Qumran Prayer and Religious Poetry represents the first attempt to undertake a systematic, comprehensive study of the liturgical and poetic texts which were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran. The collections of prayers, blessings and hymns indicate that fixed prayers were already customary within Judaism during the period of the Second Temple within sectarian circles. In the light of the prayer texts from Qumran the author conducts a systematic study of Jewish prayer beginning with its biblical traditions, through its development during the Second Temple period, and down to rabbinic prayer. By means of comparative literary analysis, the author is able to elucidate the relationship of the Qumran texts to forms and motifs found in parallel text types from various periods and circles within Judaism. This volume provides the reader with tools for a renewed study of the history of prayer in Judaism in the light of new textual evidence from the Second Temple period.

A timely collection of contributions by major scholars in the field of prayer and poetry in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

"This volume investigates the layers of meaning of the Qumran community's liturgical practice as prayer (communication with the divine), ritual (actions that establish and reinforce the social and ideological structures of the community), and speech (containing both verbal and non-verbal communication)."--Jacket.

The papers published in this volume were presented at the Fifth Orion International Symposium (Jerusalem, 2000), which focused on prayer and poetry in light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The volume examines the recently published poetical and liturgical texts from Qumran against the background of Second Temple Judaism, its biblical antecedents, and later rabbinic developments. The essays treat a variety of prayers and religious practices, as well as major issues in the history of Jewish liturgy. Topics range from magic, mysticism and thanksgiving to lamentation, fast day rituals, communal worship, and the relationship between the prayers from Qumran and the traditional Jewish prayers. The application of new Scrolls material to this breadth of topics constitutes an important contribution to the study of religious poetry, religious practice, and liturgy.

This book examines the development of institutionalized prayer in ancient Israel at a crucial time in the history of Western civilization: from the period of the Qumran writings, in the last three centuries BCE, through to the rabbinic period, after 70 CE. It explores the shift from sacrificial worship by priests to abstract, unmediated, direct approaches to the deity by laypeople. It demonstrates the transition from voluntary, freely composed prayers to obligatory prayers with fixed texts. The study shows how Qumran and Samaritan prayer contrast with rabbinic prayer, shedding light on Jewish customs before the rabbinic reform. Posthumously edited by Bernard M. Levinson.

In recent years, the scholarly consensus has emerged that early Judaism should no longer be classified as a religion of legalistic works on righteousness, but rather defined primarily by God's covenant with Israel. In this work, it is argued, instead, that there is actually a tension in early Judaism between God as righteous judge and as merciful. As E. Sj berg maintained in his Gott und S nder im pal stinischen Judentum, in the sources used for a reconstruction of early Judaism, there are two mutually exclusive ways in which God is said to relate to human beings. First, God as righteous judge deals with human beings as they deserve. They are assumed to be morally free and responsible, and God judges and recompenses them in history and eschatologically. Not only are the wicked punished for their sins, but the righteous are also rewarded for their obedience. And second, God as merciful does not deal with human beings as they deserve. Rather, he removes the guilt resulting from disobedience to the Law, sometimes on the simple condition of repentance. This means that a person can escape the consequences of disobedience. The understanding of God in the sources vacillates between God as righteous judge and God as merciful, without coming down definitively on one side to the exclusion of the other.

In 1946 the first of the Dead Sea Scroll discoveries was made near the site of Qumran, at the northern end of the Dead Sea. Despite the much publicized delays in the publication and editing of the Scrolls, practically all of them had been made public by the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the first discovery. That occasion was marked by a spate of major publications that attempted to sum up the state of scholarship at the end of the twentieth century, including The Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls (OUP 2000). These publications produced an authoritative synthesis to which the majority of scholars in the field subscribed, granted disagreements in detail. A decade or so later, The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls has a different objective and character. It seeks to probe the main disputed issues in the study of the Scrolls. Lively debate continues over the archaeology and history of the site, the nature and identity of the sect, and its relation to the broader world of Second Temple Judaism and to later Jewish and Christian tradition. It is the Handbook's intention here to reflect on diverse opinions and viewpoints, highlight the points of disagreement, and point to promising directions for future research.

In Patterns of Daily Prayer in Second Temple Period Judaism Jeremy Penner provides an account of how daily prayer became entrenched within early Jewish religious traditions.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the last century. They have great historical, religious, and linguistic significance, not least in relation to the transmission of many of the books which came to be included in the Hebrew Bible. This companion comprises over 70 articles, exploring the entire body of the key texts and documents labelled as Dead Sea Scrolls. Beginning with a section on the complex methods used in discovering, archiving and analysing the Scrolls, the focus moves to consideration of the Scrolls in their various contexts: political, religious, cultural, economic and historical. The genres ascribed to groups of texts within the Scrolls- including exegesis and interpretation, poetry and hymns, and liturgical texts - are then examined, with due attention given to both past and present scholarship. The main body of the Companion concludes with crucial issues and topics discussed by leading scholars. Complemented by extensive appendices and indexes, this Companion provides the ideal resource for those seriously engaging with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Paperback edition available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).