Identifying the People of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Scholarship has primarily concentrated on identifying the sectarian movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls with a specific group known from ancient writers, most often the Essenes as described by Josephus, Philo, and Pliny the Elder. This chapter demonstrates that this approach to identity and identification is limited in scope and ultimately fails to offer a coherent and comprehensive portrait of the sectarian movement. It argues instead for attention to the diverse units of the evidence under analysis and to how identity labels are deeply connected to the modern scholarly settings in which in which they are crafted. This reorientation yields a model of identity that is attentive to the dynamism of the social movement by engaging with the fixed names and concepts emerging from the ancient texts and modern scholarly settings, while recognizing that these names and concepts rarely fit well for the totality of the movement. In this sense, the diversity of the people in the Dead Sea Scrolls can only be identified by utilizing the multiple and diverse designations employed within the textual evidence.