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The Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran, by Carol A. Newsom. STDJ 52. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Pp. x + 382. $155 (hardcover). ISBN 900413803X. Although Carol Newsoms approach to the Dead Sea Scrolls is familiar from several essays published in the early 1990s, her book is very much a novelty in the world of scrolls scholarship. Her dialogue partners are M. M. Bakhtin and Michel Foucault, rather than Lawrence Schiffman and James C. VanderKam, although she is also fully conversant with recent (and not so recent) scholarship on the scrolls. Critical theory has hitherto made even less impression on Qumran studies than on biblical scholarship. (Maxine Grossmans study, Reading for History in the Damascus Document [STDJ 45; Leiden: Brill, 2002], is the main exception that comes to mind). In part, this is due to the fact that scholarly energy in the past decade has been absorbed by the task of editing the texts, but in larger part it is due to the persistent fascination with historical questions about the scrolls. Newsom does not question the validity of such questions, but they do not set her agenda. Rather, she uses the categories of discourse analysis to investigate how the Qumran community constructed itself and engaged its larger social context. The book is divided into six chapters. The first of these outlines the theoretical approach, which is indebted to the work of Bakhtin and his circle. All communities construct themselves in large measure through their discourse. The discourse of a sectarian community has distinctive features, as it needs to distinguish itself from other communities. Discourse also forms the identities of individuals. We first emerge as subjects in the context of language and receive our identities from various symbolic practices (p. 12). Discourse also provides strategies for the encompassing of situations, in the phrase of Kenneth Burke. Newsom cites with approval the dictum of Fredric Jameson, that the symbolic act of a text is the function of inventing imaginary or formal solutions to unresolvable social contradictions (p. 16). So it is possible to uncover the political unconscious of a text, or the way it attempts to address a historical or ideological problem. Especially important is the insight of Foucault that discourse is power, because it is what gives meaning to the world (p. 19). In any society, one may speak of a dominant discourse, which can be identified with the practices of the establishment. A sectarian discourse is a counter-discourse, which has to make a place for itself by making problematic what the dominant discourse takes for granted. Such a discourse is not necessarily polemical all the time, but it is of necessity interruptive or disruptive, as it presents a challenge to the status quo. The second chapter is an attempt to map the various strategies of discourse in Second Temple Judaism. To a great degree, the competing discourses of this period may be regarded as a debate about the proper construal of the Torah. Newsom accepts in broad outline E. P. Sanderss view of a common Judaism, or a broadly consensual religious culture in the Palestinian area. Nonetheless, it was difficult to establish a monopoly on the interpretation of Torah, even by groups with official status. She goes on to discuss the various roles played by scribes, and their attitudes to Torah. For Ben Sira, wisdom is the master discourse into which the discourse of halakah is inserted (p. 41). Daniel scarcely talks about the Torah at all. Nonetheless, Newsom notes evidence of a common scribal ethos, shared even by figures whose ideologies of knowledge are quite different. The Pharisees are taken to represent a form of nonscribal expertise. Most constructions of Torah view it as a kind of knowledge, whether guaranteed by

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ancestral tradition or by special revelation. But not everyone made knowledge the key to the will of God, as can be seen from the Maccabean focus on zeal for the law. The sectarians saw themselves as a new Israel, and accepted the common concept of covenant as the basis of their identity. They insisted, however, that, while some things were revealed to all Israel, true Torah could only be known within the sect, so that to enter the covenant was in effect to enter the community. After these two introductory chapters, Newsom turns to the scrolls and devotes two chapters each to the Community Rule and the Hodayot. The first of these, ch. 3, is a relatively brief discussion of the treatise on the Two Spirits. Two features of the discourse are emphasized. First, even at the level of syntax, the passage claims that one cannot really know one thing without knowing many other things and their relationships. Things are joined together in webs of significance. If one wants to know about human character or why the righteous sin, one has to know about the plan of God for all creation from beginning to end (p. 80). Second, there is the use of balanced pairs, light and darkness, truth and perversity, which simplify the complexity of the whole. Newsom argues that this model of knowledge is implicitly semiotic, insofar as it attempts to account for particular phenomena, such as traits of character, as elements in a system of relationships. She acknowledges, of course, that there are important differences between the metaphysical assumptions underlying the Qumran text and postmodern semiotics, but she argues that even the notion of God is nuanced by semiotic assumptions insofar as the divine plan involves a set of structured relationships. Following Fredric Jamesons idea of the political unconscious, she argues that the treatise can be seen as a response to the domination of Israel by foreign empires, although, in contrast to overtly political books like Daniel, here the political concern is displaced into anthropology. Chapter 4 is a much longer, sustained discussion of the rhetorical dynamics of the Community Rule. Newsom works with the form of the Rule found in 1QS, with occasional reference to the Cave 4 manuscripts. She accepts that the Rule is composite, but she argues for structural coherence nonetheless: the Serek ha-Yahad is roughly shaped to recapitulate the stages of life as a sectarian: from motivation, to admission, instruction, life together, and leadership (p. 107). The Serek is a book of instruction and formation. The rules are illustrative samples rather than comprehensive laws. The treatise on the Two Spirits construes the self as the product of the balance of spirits, an unstable construct liable to change in either direction. It is not simply a piece of anthropological and cosmological speculation but relates what one must know about oneself (p. 189). The emergence of an elite community in column 8 can be understood as an expression of the highest potential of the sect. The Maskil described in the closing columns is a model of the ideal sectarian self (p. 167). Newsom draws on Foucault to describe the yah\ad as a disciplinary community, where people are formed not only by instruction but also by practices. Even the character of the Maskil is formed not so much by conceptual knowledge as by experience of God and humankind (p. 173). Becoming a sectarian requires entry into a fictive or figured world, in which various privileged words, tropes, embedded narratives, patterns of behavior, and constructions of time create a distinctive form of reality and selfhood. By engaging in structured social practices and learning to speak the language of the figured world, the novice both receives a new identity and contributes to the construction of the community (p. 187).

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While the Community Rule addresses community life explicitly, the Hodayot are engaged in the formation of subjectivity. According to Newsom, subjectivity is not simply natural but is acquired in a social context. Oddly enough, the so-called hymns of the community do not talk about the community but presuppose it. The kind of subjectivity fostered in the Hodayot is described as the masochistic sublime: The model of God as absolute being that one finds in the Hodayot generates and is generated by a language of the self as nothingness (p. 220). The hymns cultivate a sense of estrangement from the dominant culture, but they do not talk about the integration of the speaker into the community of the sect. Instead, they offer a proleptic resolution of earthly problems by speaking of fellowship with the angelic world. The distinctive character of the rhetoric of these hymns is nicely illustrated by a contrast with Psalm 119 (p. 270). The last full chapter of the book, before a brief conclusion, is devoted to the socalled Teacher Hymns. Newsom is skeptical about attempts to specify the authorship of these compositions. While she does not think the evidence sufficient either to establish or to disprove the view that the Teachers persona is reflected in these hymns, she argues that it is important to loosen the grip that this hypothesis about the Teacher of Righteousness has had on our scholarly imaginations (p. 288). Newsoms interest is not in historical questions about the Teacher, but in the ways in which these hymns were read, to shape the ethos of sectarian life. So she proposes that the Hodayot articulate a leadership myth that was appropriated by the current leader in much the same fashion that the ordinary member identified with the I of the so-called Hodayot of the community (p. 288). The references to trials and opponents may be real or imagined. Newsom notes that sectarian communities need to maintain a sense of persecution and opposition as part of their rationale. These Hodayot can be read as complementary to the Community Rule. They articulate the affective dimension of sectarian existence, which was obscured in the rhetoric of legal regulations. The world of modern scholarship, no less than that of Second Temple Judaism, is a world of competing discourses, each with its own figured world and distinctive language, which the student must learn to speak. Much of contemporary academic discourse is couched in the language of theorists such as Foucault. The most obvious achievement of this book is that it is the first major study to apply such language to the study of the scrolls. Readers who are broadly versed in the humanities and already familiar with such languages will welcome this development as long overdue. Old-fashioned historical critics who look with suspicion on new-fangled phrases and theoretical abstractions will probably greet it with apprehension. But they may at least take comfort from the fact that the author is no ideological polemicist, and that, while she is attempting to reorient the discussion the scrolls, she is well versed in the more conventional scholarship and is by no means repudiating it. One obvious gain from the new form of discourse is new vocabulary, which entails new insights or at least offers attractive ways of expressing old ones. The masochistic sublime offers some advantages for English speakers over the German Niedrigskeitdoxologie. But Newsoms discourse analysis also benefits from sustained attention to the literary and rhetorical character of the text. The difference made by her approach is perhaps most clearly evident in her discussion of the so-called Teacher Hymns. Undeniably, the great temptation of historical criticism is to move too quickly from references in a text, often taken out of context, to historical reconstruction. Discourse analysis, as

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practiced by Newsom, is a powerful antidote to this temptation, while it does not at the same time dispute the inherent value of historical questions. Throughout the book, she shifts the focus away from authorial intention to the effects these texts would have had on their readers or hearers. Her use of Foucault heightens the readers awareness of issues of power. Her reading of the Community Rule is, to my knowledge, the most persuasive attempt yet to imagine how this text might have functioned in a community. It is not a descriptive account of the actual practices of a community, but rather an illustrative prescription that attempts to shape community life, and an articulation of normative ideals. Again, the discussion of the Two Spirits shifts the focus from the cosmology as such (although that is a perfectly legitimate subject of investigation) to the way it is being used to mold character. If the book has limitations (and what book does not?), they lie in the rather abstract character of the discussion. To be sure, a measure of abstraction is inevitable, since we lack specific details about the life and history of the sect. The suggestion that the treatise on the Two Spirits is a response to political domination may be valid, but its validity must be sought rather deep in the unconscious. One may wonder whether Newsoms reading of the Teacher Hymns as a leadership myth does full justice to the distinctive voice we encounter in those poems, although her reading would not be negated if the Hymns could be shown to be the work of a specific individual such as the Teacher. The location of the Scrolls among the strategies of discourse of Second Temple Judaism might emerge more clearly from a detailed historical comparison of specific texts and movements. But here again, this would not invalidate what Newsom has written, which is meant to be suggestive rather than comprehensive in any case. It is unlikely that future discussion of the scrolls will be dominated by Foucaultian discourse, but it should be enriched by the numerous insights of this pioneering study. We are indebted to Newsom for expanding our horizons and opening up a new angle of vision on these intriguing texts. John J. Collins Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511

The Worldly and Heavenly Wisdom of 4QInstruction, by Matthew Goff. STDJ 50. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Pp. xii + 276. $113.00 (hardcover). ISBN 900413591X. Matthew Goffs book represents a watershed of sorts for both the study of 4QInstruction and the wisdom material from Qumran. While Goff does not necessarily revolutionize our understanding of 4QInstruction, his cautious approach to both the texts fragmentary manuscripts and its frequently enigmatic vocabulary, combined with a comprehensive overview and critique of the scholarship on the text to date, results in the first study on 4QInstruction to discuss both the past and present state of scholarship on this material while simultaneously highlighting several areas in need of further study. A revised version of Goffs Ph.D. dissertation written under the supervision of John J. Collins at the University of Chicago, this well-written study is primarily concerned with how 4QInstruction should be understood in relation to wisdom and apocalypticism (p. 27). According to Goff, 4QInstructions content and place within the literature of the Second Temple period cannot be truly appreciated without taking into