Pockets Full of Piety

The ancient historian Josephus records that Palestine witnessed a surge in Jewish sectarianism during the second and first c. BCE, resulting in the proliferation of groups associated with the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Qumran sects. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of ancient sectarian manuscripts from the first c. BCE, offers an unprecedented glimpse into the debates and social issues that generated and sustained sectarian identities during this period. This project addresses the following stream of questions: what was it about the context of late Second Temple Judea that made this area/time so fertile for the emergence of sectarian organizations and how did that context give shape to various ideological and structural paradigms associated with Jewish sects? Scholarship has concluded that ancient Jewish sectarianism derives its origin from the widespread cultural debates over halakhah and/or politics that characterize the late Second Temple period. That is, sectarian research generally frames those groups as political and/or theological protest movements and studies sectarian groups principally in relation to their beliefs which stand in opposition to a normative church or political institution. This is largely due to the fact that scholarship of ancient Jewish sectarianism invariably draws its methodological frameworks from Bryan Wilson and/or Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, each of whom preserve the church-sect dichotomy and protest language originally proposed in Max Weber’s pioneering definition of sectarianism. However, this two-fold framework of sectarianism oversimplifies the complex formation of sectarian groups and ideologies. Instead, this project blends methodological insights from David Chalcraft’s reading of Weber and Karl Marx’s historical materialism in order to better understand the material economic conditions that undergird the emergence of sectarian groups and the production of sectarian ideologies. In so doing, this project argues that Jewish sectarianism flourished in the late Second Temple period because of the increasingly desperate and precarious economic conditions in which most of the population lived.The first half of this dissertation reconstructs the economic atmosphere of Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Hasmonean Palestine, emphasizing the degree to which class violence and macroeconomic changes with regard to coinage, tenancy, and taxation resulted in an extremely anxious situation for the Judean peasantry. These chapters argue that extant literature from the late Second Temple period, including the Zenon Papyri, 4QInstruction, and Ben Sira, attest to an overwhelming economic malaise which emerged from an increasingly precarious economic landscape and generated interest in sectarian activity. The second half of the project then examines the way in which the economic context of the second and first c. BCE influenced the nature of the sectarian ideologies and structures depicted in the extant Dead Sea Scrolls. This project’s methodological approach to sectarianism based on a reinterpretation of Weber and Marx’s Materialismus highlights the material backgrounds that engender the development of unique ideologies and organizational practices. Chapters Four and Five thus argue that the precarious economic atmosphere of late Second Temple Palestine shaped the way the sectarian texts understood and articulated the concept of election and the way sectarian groups managed the wealth of its constituents in cooperative ways so as to obviate the need for excessive borrowing and prevent the accumulation of debt. This approach sheds light on the way that the sectarian texts represent the value of sectarian membership in relation to monetary wealth, consistently emphasizing the superiority of the former in juxtaposition to the latter. Therefore, the second half of this project interprets the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls in relation to their economic context in order to illuminate the complex relationship that exists between ancient Jewish sects and the depleting financial conditions of Hellenistic and Hasmonean rule in ancient Palestine. Altogether, I submit that scholarship can better understand the representations of sectarian ideologies and organizational patterns in the Dead Sea Scrolls when they are read in direct conjunction with the economic context of the ancient world.