The Self As Symbolic Space ─ Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran

Looking especially at the two central documents, the Serek ha-Yadad and the Hodayot, Newsom (Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, Emory U.) investigates practices by which the Qumran community constituted itself as a sectarian society. The reconstruction of the identity of individual members, she says, was key to the formation of the community, so self became an important symbolic space for the development of the ideology of the sect. She concludes that people 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 to constitute a sectarian society. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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).