Violence, Religion, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

FAIN: FT-58255-10

Alex Paul Jassen
University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN 55455-2009)

My research project represents the first sustained analysis of religious violence in the Dead Sea Scrolls (2nd century BCE--1st century CE). I integrate close linguistic analysis with broader social-scientific models regarding religious violence in order to understand the origins and rhetorical function of violence in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The project moves the scholarly discussion beyond merely cataloging violent language and imagery to examining its social, theological, and ideological setting and determining what such evidence tells us about the social world of the practitioners. My interdisciplinary approach seeks to create an intellectual meeting point for historical-philological analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls and larger theoretical models in the Humanities and Social Sciences. With its primary focus on antiquity, my analysis will provide a new data set and historical contextualization for current work on the nature of religious violence.