An article entitled “Ritual and Worship at Qumran” calls for some clarification of what is to be discussed, especially given the significant rethinking that is ongoing in current scholarship. The title focuses our attention on the site of Qumran, a geographical location on the west shore of the Dead Sea where there are the material remains of a settlement where people once lived, ate, prayed, and buried their dead; from eleven nearby caves came the large cache of written documents known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the first decades after the discovery of these caves in the years 1947–1956, scholars often spoke about Qumran as a remote and isolated desert place inhabited by a small group of male celibate ascetics who had withdrawn from the mainstream of Jewish life; in the past two decades, with the full publication of all the texts and the ongoing publication of the archaeological reports, the site and its manuscripts are more often linked to a vibrant and complex movement that flourished within Judea with adherents living in multiple places during a span of over one hundred and fifty years from the time of the Maccabean crisis to the years of the Jewish Revolt.
After seventy years of scholarship, there is still ongoing debate and rethinking about even such a basic point as how we should designate the people who lived at Qumran. Some scholars favor using the Hebrew term ha-yahad (literally, “the oneness/unity”), a self-designation found in many documents, especially the Rule of the Community. Other scholars designate them as Essenes, since there are many similarities between certain features of communal life, shared property, and the initiation process as described in some of the Scrolls and the Essenes as described by the classical writers Philo, Josephus, and Pliny (see Vermes and Goodman 1989, for a collection of the key texts). More and more scholars would not want to make that identification so precisely, and thus prefer to talk very generally of a “movement” (de Looijer 2015). It seems that many members were married and lived in families; 1QS 6:3 talks about “every group of ten”; the Damascus Document uses the terminology of multiple “camps” spread throughout Judaea. The number of people who actually lived at the desert site of Qumran was probably quite small, perhaps an elite core (Collins 2010), or new members in residence there during their years of initiation and training. Around the time of the revolt against Rome, manuscripts from different communities and places may have been brought to the desert caves. Hence scholars use the language of “Qumran,” “the Qumran Community,” or “the Qumran movement” as shorthand for a complex and diverse phenomenon.
The ritual and worship of this group of pious Jews is to be considered within the larger framework of the ritual and worship of the Hebrew Bible. The goal of their life was above all to “do what is good and upright before him [God] as he commanded through Moses and all his servants the prophets” (1QS l:2–3)—and what was commanded included the whole cultic life as prescribed in Leviticus. Yet these people were convinced that the rest of Israel had gone astray and that they alone knew how to interpret the scriptures according to all that was revealed to their founder, a priest designated by the epithet “the Teacher of Righteousness” (CD l:8–11; 1QpHab 7:1–5). Thus with regards to ritual and worship, as with many other aspects of their lives, significant and even radical innovations were understood as Torah correctly interpreted and lived out according to the divine plan and will.
The discoveries at Qumran have provided us with a dramatic increase in the amount of material available for the study of ritual and worship in the Second Temple period. The manuscripts themselves were deciphered and published over the course of more than fifty years (from the 1950s to 2009, in the official series, Discoveries in the Judean Desert, volumes 1–40, Oxford University Press). These manuscripts provide us with copies of the actual words of prayers, psalms, liturgies, blessings and curses, plus a smaller number of passages that talk about ritual and worship. There are certain details that are found only in the classical Greek sources, for example, that communal meals were held twice a day; that prayers were recited before sunrise (Josephus, Jewish War 2.128–133). Unless such details can be corroborated with actual Scrolls texts, they need to be treated with some caution since their relevance depends on how much the Essenes of the classical sources are to be conflated with the people of the Scrolls. The textual evidence can be supplemented with what is gleaned from the archaeological remains at Qumran, but, as always, these “mute stones speak” only when interpreted. For members who lived elsewhere than at Qumran there are few, if any, archeological remains that can be identified with any certainty (some scholars have attempted to identify an Essene Quarter and an Essene Gate in Jerusalem, Pixner 2010). Those living in “towns and villages” probably met in in small groups in domestic dwellings and not in special buildings; there is one very cryptic passage (CD 11:21–22//4Q271 5 i 15–17) that refers to a “house of prostration” which may be terminology for local places of worship (Steudel 1993–1994).
The amount of ritual and prayer material preserved is significant. In the manuscripts are found, though often very fragmentarily preserved, the earliest collections of fixed prayers to be recited on a weekly and monthly cycle and on feasts; there are previously unattested liturgies for special occasions such as the entrance in the covenant; there are texts for the actual words of the blessings that are to accompany ritual acts of washing and purification; for the eschatological age, there are prayers and hymns to be recited when the final battle will take place between the Sons of the Light and Sons of Darkness. It is difficult to delineate exactly how many prayers, psalms, and songs have been preserved (much depends on how certain texts are classified and how multiple copies are treated), but the number often cited is approximately two hundred different compositions (Chazon 1998, 265–270); according to another count, “as many as one-quarter of the non-biblical texts can be classified as ritual or liturgical” (Arnold 2011, 550). Materials can be found from all of the six ritual categories systematized by Catherine Bell: rites of passage, feasts and fasts, calendrical rites, rites of affliction, political rites, and rites of communion (Bell 1992, 91–137). This “ritual density” signals “the hegemony of ritual at Qumran” where a large portion of the daily life of these Jews was “religious” (Arnold 2006; Kugler 2002).
The prayer and psalm-like compositions found in the Scrolls do not have a single origin and authorship. Some are recognized by their distinctive vocabulary and worldview as “sectarian,” that is, they were composed and used specifically within the Qumran movement (see the later discussion of the Hodayot and the Covenant Renewal Liturgy). That it was considered justified and even necessary to compose “new” compositions—and not just to use the biblical psalms—speaks to a sense of a new self-identity and a reconfigured relationship to God. But a surprisingly large number of prayers and psalms contain nothing distinctively sectarian in vocabulary or content, and express biblical motifs and themes that would be shared by the “Common Judaism” of the Persian-Hellenistic period (e.g., the Words of the Luminaries; many of the non-masoretic psalms in 11QPsa; the collection of psalms attributed to various prophets and kings in 4Q38l). Other compositions are not easily categorized as either sectarian or nonsectarian in origin (e.g., Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, Daily Prayers). This rich cache of texts, which are known to us today only because they were preserved in the Qumran caves, gives us a glimpse of how fixed prayer traditions were developing throughout the Second Temple period in different Jewish groups.
In dealing with this material, the move from text to practice must be made with caution. There are few specific rubrics, and the simple fact that we have manuscripts that contain collections of prayers does not give us ready access to when, how, or by whom these were used. There have been various attempts to reconstruct the worship components in a typical day in the life of a sectarian, but such reconstructions are necessarily speculative and usually centered on life as lived at the site of Qumran (Roitman 1997). Given how little can be known with any degree of certainty about the day-by-day “doing” of ritual and worship, especially in smaller communities away from the site of Qumran, it seems best to approach this article first by looking at broad questions of temple, priesthood and sacrifice and then focusing on a selected number of key texts from this vast literature (for general surveys, see Chazon 1998; Davila 2000; Falk 1998).
According to the authors of the sectarian Scrolls, the Temple in Jerusalem is defiled, its priesthood corrupt, and its sacrifices ineffective (CD 5:6–11, 6:11–13, 20:23, 1QpHab 9:4–5, 12:8–9). The priest who pursued and attacked the Teacher of Righteousness is given the sobriquet “The Wicked Priest” (ha-kohen ha-resha`, a play on ha-kohen ha-ro’sh, “the high priest”). In interpreting a text from Isa 24:17 about the terror, pit, and snare that come upon Israel, the third is interpreted as “profanation of the sanctuary” (CD 4:12–19) “for they do not separate clean from unclean according to the Law” (CD 5:6–7). However, it is far from clear what precisely was at the basis of such accusations and to what extent these charges are stereotypical rhetorical polemic of corruption, misappropriation of temple monies, and sexual immorality. Some texts can be read so as to locate the decisive crisis in the appropriation of the priesthood by John Hyrcanus and the Hasmonean dynasty that resulted in the displacement of the ancient Zadokite priestly line, but in many places little is said about priestly authenticity as a major cause for separation. Other texts focus on differences in the interpretation of specific details of sacrificial halakhic rulings (e.g., the purity of animal hides, the slaughter of certain sacrifices, the fourth-year tithes, in Miqsat ma`aseh ha-Torah). Sometimes the concern seems to be with the calendar, that is, “his holy Sabbaths, his glorious festivals” are named as the first of “the hidden things in which all Israel strayed” (CD 3:13–14). The sectarians followed a solar calendar, claiming that in adopting a lunar calendar at the time of the Maccabean crisis, the Temple cult in Jerusalem was no longer in synch with the calendar observed by the heavenly priests and the angels.
Yet the biblical system of temple, sacrifice, and atonement is not denied nor abandoned, for this is a core component of the Torah given on Sinai. Rather, technical biblical vocabulary is often reconfigured and reinterpreted. A key text is a passage from the Rule of the Community, which states that “prayer rightly offered shall be as an acceptable fragrance of righteousness, and perfection of way as a delectable free-will offering” (1QS 9:5), so that “acceptance shall come to the land apart from the flesh of burnt offerings or the fat of peace offerings” (1QS 9:3–4, 8:8–9). That is, what is claimed is that there is a way of atonement that is not dependent upon the temple sacrificial system in Jerusalem and its priests. It is now the community (yahad) that makes atonement for the land (1QS 8:4–6) and temple language is applied to living people who are to be a “holy of holies for Aaron” (1QS 8:9) so that purification and sanctification are effected through “the spirit of uprightness and of humility” (1QS 3:6–9). The passage in Exod 15:17 “the sanctuary O LORD, which your hands have fashioned” is interpreted, with purposeful ambiguity, that “he[God] commanded to build for himself a sanctuary of Adam [Adam? humans?] to offer him in it deeds of thanksgiving” (4Q174 l ii 6–7), thus bringing together the Edenic sanctuary of Adam, the Jerusalem sanctuary, and the sectarian community as a sanctuary that offers works of todah (praise) and torah (right living).
What this meant in “real life” is a matter of considerable dispute among scholars, because there are not clear and unambiguous statements about cultic practice. The majority scholarly view has been that the community eschewed any participation in the Jerusalem Temple since their way of life, obedience to the Torah, and above all a regular system of verbal prayers replaced or substituted in some way for the Temple cult. This interpretation is often linked to a cryptic statement in Josephus: “they [the Essenes] send offerings to the Temple but perform their sacrifices using different customary purifications; for this reason they are barred from entering into the common enclosure but offer sacrifice /do not offer sacrifice [in the epitome of Josephus and the Latin version the verb is negated] among themselves” (Ant 18:19); Philo states that the Essenes “do not offer animal sacrifices” (That Every Good Man Is Free, 75). Yet other scholars are much more cautious in making the leap from criticism of the Temple and its priests to non-participation and boycott, and argue that it would be “bizarre” that any group within Second Temple Judaism actually withdrew totally from participation in the Temple realm (Goodman 2010, 87–89).
Another way to configure how the sectarians handled the biblical sacrificial system is to propose that they practiced sacrifice, not at the Jerusalem Temple but at the site of Qumran. This view was advanced early on as a minority opinion (Frank Moore Cross 1958, 102–103) and has been argued recently by some archaeologists on the evidence of the deposits of animal bones buried at various loci throughout the site (Magness 2016) and the possible identification of a sacrificial courtyard in the north of the site in the earlier years of occupation, which then moved to the south area, and possibly even the identification of a place for an altar (Humbert 1994). According to this proposal, it was by equating the site of Qumran with the biblical wilderness camp of the desert with the tabernacle in its midst where animal sacrifices were offered that the sectarians found a scriptural prototype to incorporate sacrificial rituals into their life independent from the Jerusalem Temple.
Whatever was the actual practice, it is clear that when eschatological hopes and dreams are articulated the sacrificial system of Leviticus remains at the core. In the final days of the great battle of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness, the first stage of victory after seven years will involve the restoration of Temple worship in Jerusalem: “these shall take their positions at the holocausts and the sacrifices, in order to prepare the pleasant incense for God’s approval” (1QM 2:5–6). Other texts speak of an eschatological temple to be created by God himself in heaven (Temple Scroll 29:9–10); in the Aramaic New Jerusalem texts, a seer (perhaps Ezekiel) is given a vision of Jerusalem complete with Temple and sacrifices (2Q24. 4:11–18). Whatever compromises are required in this “age of Belial” and this “time of wickedness” (CD 12:23), these are but a temporary expedience, not a denial of the permanence and validity of the sacrificial ritual and the Jerusalem Temple.
Priests occupy a place of preeminence in the community, and their status and authority are established and reinforced by rituals and hierarchical structures, even if they did not perform the act of sacrifice that is definitive of priestly identity. In the version of The Rule of the Community found in cave 1, “the Sons of Zadok, the priests, the keepers of the covenant” are listed first in terms of those who hold authority in the community, though they govern in conjunction with the “majority of the men of the yahad (1QS 5:2–3). Yet in other parallel versions of the Rule there is no mention of the priests at this point, and authority resides with “the Many” (cf. 4QSb, 4QSd). The differences in the versions of The Rule of the Community may reflect a chronological development (though whether the text with the emphasis on the Zadokite priests is earlier or later is much disputed), or these differences may reflect divergences among contemporary but semi-independent groups, some of whom may have been more priestly focused than others. Many privileges are reserved to priests: in the annual covenant ceremony, they pronounce the blessings (1QS 1:19–25); in groups of ten a priest always has to be present among them (1QS 6:3–4; CD 13:2); priests have a central role in the examination of new members (1QS 6:9–10, CD 14:6); they have the prominent place in the hierarchical seating arrangements at meals and are the first to pronounce the blessing for the communal meal (1QS 6:4–5). According to the Damascus Document, it seems that only priests read from the Torah (4Q266 5 ii 1–3), in contrast to the practice in Galilean and Diaspora synagogues where non-priests could read (Luke 4:17–19, Acts 13:15).
The founding figure, the Teacher of Righteousness, is designated as a priest in a Pesher on the Psalms (4Q171 iii 14), although scholars are not in agreement about whether his designation as “the priest” (ha-kohen) necessarily indicates that he once held the role of the high priest (Stegemann 1998, 147–8). As a priest, he taught Torah and interpreted the words of the prophets (1QpHab 2:8–9; 7:1–3). In the eschatological future, priests would continue their traditional roles: instruction in the laws of warfare (1QM 10:2–5, 15:6–11), pronouncing prayers, blessings and curses, and offering sacrifices (1QM 2:5–6). In at least some texts, there is an expectation of a priestly eschatological figure, a messiah of Aaron who will be alongside of the Davidic messiah (CD 14:19, 20:1, 1QS 9:11). In the meals to be held in the eschatological future, a priest will say the words of blessing before the Davidic messiah pronounces his blessing (1QSa 2:17–21).
One of the most distinctive features in the worship life of the yahad was the central place given to fixed prayer. Individuals pray in the Hebrew Bible in times of need and crisis and in times of joy and thanksgiving (Balentine 1993), but such prayers are personal and spontaneous. Although there is a reference to Daniel praying three times a day (Dan 6:10), there are no explicit regulations in the Torah about how many times a day to pray, or at what times, or what specific words to use. In the Temple, the cult seems to have been carried out in silence, apart from the psalms sung by the Levites; only on rare specific occasions were words spoken (the priest’s confession of sin on Yom Kippur, Lev 16:21; the statement of the layperson bringing a first-fruits offering, Deut 26:5–9). In contrast, in the Scrolls there are collections of specific prayers to be recited at a set time, as set out in a formal rubric. These prayers were written down, in contrast to the practice of the rabbis wherein prayers were passed on orally and only after many centuries compiled in a written form into a prayer book (see the chapter 27 by S. G. Reif in this volume).
There are three major collections of prayers preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. One is the Words of the Luminaries (4Q504 and 506, 4Q505 may be a third copy), petitionary prayers for each day of the week and poetical words of praise for the Sabbath. Although the manuscript is damaged and fragmentary, there are traces of rubrical superscriptions, e.g., “Prayer (tefillah) for the fourth day” “ Psalm (mizmor) song (shir) for Sabbath.” These compositions form a literary unit, beginning with themes from creation on Sunday and progressing in historical sequence through Exodus and Sinai to the time of exile on Friday; the Sabbath prayer is more poetic in form and focuses solely on praise. One of the manuscripts (4Q504) is dated on paleographic grounds to the mid second-century bce, and both the early date and the absence of any distinctive sectarian vocabulary indicate that these prayers were composed prior to the formation of the yahad itself. Thus they are an important indicator that there was some Jewish group/s other than the yahad who had already taken on the practice of fixed daily prayer.
Another collection of prayers, Daily Prayers (4Q503), contains two prayers for each day of the month. The introductory rubrics link these to the cosmic cycle, “on the [x] day of the month . . . .when the sun goes forth . . . when the sun returns. ” The calendrical system seems to be luni-solar. Most prayers both begin and end with a blessing and a concluding refrain, “Peace be upon you, Israel,” words presumably spoken by a priest or leader. A third collection is the Prayers for Festivals (1Q34, 4Q507–509). Only a few of the rubrics have been preserved (e.g., “Prayer (Tefillah) for the Day of Atonement”) and the very fragmentary state of preservation of all these manuscripts makes the precise allocation of fragments to specific feasts quite speculative.
Though it is not possible here to do an analysis of individual prayers (for more detailed study, see Falk 1998, Penner 2012), it is clear that these prayers stand somewhere between the more literary and unstructured prayers found in biblical narratives (and also in many books of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha) and the fixed structures and formulae that became normative for rabbinic public statutory prayer. Within each collection there are some regular patterns, though there is still considerable variation both among the collections and even within an individual collection. Most often there is a blessing formula to open and close, but the precise wording is not yet standardized and uniform. Sometimes the blessing is in the third person, “Blessed be the God of Israel who . . . ”; sometimes it is in the second person, as became normative in rabbinic prayer, “Blessed are you, O God of Israel, who . . . ” In the Words of Luminaries and the Festival Prayers, the opening formula is distinctive, “Remember, O Lord,” though the prayer regularly concludes with a blessing in which God is praised in relation to the specific theme and petition of the day. Unlike the fixed rabbinic statutory prayers such as the Amidah, these prayers change daily. In the Daily Prayers, the Sabbath prayers are not particularly distinctive, and praying with the angels is not reserved for the Sabbath; in The Words of the Luminaries, however, the Sabbath prayer is distinctive in that there is no supplication and it consists totally of doxological praise. This practice of praise, not petition, on the Sabbath, as well as the employment of specific themes and vocabulary (e.g., the petition to ingather the exiles and even the exact wording of some of the petitions) demonstrate that there are elements of significant continuity between pre-70 and post-70 traditions. This is important evidence that statutory prayer did not begin de novo after the destruction of the Temple but was rooted in earlier and broadly based prayer practices that have been preserved in the manuscripts from the caves (Chazon 2011).
Another distinctive collection of prayers for set times, preserved in nine manuscripts found at Qumran and one found at Masada, is the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. These songs, designated for thirteen Sabbaths of the first quarter of the year, summon the angelic priests to give praise, and describe in rich detail the heavenly temple, the divine chariot throne, and the appearances and sacrifices of the angelic high priests. The unusual language of these songs, highly repetitious and almost chantlike, is more evocative and mystical than that found in any other prayer texts until the much later Hekhalot hymns and seems to be intended to induce the experience of being part of the heavenly realm and its angelic praise (Alexander 2006, 7–10; Newsom 1985); that is, through the recitation of these texts it is possible to bypass the problematic earthly Temple and to partake now in the present (and not only after death) in the worship of the angels in the heavenly Temple.
The compositions that are usually considered to be the most distinctive of the spirituality and religious expression of the Qumran community are a collection of approximately thirty-five poetic texts, called the Thanksgiving Psalms, Hodayot. Many of them begin with the introductory formula, “I thank you, Lord;” others begin with a blessing, “Blessed are you, Lord, who . . .” Eight copies are preserved: from cave 1 comes the longest and most well-preserved manuscript (1QHa), along with two small fragments of a second, perhaps never completed, manuscript (1QHb); from cave 4, six more fragmentary manuscripts (4Q427–433, 4QHa-f) that are collections in a different order, perhaps with some variations in content, or containing only smaller collections (Schuller 2011; Schuller and Newsom 2012, 2–11). These psalms are clearly modeled to some extent on the individual biblical psalms of thanksgiving; yet they are distinctive in the absence of certain key biblical concerns and themes (such as pilgrimage to the Temple, sacrificial language, a retelling of events of biblical history) and in their complexity and more didactic thrust. Thanksgiving is expressed above all for the gift of a special knowledge that has salvific impact in that it enables the recipients to know their true reality before God. These psalms speak repeatedly of the depths of human fragility and lowliness, not just because of individual sin but by virtue of how God has created human beings from dust, with little capacity for agency and independent action; yet this same earthly human creature has the capacity to praise God along with the heavenly beings, indeed to “take his place before you with the everlasting host and the [eternal] spirit[s]” (1QHa 19:13–17); This intricate and complex interplay of human weakness and divine sovereignty (what Carol Newsom has termed “the masochistic sublime”) is one of the most distinctive aspects of a spirituality that is inspired by the theological worldview found in Treatise on the Two Spirits (1QS 3:13–4:26).
It is very difficult to say with any certainty how these poems might have functioned in the ritual and worship of this community. Some scholars have argued that because of their length and complexity they must have been used mainly for private devotion and meditation; others have proposed that they may have served as morning prayers or at the nightly sessions of study, interpretation, and blessing (1QS 6:7–8). Other scholars would link them more closely with the communal meal, proposing a scenario like that described for the Therapeutae where communal singing followed the meal (Philo, De Vita Contemplativa). The written texts that have been preserved may have served as models for initiating members into the sectarian “world” so that they could learn to compose their own poems of thanksgiving (Newsom 2004).
The ceremony that is described at the beginning of the cave l version of the Rule of the Community (1QS 1:16–3:12) is perhaps the best example of how a liturgical ritual incorporated and enacted in word and action the essential core of what it meant to choose to belong to this particular expression of Second Temple Judaism. The ritual of covenant making and covenant renewal was traditional and biblical, and individual words, phrases, and elements would be recognized by any Second Temple Jew. Yet the whole is something quite new: a “covenant” not between God and ethnic Israel, but God and an individual, who is both predestined and chosen and yet has made a voluntary choice. The initiate “crosses over” and “enters in” in time and space to a new identity. Both blessings and curses are formally pronounced, but instead of applying to the whole community these signal a dualistic division: the insiders who are blessed as “the members of the lot of God” and the outsiders who are cursed as “the lot of Belial.” An element that is not constitutive in biblical accounts of covenant renewal is the inclusion of an explicit confession of sin, with language drawn from the penitential prayers (Dan 9, Neh 9, Ezra 9, 1 Kings 8, 2 Chr 34:19, Ps 106:6): “we have acted sinfully, we have [trans]gressed, we have [si]nned, we have committed evil, we and our fathers before us” (1QS 1:24–25). This is followed by an acknowledgement of God’s justice; yet there is no explicit petition for forgiveness. Hence the very words of confession take on a new function and become a declaration of status and identity. The traditional words of the Priestly Blessing of Num 6:24–26 are reconfigured to articulate a dualistic worldview (“may he bless you with everything good and preserve you from everything evil”) that expresses confidence in being recipients of a special and salvific knowledge (“with the discernment of life . . . eternal knowledge . . . for everlasting bliss” 1QS 2:2–4). The subsequent cursing of the person who would enter the covenant hypocritically combines traditional wisdom motifs about recalcitrance with levitical language about ritual impurity and defilement (“unclean, unclean shall he be all the days that he rejects the laws of God,” 1QS 3:5–6) to deal with perceived threats to community existence and purity.
Although at first glance we seem to have a detailed description of this ceremony, it is difficult to establish exactly how the ritual was carried out with all its various components. Again, the text is only one element, and tradition and lived experience would have supplied what is lacking. For example, on the basis of the repeated language in 1QS column 3 about washing and cleansing for purification, not from ritual impurity but from iniquity and moral impurity, many scholars conclude that ritual bathing in a miqvah was part of this ritual, but this is never stated explicitly. Key elements are expressed in action and not just in words. For example, all members “crossing over” in rank (1QS 2:19–22) is not just a matter of discipline and good order but a visual expression of how “each Israelite may know his standing in God’s community, in conformity with the eternal plan” (1QS 2:22–23). The fact that the ritual is repeated annually contradicts, in a certain way, its decisiveness and solemnity, and introduces an element of liminality in that the decision and the separation is never complete and definitive.
As with most Jewish and Christian groups in antiquity, meals shared in common can be considered as rituals to the extent that they have a significance beyond the simple act of taking nourishment. The sharing of food is to be joined with praise and deliberation “together (yahad) they shall eat, together they shall bless, together they shall deliberate” (1QS 6:2–3). But how often such meals took place is less than clear; it is only in Josephus’s description of the Essenes that meals twice a day are specified (JW 2.129–132), and in the Damascus Document there is no mention of communal meals. The archaeological remains of an exceptionally large room with a side pantry containing over a thousand dishes (L77) at the site of Qumran points to large gatherings at least on occasion, whether at major feasts or on an annual basis. The regulations for a complex and graduated admission to meals for new members, and the detailed penal code that involves restrictions on the amounts of food and/or exclusion from meal participation further indicate how meals enacted concepts of purity, establishment of boundaries, hierarchical ranking, and the prerogatives of the priest. In anticipating meals to be held in the eschaton, it is specified that the priest will bless first, then the Messiah and then each member “according to his glory,” and “it is in accordance with this statue that they shall proceed at every me[al at which] at least ten people [g]ather” (1QSa II 11–22).
Apart from the pivotal moment of entrance into the community, there is little focus—at least in the written texts that have been preserved—on ritual activity associated with other life-cycle moments, e.g., birth, circumcision, and marriage, although ritual lore may have been passed on orally, especially by women, within the family circle. One very fragmentary text, 4Q502, talks of men and women, brothers and sisters who come together to sing and rejoice. In this ritual, a woman “stands in the assembly of elderly men and elderly women” (4Q502 24 2) and in the next lines someone (the woman?) recites a blessing; although the first editors called this a “Marriage Ritual,” the context is less than certain, and some of the themes and vocabulary may be more suitable to a ritual for the new year (Satlow 1998). Although some details of burial practice can be gleaned from approximately fifty graves excavated in the cemetery to the east of the settlement, there are no burial and mourning rituals in the preserved texts.
Indeed, in terms of rituals and liturgies, what is not found is very significant. Most notable is the absence of a feast celebrating the founding of the community or commemorating its founder or founding members (Brooke 2012, 42–43). Josephus associates the Essenes with healing and medicines (War 2.136), but there is little evidence of interest in healing rituals (except in some Aramaic nonsectarian texts, Genesis Apocryphon 20:21–29 and the Prayer of Nabonidus). There are various collections of apotropaic psalms that could be used to expel demons, either by addressing them directly (11Q11, Apocryphal Psalms) or by frightening and terrifying them with words of divine praise (4Q510–511, The Songs of the Sage). Also absent from the cultic calendar are regular fast days, with the exception of the Torah-mandated Yom Kippur (in contrast to the multiplication of fasts in Zechariah 8 and in rabbinic Judaism); perhaps this is to be seen as a logical outcome of a strict predeterministic theology in which petitionary prayer, though never absent, is limited (Schuller 2000).
The study of ritual and worship at Qumran is at an innovative and exciting stage, with many more questions than answers. In the early stages of Scrolls study, attention was often necessarily focused on the decipherment of small pieces of papyrus or parchment that were so difficult to read both visually and linguistically. Much of this technical and philological work is now completed, although more still can be done, especially since many of the collections of prayers are among the Scrolls that are the most poorly preserved; for some manuscripts few attempts have been made to reconstruct the shape and order of the original scroll (Falk 2014). Even better preserved texts, already published, could profit from new editions, now that the whole corpus is available for study. For instance, it has often been presumed that prayers and hymns were very regular and could be reconstructed almost mechanically according to set patterns and formulae; with the availability of multiple copies of certain texts (for example, for the Hodayot, Schuller 2001), scholars have become much more aware of the fluidity of manuscripts transmission in this period and the scribal freedom for editing and reconfiguration, and hence the need for due caution in proposing reconstructions.
In the early years of Scrolls scholarship, prayers and psalms were sometimes read mainly to discover doctrinal ideas and a more-or-less systematic theology (Ringgren 1963), sometimes with the imposition of external or Christian categories and terminology (salvation, atonement, grace). But while there remains much truth in the classic adage lex orandi/lex credenda, other less theological ways of reading are currently being explored. The methodologies developed by scholars of Ritual Studies have brought an increasing recognition that worship is more than words and concepts, and indeed that individual words, specific formulae, and theological concepts may be less important than non-verbal elements such as order, actions, and the sequencing of actions. More attention is being paid to the function of ritual to create solidarity and social cohesion, to mark boundaries, and to separate insiders and outsiders. For example, Carol Newsom suggests that our question should be not so much “what do the Hodayot say?” but “what do the Hodayot do?” (Newsom 2004, 191–286). Other scholars (Jokiranta 2013; Kim Hawkins 2012) are turning to social scientific work in fields such as cognitive linguistics and the study of emotions and religious experience in an attempt to find new ways of understanding and appreciating how religious ideas were embodied and experienced. From a somewhat different perspective, there has been significant work done in recent years on incorporating the materials from the Dead Sea Scrolls into the broader study of the development of Jewish liturgy (Chazon 2011); less attention has been devoted to exploring links with early Christian liturgy and hymnology and this remains a desideratum.