Alex P. Jassen, Violence, Power, and Society in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.I noted the publication of the book here. And here is an old post of mine about the Branch Davidians. Alas, almost all the links have evaporated.The Dead Sea Scrolls inhabit a world between texts and ideas, between imagination and lived reality. The texts are carefully constructed literary productions that reflect a wide range of human creativity and imagination, and likely a good deal of anxiety about the world and the authors’ place in it. My goal in this book has been to peek behind the texts to recover the opaque world of the ancient people who created these texts and the impulses that compelled them to do so. In so doing, I also was finally able to answer many of my own linger questions about the Branch Davidians.
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