Mediating the divine: Prophecy and revelation in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism

This study identifies and classifies prophetic and revelatory phenomena in the Dead Sea Scrolls. We explore how the Qumran community and wider segments of Second Temple period Judaism reflected within the Qumran corpus conceptualized the function of a prophet and the nature of the revelatory experience. We further examine the evidence for ongoing prophetic activity at Qumran and in contemporary Judaism.;The first and second parts of this study analyze prophetic and revelatory traditions found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Through analysis of the texts that re-present the classical prophets from Israel's biblical heritage and rewrite the character of their revelatory experience, we determine how the Qumran sectarians and contemporary Judaism conceptualized the meaning of prophecy and revelation in dialogue and in contrast with received biblical models. We argue that the Dead Sea Scrolls bear witness to a transformed prophetic tradition active both at Qumran and in Second Temple period Judaism. The recontextualization of ancient prophets and prophetic activity in the Dead Sea Scrolls provides the opportunity to develop a model of prophecy for the Qumran community and related elements in Second Temple Judaism. Alongside the portrait of the ancient prophets, we examine the few texts in the Qumran corpus that speculate on the nature of prophecy in the end of days. Though these texts present a very limited portrait of prophecy in the eschatological age, they attest to a new phase of prophetic history that the Qumran community believed was imminent.;The third section of this study examines the direct evidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls regarding ongoing prophetic activity at Qumran and within the larger Jewish world, in an attempt to define more closely the location of prophecy in these contexts and the character of its application. Relying upon the new rubrics of prophecy and revelation identified in earlier chapters, we find evidence for the application of these new prophetic and revelatory models in sectarian and non-sectarian contexts. Contemporary "prophetic" activity takes over the mediating function of ancient prophecy and the practitioners of these new modes of revelation view themselves in continuity with the ancient prophets.