested in 4Q403 1 i 41–45) that follows Song 7’s expanded invocation (the so-called “Cycle of Summons,” 4Q403 1 i 30–40 and parallels) and introduces the main body of the Song that follows. This poetic unit, which Mizrahi labels the “Introductory Poem,” invites not only the angels but also the architectural elements of the heavenly shrine to praise God in the angelic liturgy. A detailed analysis of the literary structure of this unit, including its content, form and rhythm, sheds light on the sophisticated poetics by which the composers render the ineffable wondrousness of the divine realm in human language. It also, Mizrahi argues, points to the likely liturgical performance of the poem: the persistent use of bipartite structures in the unit seems to lend itself to a context of antiphonal proclamation.
Mizrahi’s discussion of the ways in which architectural elements of the heavenly temple are called to worship God alongside the angels leads to a second thematic cluster within the volume: the conceptualization of sacred space. The contributions by Zahn and Noam both engage questions arising from the idea that the divine resides among the people. These two essays each examine one way the classic expression of this idea in the Pentateuch—that God dwells amidst Israel in the wilderness tabernacle and is ritually encountered there—was “translated” to other spatial contexts. For Molly Zahn, this context is the utopian temple complex imagined by the composers of the Temple Scroll, while for Vered Noam the context is the physical space of the historical Jerusalem and its temple, interpreted through the lens of the tabernacle traditions by the composers of 4QMMT.
Zahn’s contribution focuses on the “City of the Sanctuary” in the Temple Scroll. Although most scholars have taken this expression as an implicit reference to Jerusalem, Zahn argues that this is not what the composers of the scroll intended. Instead, she maintains, the Temple Scroll deliberately leaves the geographical setting of its divinely revealed temple complex undetermined, in line with the indeterminate locations of other imagined ritual spaces that would have been known to the authors (especially the priestly Tabernacle and Ezekiel’s visionary temple). By troubling the scholarly assumption that “temple city” would naturally mean “Jerusalem,” the essay calls attention to the diversity of ways in which sacred/ritual space was conceptualized in early Judaism.
Noam’s essay, on the other hand, deals with authors who very explicitly equated the place of God’s residence among the people with Jerusalem. In a contribution drawn from her forthcoming commentary on 4QMMT, Noam calls attention to rich and vigorous debate concerning sacred space and the proper treatment of sancta, which in MMT is predicated on the assertion that “Jerusalem is the camp of holiness” (B 60). Focusing on the prohibition on the entry of dogs into Jerusalem preserved in MMT’s halakhic section (B 58–59), she brings to light a broader and, she argues, older tradition in Judaism of seeking to prohibit certain forbidden animals from being brought into Jerusalem at all. The heightened view of Jerusalem’s sanctity and prohibition of secular slaughter anywhere in the city led the authors of MMT to argue that dogs had no place in the city at all, since (with no secular slaughter) there would be no food available for them to eat. Their presence there could only threaten to debase the “holy meat” of consecrated sacrifices. In contrast, the view attested in later rabbinic sources permits both non-sacral slaughter and the presence of dogs in Jerusalem. Noam demonstrates the relevance of debates concerning sacred space to ongoing questions about halakhic diversity: the presence of the stipulation in MMT shows that the relatively permissive attitude found in the rabbinic materials seems to have existed in earlier periods as well (among MMT’s implied opponents), though in this case, Noam argues, it is MMT that represents an older, stricter, legal tradition, with the more permissive position representing an innovation.
The final two essays in the volume turn to the intersections of ritual with questions of time and history. George Brooke examines concepts of time in the so-called sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls, arguing that scholarship has overstated the importance of eschatological time and has tended to overlook the role that ritual played in bringing together the community’s ideas of past, present, and future. Brooke investigates these polyvalent concepts of past, present, and future through the lens of the use of central scriptural traditions in the scrolls, especially Genesis, Deuteronomy, Psalms, and Isaiah. The past is construed as the source of events and practices (often ritual practices) that form the identity of the community in the present. The present is approached as liturgical time, structured by a cosmically-embedded calendar, wherein obedient worship is construed as the required response to divine favor. The future is anticipated glory but also exegetical time, revealing the realization of scriptural promises. Yet the sense of living on the brink of the prophesied end times also finds its ritual realization in the present, in concern for right living and worship.
The volume concludes with Robert Jones’s essay, which engages questions of time and history specifically as they apply to the identity-formation of one particular group of ritual actors, namely the Aaronide priesthood. Jones offers a corrective to the common scholarly perspective that, in their concern with Levi as the ancestor of the priesthood, the Aramaic Levi Document, the Testament of Qahat, and the Visions of Amram convey an anti-Aaronide or “pan-Levitic” view of Israelite priestly lineage. He notes how, even in the Aramaic Levi Document, Levi’s sons Qahat and Amram (that is, the immediate ancestors of Aaron) are given special attention. This focus on Aaron’s lineage only increases in the Testament of Qahat and Visions of Amram, and would be very difficult to explain if the texts were meant to downplay the Aaronides in favor of a pan-Levitic view of the priesthood. Without denying the possibility of conflicts among priestly groups in the Second Temple period, Jones thus argues that these Aramaic compositions maintain a broadly Aaronic conception of the priesthood, and are consistent with the conventional division of the priesthood into sons of Levi and Aaron in the Persian period and beyond.
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to express our gratitude to the members of the IOQS Executive Committee and a number of other colleagues who assisted with the peer review of submissions to the volume, and to Brill for accepting this volume into the STDJ series. We are also deeply grateful to Alana Zimath and Ally Huffmire for their editorial assistance as we prepared the manuscript for publication.