SBL abstracts; Qumran covenant renewal

Discussion about the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, Talmud, Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeology, etc.
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StephenGoranson
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SBL abstracts; Qumran covenant renewal

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a) Society of Biblical Literature 2021 Annual Meeting abstracts are available [link corrected]:
https://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/Congr ... etingId=39
Though hearing the papers (in San Antonio or online) requires pay, these are free, and if like me you don’t want to read all of them, they are searchable by a word or name that may interest. Imo, some are good; at least a few I hope to learn more about.

b) A claim that Qumran was likely the location of an annual ritual of covenant renewal has been getting a lot of media attention lately (in Ha’aretz, Jerusalem Post, BAR. and others).

But that may not really be news.

Daniel Vainstub wrote, in an online journal, Religions (received 28 June, accepted 21 July 2021), “The Covenant Renewal Ceremony as the Main Function of Qumran.” [1]

In Live Science, Vainstub was quoted, apparently (?) referring to his proposal about the Damascus Document, “No one noticed this before me.” [2]

But J. T. Milik (translated from French by John Strugnell) wrote in Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea (1959) pages 116-7: “Entry into the sect took on a special importance; it took place on the day of the feast of the Renewal of the Covenant….At this festival, probably, Essenes from the most distant communities gathered together at the mother-house at Qumran….Our oldest manuscript of the Damascus Document places the ceremony of the renewal of the Covenant in the third month of the year.”

William H. Brownlee, “The Ceremony of Crossing of the Jordan in the Annual Covenanting at Qumran,” Alter Orient und Altes Testament, Band 211, 1982, 295-302, offers discussion.

Shemaryahu Talmon, after supporting the Essene identity (“A Further Link Between the Judean Covenanters and the Essenes,” HTR 1963, 313f), preferred to call the group the Community of the Renewed Covenant (book of the same title, ed. E. Ulrich and J. VanderKam, U Notre Dame P, 1994).

Several others also wrote about the annual ceremony, with varying degrees of certainty that it probably occurred at Qumran.

Philo and Josephus both estimated the Essene population as “more than 4000." Imo they “got some of their reports on Essenes from Strabo, who in turn drew on Posidonius.” See S. Goranson, “Posidonius, Strabo and Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa as Sources on Essenes,” Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 45 no. 2 (Autumn 1994), pp. 295-98, at 295-96. [3]
Not sure whether all of them would fit in nearby caves or the southern extension. Perhaps the ritual was required for initiation but, in subsequent years, when possible?

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/8/578
[2] https://www.livescience.com/medieval-da ... ll-mystery
[3] https://people.duke.edu/~goranson/Posid ... ssenes.pdf
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