Review of Jason, Repentance at Qumran

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: The Evolution and Experience of Repentance at Qumran (Carmen Palmer).

In Mark A. Jason’s revised doctoral dissertation, Repentance at Qumran: The Penitential Framework of Religious Experience in the Dead Sea Scrolls, he argues that for the Qumran community, “repentance was the very basis of the community’s existence,” and that the community exists within one overarching “penitential worldview” (249–250). Beginning with a working definition of repentance as that which entails “the radical turning away from anything which hinders one’s whole-hearted devotion to God and the corresponding turning to God in love and obedience” (as defined by Jacob Milgrom, 8), Jason gradually builds his own definition of repentance at Qumran. He does this by means of a study of various Dead Sea Scrolls, as compared to scriptural and other Second Temple literature.

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Earlier essays in AJR's current series on the Dead Sea Scrolls (in honor of the 70th anniversary of their discovery) are noted here and links.