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  • Queerly Sectarian:Jewish Difference, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Marital Disciplines
  • Maxine Grossman (bio)

In her essay, "Queer and Now," Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explores the potential for queer theory to identify and deconstruct uninterrogated categories of cultural power. Modern heterosexuality, she explains, gains social authority in large measure from its apparent naturalness.1 "If we are receptive to Foucault's understanding of modern sexuality as the most intensive site of the demand for, and detection or discursive production of, the Truth of individual identity," she writes:

… it seems as though this silent, normative, uninterrogated "regular" heterosexuality may not function as a sexuality at all. Think of how a culturally central concept like public/private is organized so as to preserve for heterosexuality the unproblematicalness, the apparent naturalness, of its discretionary choice between display and concealment. …2

The category of heterosexuality, from this perspective, so defines the norm that it eclipses the constructions and power dynamics that underpin it, while ensuring its own status as "natural" and "unproblematic."

Uninterrogated categories have discursive power within academic disciplines as much as they do in larger social contexts. Scholarly treatments of the Dead Sea Scrolls—a collection of Jewish manuscripts from the Second Temple period—provide evidence for such layerings of academic assumption. Attitudes toward marriage and sexuality in the scrolls appear to fall "between" Judaism and Christianity (the former often understood as sex-positive and the latter as a site for ascetic or sex-negative attitudes), in ways that have led scholars to understand the scrolls as evidence for a sectarian Judaism, at most a marginal cul-de-sac in the narrative of Jewish history. Queer treatments of these categories, however, provide an opportunity to read the scrolls back into the narrative of Jewish history while calling into question the binary foundations that underpin certain aspects of that narrative.

This essay begins with a brief introduction to the scrolls and an interrogation of the term "sectarian" as used in reference to them. Tensions around "normative" and sectarian Judaism will then be explored, particularly in light [End Page 87] of treatments of marriage and sexuality within the rule texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In lieu of a framework that distinguishes between (Jewish) marriage and (Christian) celibacy, this treatment will highlight the complexity of attitudes toward sexuality in the Judaism of the Second Temple period. A queer approach to these social norms, in turn, will provide for a reconsideration of the larger cultural framings of religion, sect, and Jewishness in scholarly discourse around the scrolls and their contributions to Jewish history.

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Some Opening Observations

The term "Dead Sea Scrolls" refers to the more than 900 manuscripts, many highly fragmentary, that were discovered in the mid-twentieth century in eleven caves in the Judean Desert, not far from the northern tip of the Dead Sea.3 The caves are all within walking distance of the ancient ruin of Khirbet Qumran, which many scholars understand as a habitation site, and from which arises the designation "Qumran Scrolls." The scrolls and the site of Qumran both date from the first centuries BCE and CE, and the scrolls themselves reflect an interesting range of Second Temple period Jewish literature, including close to three dozen manuscripts of the book of Deuteronomy, roughly twenty each of Genesis and Isaiah, and more than a dozen each of Exodus, Leviticus, and the books of Enoch and Jubilees (which are elsewhere preserved among the Pseudepigrapha but are not included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible). In all, the scrolls include some 200 copies of biblical manuscripts, reflecting an uneven representation of all the books of the modern Jewish Bible, with the notable exception of the Book of Esther.4

Another large proportion of manuscripts reflects previously unknown texts that expand on biblical themes, including dozens of legal texts (especially the Temple Scroll); narratives and so-called Testaments of biblical figures (the Genesis Apocryphon, the Testament of Kohath); hymns; and prayers. Calendars, horoscopes, and cryptic texts are also found among the scrolls. The texts are almost exclusively written in Hebrew and Aramaic (with a small number in Greek), and they are diverse but not comprehensive in their representation of...

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