The Self as Symbolic Space

This volume investigates critical practices by which the Qumran community constituted itself as a sectarian society. Key to the formation of the community was the reconstruction of the identity of individual members. In this way the “self” became an important symbolic space for the development of the ideology of the sect. Persons who came to experience themselves in light of the narratives and symbolic structures embedded in the community practices would have developed the dispositions of affinity and estrangement necessary for the constitution of a sectarian society. Drawing on various theories of discourse and practice in rhetoric, philosophy, and anthropology, the book examines the construction of the self in two central documents: the Serek ha-Yahad and the Hodayot.

Carol A. Newsom, Ph.D. (1982) in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, is Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Emory University. She is author of the critical edition of 4QShirot ‘Olat HaShabbat in DJD XI (Oxford, 1998) and of The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (Oxford, 2003).

"…a goldmine of insights…" – C. Hempel, in: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament (2005)