Sectarian or not: What is the question?

The hundreds of Dead Sea Scrolls published between 1990 and 2010 reveal a great variety of generically and ideologically diverse texts. This richer, more varied collection spawned new taxonomies of the texts in the so-called “Qumran library.” Notably, Devorah Dimant introduced “an intermediate category standing between sectarian and nonsectarian texts.”1 In contrast, Florentino García Martínez advised abandoning dichotomous taxonomies in favor of viewing the Qumran corpus “as a collection of religious writings more or less authoritative for the group that collected them, preserved them, and in certain cases, wrote them.”2 While fully embracing the reception and readership approach, I advocate continuing a quest for origins that can potentially enhance our picture of the broader cultural and sociohistorical context and, at the same time, resonates with the Yaḥad’s own writings, which clearly draw a line between members and outsiders. Consequently, in order to address the separate questions of origin and reception, I propose a dual approach to texts found at Qumran:

1) Consider whether the text in question is clearly a nonsectarian composition, a distinctively Yaḥad work, or somewhere on the range from most to least like the sectarian writings, and with which other contemporary works it resonates.

2) Consider why the text in question was preserved at Qumran and how the Yaḥad might have read it in consonance with sectarian writings, beliefs, identity, and practices.

My test case for this dual approach is the text found in Cave 4 that comprises prayers for each day of the week and is entitled the Words of the Luminaries. In the first part of the paper, I present the evidence for this text’s nonsectarian origin. In the second part, I suggest why the Yaḥad preserved this text despite its apparent dissonance with sectarian ideology. To conclude, I consider how, by providing a richer picture of the broader context, early texts like the Words of the Luminaries may offer insights into a central issue of the Pretoria conference: consideration of “a longer and more complicated process than was formerly realized” for the formation of the sectarian movement.