Repentance at Qumran: The Penitential Framework of Religious Experience in the Dead Sea Scrolls

by Mark A. Jason

Overview

Mark A. Jason offers a detailed investigation of the place of repentance in the Dead Sea Scrolls, addressing a significant lacuna in Qumran scholarship. Normally, when the belief system of the community is examined, repentance is usually taken for granted or relegated to a peripheral position. By careful attention to key texts, Jason establishes the importance of repentance as a fundamental way of structuring and describing religious experience within the Qumran community. Repentance was important not only for entry into the community and covenant but also for daily governance and cultic activities, and even for authenticating understanding of the end times. Jason shows, then, that repentance was a central and decisive element in shaping that communitys identity and undergirded its religious experience from the start. Further, comparison with relevant texts from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha shows that the Qumran community represented a distinctive penitential movement in Second Temple Judaism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781451485301
Publisher:	1517 Media
Publication date:	02/01/2015
Series:	Emerging Scholars
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Mark A. Jason is currently presbyter in the MethodistChurch at Stirling, Scotland. He studied divinity and served as a presbyter in the Church of South India. After completing his PhD in biblical studies at the University of Aberdeen, he servedas coordinator of ministerial formation and theological education in the Methodist Church in Gambia, West Africa.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations vii

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 Religious Experience and Repentance 29

2 Motivations for Repentance 47

3 Repentance, Separation, and the Covenant 65

4 Predestined Repentance 105

5 The Extent of Repentance 145

6 Repentance in Daily Life: Cult and Rituals 157

7 Repentance and Eschatology 201

Conclusion 233

Bibliography 253

Index of Authors 281

Index of Scriptures and Ancient Literature 285