2 - Mutable Ethnicity in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Intertwined Acts of Tolerance and Intolerance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2022
Summary
Abstract
By analyzing how the term ger is used in the Dead Sea scrolls, particularly in relation to conversion, this article demonstrates the variety of attitudes in the community toward outsiders. One tradition reflects tolerance through a notion of mutable ethnicity: taking on Jewish kinship and connection to land, the Gentiles who converted became full members as ger. The scrolls also reflect another, more intolerant tradition in which the gerim (plur.) were inauthentic converts who had to be excluded from the community for reasons of kinship and religious practice.
Keywords: identity; Dead Sea scrolls, outsiders; ethnicity
Overview
In seeking patterns that promote tolerance of others within the period of ancient Judaism, a ready marker is a group's inclusion of an outsider through the process of conversion. Likewise, the prohibition of a convert's inclusion into a group could mark a type of intolerance. Within the cultures of this ancient Mediterranean context, a conversion includes a change in religious practice, such as Torah obedience within ancient Judaism. However, a conversion includes more than merely a change in religious practice: all components of an identity transform, or convert, to the new group. This full identity is known as an “ethnic identity,” and a working definition of its components include, in addition to religious practice, a notion of shared kinship, as well as connection to land. When ethnic identity is mutable, permitting a conversion, one observes a type of “tolerance” to heretofore outsiders, and where ethnic identity is immutable, denying a conversion or the inclusion of a convert, a type of “intolerance.” A cursory look at texts from within ancient Judaism highlights both trends of mutable and immutable ethnicity. For example, Philo intimates that Gentile individuals who have made a change in their connection to land and their religious practices have also made a change in their kinship, and now constitute converts:
Moreover, after the lawgiver has established commandments respecting one's fellow countrymen, he proceeds to show that he looks upon strangers also as worthy of having their interests attended to by his laws, since they have forsaken their natural relations by blood, and their native land and their national customs, and the sacred temples of their gods, and the worship and honour which they had been wont to pay to them, and have migrated with a holy migration,
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- Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021