Converts in the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Gēr and Mutable Ethnicity by Carmen Palmer (review)

This comprehensive study of the term gēr in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a revised version of Palmer’s Ph.D. dissertation (University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, 2016; supervised by Sarianna Metso and Judith Newman), seeks to fill a lacuna in Second Temple scholarship. As Palmer notes in her introduction, “to date, no monograph and only a little over half a dozen articles exist” (p. 17) for this specific topic. Her research question is stated clearly at the opening of the volume: “what is the meaning of gēr when the term is employed within the Dead Sea Scrolls?” (p. 1).

The primary reason that this question has far from a simple answer is the distinct terminological shift that occurred in this term from denoting the resident alien in the Hebrew Bible to marking the convert to Judaism in rabbinic parlance. Hebrew will sub sequently clarify the ambiguity by references to a resident gēr and a righteous gēr, but this is a rabbinic development. In Second Temple times the confusion is not yet apparent, and hence it is unclear which of the two, if either, is designated by the term. Evidently, any inter -pretation carries with it the danger of imposing notions that are foreign to the text in question.

Although P. presents her research question as a limited, almost lexical, inquiry, the scope of the study goes far beyond philology. A remarkably systematic approach guides the discussion, allowing the author to make astute observations and offer firm statements on foundational matters relating to the scrolls.

The introduction presents a careful and thorough survey of scholarship, familiarizing the reader with the problem at hand, demonstrated by the array of possible interpretations of the term gēr. Any doubts that this small word merits such close inspection are certainly dispersed by the end of this chapter. The survey also addresses the concept of gēr in scholarship of the Hebrew Bible, as well as two crucial concepts for the understanding of Second Temple Judaism: the notion of sectarianism and the debate over its evidence in the scrolls, and the construction of Jewish identity as an ethnic, rather than a religious, identity. Following this survey, P. presents her own methodology and states the conclusions of her research: in the Dead Sea Scrolls, she claims, “the gēr is always a Judean convert whether included as a sectarian movement member, or excluded as ‘yet a gentile’” (p. 40).

The conclusion that the terminological shift occurred before rabbinic times and outside of the circles of the scrolls could raise some concern that P. is reading the scrolls through the lens of later Jewish sources. This is plainly not the case, however, as she carefully catalogues each occurrence of the term in the scrolls and thus cements her argument in the internal evidence of the scrolls themselves. Chapter 2 is dedicated to examining each of these occurrences. It opens with some background material that perhaps belongs in the introduction, including the social history of the sectarian movement and whether it should be identified with the Essenes (pp. 42–48). P. is skeptical about this identification but concludes that to link the sect reflected in the scrolls with the Essenes is “neither accurate nor necessary for the present task” (p. 48), setting the debate aside.

A discussion more pertinent to this chapter is the relationship between the Damascus Document texts (D) and the Community Rule texts (S). P. considers to be extreme Eyal Regev’s opinion (Sectarianism in Qumran: A Cross-Cultural Perspective [Religion and Society 45; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007]) that these texts reflect entirely different movements (p. 50), but she nevertheless finds the distinction of these two groups of texts helpful, as they suggest “two dominant traditions within the sectarian movement” (p. 51). This prism proves to be one of the most innovative contributions of the volume, as P. then proceeds to analyze each...