Communities of discourse -- Torah, knowledge, and symbolic power: strategies of discourse in Second Temple Judaism -- Knowing as doing: the social symbolics of knowledge in the two spirits treatise of the Serek ha-Yahad -- How to make a sectarian: formation of language, self and community in the Serek ha-Yahad -- What do Hodayot do? Language and the construction of the self in sectarian prayer -- The Hodayot of the leader and the needs of sectarian community -- Conclusions
Summary
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
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 353-364) and indexes
