The Self as Symbolic Space

Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran
Erscheinungsjahr 2004
ISBN: 978-90-04-13803-2
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 52, 382 Seiten, Format (B × H): 169 mm x 246 mm, Gewicht: 866 g

Reihe: Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Newsom, Carol

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien Jüdische Glaubensrichtungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Bibelwissenschaften Altes Testament: Exegese, Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Geschichte des Judentums Geschichte des Judentums: Biblische & Klassische Periode
• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien Heilige & Traditionstexte: Torah, Talmud, Mischna, Halacha

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Communities of Discourse
2. Torah, Knowledge, and Symbolic Power: Strategies of Discourse in Second Temple Judaism
3. Knowing as Doing: The Social Symbolics of Knowledge in the Two Spirits Treatise of the Serek ha-Yahad
4. How to Make a Sectarian: Formation of Language, Self, and Community in the Serek ha-Yahad
5. What Do Hodayot Do? Language and the Construction of the Self in Sectarian Prayer
6. The Hodayot of the Leader and the Needs of Sectarian Community
Conclusions

Bibliography
Subject Index
Modern Author Index
Passage Index

Über Autor(innen)

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).