Final Report Summary - RELEXDSS (The Teacher of Righteousness and Religious Experience in the Dead Sea Scrolls)
“The Teacher of Righteousness and Religious Experience in the Dead Sea Scrolls”
MC-IIF Grant Agreement Number 627536 (RelExDSS); Angela Kim Harkins (MC IIF Fellow)
The rich textual remains that comprise the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) have given scholars unprecedented access to the literary heritage of an ancient Jewish movement. Access to this sizeable textual corpus has radically transformed our understanding of Jewish and Christian antiquity, especially the transmission of the sacred scriptures and the socio-religious formation of the groups that would later become Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. While traditional scholarship has approached the Scrolls as more or less faithful and reliable historical records of the events they describe, researchers today are increasingly aware of the complexities of these literary artefacts and read the claims made in these texts with the same degree of critical scrutiny applied to other ancient literature.
Shortly after the 1947 discovery of the Scrolls, the first texts to be published were from Cave 1. A number of enigmatic references to a figure known as the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ (TofR), immediately sparked scholars’ interests. The recent completion of the full corpus of texts has shown that the great majority of the evidence for the TofR comes from a surprisingly small fraction of Scrolls texts, in which this figure appears at defining moments in the community’s history. This fact alone raises serious doubts about our ability to recover the historical person behind this moniker (Stuckenbruck 2010). Most of the evidence for the TofR comes from the Habakkuk Commentary (1QpHab) and the Damascus Document (CD). Mediaeval copies of CD had been discovered previously in the storeroom of a synagogue in Old Cairo (the Cairo Geniza) at the end of the nineteenth century. Remarkably, as many as eight ancient manuscripts of this document were subsequently identified in Qumran Cave 4 (4Q266-273) with a small amount of material found in other caves (5Q12; 6Q15). The earliest generation of scrolls scholars have long associated the Teacher with the Thanksgiving Hymns, but no explicit mention of him has been found among the eight scrolls from Caves 1 and 4.
For the greater part of the twentieth century, scholarly understandings of the Teacher were based on the partial evidence of the texts that had been hastily published shortly after the original discoveries. On this basis scholars arrived at a portrait of the Teacher as a religious and political figure who established the community of the DSS in the face of fierce opposition, with many scholars identifying this individual by name. Such historical interest in the Teacher’s identity has far outstripped scholarly consideration of how this figure functioned within a religious experiential system. Because the period of the Dead Sea Scrolls relates to the study of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Scriptures, and Hellenistic Judaism, scholarly study of these texts has typically applied the discipline-specific methodologies used in Biblical Studies and Classics. The research undertaken during the period of the MC IIF has been to investigate how emerging integrative approaches from the natural and social sciences can shed new light on our understanding of the religion of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Today, scholarship on the TofR stands at a critical impasse and is ripe for re-examination. The inquiry into the experiences of the Qumran community receives considerable warrant from the relatively recent publication of the significant number of fragments from Cave 4 which were only published fully in 2009. Texts from this Cave amply demonstrate the importance of religious experiences for these ancient Jewish communities. The communities of the Scrolls greatly prized mediated knowledge and revelatory experiences. Otherworldly phenomena (celestial and angelic) are often mentioned in these texts. In view of the above limitations of previous assessments of the TofR, the overarching aim of this project has been to situate this figure conceptually within a larger and more comprehensive account of how religion was experienced during the late Second Temple period.
The ultimate aim of the research has been to examine how texts and practices function to generate religious ideas and commitment to cooperative living among the community members at Qumran. Several studies of select Second Temple emotional communities were undertaken to demonstrate the methodological approaches that will be applied to the Teacher of Righteousness at Qumran and to construct the social and religious context for the communities of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These preliminary studies focused on biblical and non-biblical examples of texts, the instrumental role of emotions, and the generation of religious ideas, and two of them were published in refereed scientific journals.
The first of these studies concerned the figure of Ezra, a scribe and religious leader with a prestigious lineage who arrives as an outsider to Judea from the east. Chapters 8, 9, and 10 of the biblical Book of Ezra describe how emotion and rituals of mourning play a role in the authentication of Ezra as a religious leader in Judea, a role that includes an innovative legislation concerning intermarriage. Ezra’s display of performative grief and the community’s response to his prayer and ritual behaviors, illustrate how grief and similar emotions of self-diminishment can be said to participate in the generation of religious ideas, a new law concerning intermarriage. In turn, Ezra’s display of emotion could be said to be mirrored naturally in the emotional states of the Judeans (Ezra weeps, Shechaniah and the Hareidim also weep); thereby heightening the community’s receptivity to the law and recommitment to the covenant. Even if the events in Ezra are fictionalized literary constructs, later Second Temple communities could be moved to mirror such behaviors of renewed commitment to cooperative living through the process of enactive reading (Kuzmicová 2012). The methodology used for this study of Ezra uses interdisciplinary studies of performative emotions drawn from ancient classical culture, ritual and performance studies, and evolutionary anthropology. The second study examined the events in Daniel 9 and 10. Here the second century figure of Daniel uses stereotypical rituals of mourning while meditating upon Jeremiah’s prestigious sixth-century prophecy. A new understanding of the duration of the exile is revealed as a result. This study details how grief is capable of arousing the natural cognitive processes of rumination which are evolutionarily designed to make presence from absence. It is while the seer is in this ruminative state that he receives a vision of the Angel Gabriel. Even if the otherworldly encounter reported in Daniel 9 is an instance of textual verisimilitude, its impact had far reaching consequences for later Jewish and Christian communities who were moved to act and revolt politically in this world. Both Ezra and Daniel illustrate how performative emotions can induce cognitive states that can help to account for the generation of new religious ideas and the deepening of religious commitments. Additional studies were conducted on Nehemiah 9 and Psalm of Solomon 8.
Inquiry into how performative emotions, especially grief and desolation, play an instrumental role for the communities at Qumran has produced two studies that have already been published during the period of the grant. The first one concerns a small group of Thanksgiving Hymns, which hymns have long been associated with the TofR, and the second is the Damascus texts. Both of these inquiries into the Scrolls highlight the diverse ways that emotions can assist in the generation of commitment to cooperative living by allowing for re-experiencing of foundational events of divine encounter and covenant renewal. The specific Thanksgiving Hymns chosen for this study reuse language and images from the foundational event of covenant breaking and re-making in Exodus and Deuteronomy. This study was published in 2015. The study of the Damascus texts also focused on the role that foundational experiences of covenant breaking and re-making play in covenant renewal experiences. Both of the completed studies of the Scrolls describe how negative emotions play an instrumental role in heightening commitment to cooperative living. In the case of the Damascus study, the experience of self-diminishment can also re-create the conditions of divine encounter that is the occasion for the reception of laws. This study was also published.
While the researcher was not able to complete the full 24 mos term, the 17 mos of research and writing have allowed for substantial progress into the question of how the Second Temple communities of the Dead Sea Scrolls experienced religion and actualized their texts. One of the major conclusions of this body of research has been that the instrumentalization of emotions assisted in the generation of religious ideas and played a key role in heightening commitment to cooperative living under the covenant. A study of the emotions in the Habakkuk Commentary is planned for the near future.
MC-IIF Grant Agreement Number 627536 (RelExDSS); Angela Kim Harkins (MC IIF Fellow)
The rich textual remains that comprise the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) have given scholars unprecedented access to the literary heritage of an ancient Jewish movement. Access to this sizeable textual corpus has radically transformed our understanding of Jewish and Christian antiquity, especially the transmission of the sacred scriptures and the socio-religious formation of the groups that would later become Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. While traditional scholarship has approached the Scrolls as more or less faithful and reliable historical records of the events they describe, researchers today are increasingly aware of the complexities of these literary artefacts and read the claims made in these texts with the same degree of critical scrutiny applied to other ancient literature.
Shortly after the 1947 discovery of the Scrolls, the first texts to be published were from Cave 1. A number of enigmatic references to a figure known as the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ (TofR), immediately sparked scholars’ interests. The recent completion of the full corpus of texts has shown that the great majority of the evidence for the TofR comes from a surprisingly small fraction of Scrolls texts, in which this figure appears at defining moments in the community’s history. This fact alone raises serious doubts about our ability to recover the historical person behind this moniker (Stuckenbruck 2010). Most of the evidence for the TofR comes from the Habakkuk Commentary (1QpHab) and the Damascus Document (CD). Mediaeval copies of CD had been discovered previously in the storeroom of a synagogue in Old Cairo (the Cairo Geniza) at the end of the nineteenth century. Remarkably, as many as eight ancient manuscripts of this document were subsequently identified in Qumran Cave 4 (4Q266-273) with a small amount of material found in other caves (5Q12; 6Q15). The earliest generation of scrolls scholars have long associated the Teacher with the Thanksgiving Hymns, but no explicit mention of him has been found among the eight scrolls from Caves 1 and 4.
For the greater part of the twentieth century, scholarly understandings of the Teacher were based on the partial evidence of the texts that had been hastily published shortly after the original discoveries. On this basis scholars arrived at a portrait of the Teacher as a religious and political figure who established the community of the DSS in the face of fierce opposition, with many scholars identifying this individual by name. Such historical interest in the Teacher’s identity has far outstripped scholarly consideration of how this figure functioned within a religious experiential system. Because the period of the Dead Sea Scrolls relates to the study of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Scriptures, and Hellenistic Judaism, scholarly study of these texts has typically applied the discipline-specific methodologies used in Biblical Studies and Classics. The research undertaken during the period of the MC IIF has been to investigate how emerging integrative approaches from the natural and social sciences can shed new light on our understanding of the religion of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Today, scholarship on the TofR stands at a critical impasse and is ripe for re-examination. The inquiry into the experiences of the Qumran community receives considerable warrant from the relatively recent publication of the significant number of fragments from Cave 4 which were only published fully in 2009. Texts from this Cave amply demonstrate the importance of religious experiences for these ancient Jewish communities. The communities of the Scrolls greatly prized mediated knowledge and revelatory experiences. Otherworldly phenomena (celestial and angelic) are often mentioned in these texts. In view of the above limitations of previous assessments of the TofR, the overarching aim of this project has been to situate this figure conceptually within a larger and more comprehensive account of how religion was experienced during the late Second Temple period.
The ultimate aim of the research has been to examine how texts and practices function to generate religious ideas and commitment to cooperative living among the community members at Qumran. Several studies of select Second Temple emotional communities were undertaken to demonstrate the methodological approaches that will be applied to the Teacher of Righteousness at Qumran and to construct the social and religious context for the communities of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These preliminary studies focused on biblical and non-biblical examples of texts, the instrumental role of emotions, and the generation of religious ideas, and two of them were published in refereed scientific journals.
The first of these studies concerned the figure of Ezra, a scribe and religious leader with a prestigious lineage who arrives as an outsider to Judea from the east. Chapters 8, 9, and 10 of the biblical Book of Ezra describe how emotion and rituals of mourning play a role in the authentication of Ezra as a religious leader in Judea, a role that includes an innovative legislation concerning intermarriage. Ezra’s display of performative grief and the community’s response to his prayer and ritual behaviors, illustrate how grief and similar emotions of self-diminishment can be said to participate in the generation of religious ideas, a new law concerning intermarriage. In turn, Ezra’s display of emotion could be said to be mirrored naturally in the emotional states of the Judeans (Ezra weeps, Shechaniah and the Hareidim also weep); thereby heightening the community’s receptivity to the law and recommitment to the covenant. Even if the events in Ezra are fictionalized literary constructs, later Second Temple communities could be moved to mirror such behaviors of renewed commitment to cooperative living through the process of enactive reading (Kuzmicová 2012). The methodology used for this study of Ezra uses interdisciplinary studies of performative emotions drawn from ancient classical culture, ritual and performance studies, and evolutionary anthropology. The second study examined the events in Daniel 9 and 10. Here the second century figure of Daniel uses stereotypical rituals of mourning while meditating upon Jeremiah’s prestigious sixth-century prophecy. A new understanding of the duration of the exile is revealed as a result. This study details how grief is capable of arousing the natural cognitive processes of rumination which are evolutionarily designed to make presence from absence. It is while the seer is in this ruminative state that he receives a vision of the Angel Gabriel. Even if the otherworldly encounter reported in Daniel 9 is an instance of textual verisimilitude, its impact had far reaching consequences for later Jewish and Christian communities who were moved to act and revolt politically in this world. Both Ezra and Daniel illustrate how performative emotions can induce cognitive states that can help to account for the generation of new religious ideas and the deepening of religious commitments. Additional studies were conducted on Nehemiah 9 and Psalm of Solomon 8.
Inquiry into how performative emotions, especially grief and desolation, play an instrumental role for the communities at Qumran has produced two studies that have already been published during the period of the grant. The first one concerns a small group of Thanksgiving Hymns, which hymns have long been associated with the TofR, and the second is the Damascus texts. Both of these inquiries into the Scrolls highlight the diverse ways that emotions can assist in the generation of commitment to cooperative living by allowing for re-experiencing of foundational events of divine encounter and covenant renewal. The specific Thanksgiving Hymns chosen for this study reuse language and images from the foundational event of covenant breaking and re-making in Exodus and Deuteronomy. This study was published in 2015. The study of the Damascus texts also focused on the role that foundational experiences of covenant breaking and re-making play in covenant renewal experiences. Both of the completed studies of the Scrolls describe how negative emotions play an instrumental role in heightening commitment to cooperative living. In the case of the Damascus study, the experience of self-diminishment can also re-create the conditions of divine encounter that is the occasion for the reception of laws. This study was also published.
While the researcher was not able to complete the full 24 mos term, the 17 mos of research and writing have allowed for substantial progress into the question of how the Second Temple communities of the Dead Sea Scrolls experienced religion and actualized their texts. One of the major conclusions of this body of research has been that the instrumentalization of emotions assisted in the generation of religious ideas and played a key role in heightening commitment to cooperative living under the covenant. A study of the emotions in the Habakkuk Commentary is planned for the near future.