This dissertation investigates the praxis of kechien, forming a karmic connection, evidenced in various religious picture scrolls produced during the Golden Era of their production in Japan, the late thirteenth through the early fourteenth century. This study is inspired by two goals: (1) to define the concept and practice of kechien, and (2) to challenge the widely accepted idea that picture scrolls, emaki, were used solely as a didactic and proselytizing tool. This absence of scholarly work focusing on kechien is rather astonishing considering that a variety of kechien practices are still omnipresent today and were especially so in medieval Japan. Inspired by Miya Tsugio's suggestion that some emaki were created for the purpose of kechien, I examine text and painting within picture scrolls as well as Buddhist scriptures and contemporary literary works in order to understand the role they played in the formation of kechien. I propose that emaki scrolls served as both a means and a site of kechien in medieval Japanese religious praxis.The dissertation starts with the concept of kechien seen through various modern dictionaries and the writings of Zhiyi and Genshin, two early monks whose works are often cited as the locus classicus for the term. As my study aims to explore praxis, I then turn to various practices of kechien performed by two types of people: producer and audience. I argue that production and consumption of religious picture scrolls were both regarded as valid and legitimate religious practices, especially near the perceived beginning of the age of mappo, the Final Age of the Dharma. People believed that once they had formed a kechien link with the subject of emaki scrolls through its production and viewing, they would be reborn into a Pure Land and ultimately achieve enlightenment sometime in the future. They also performed meritorious acts utilizing emaki scrolls in order to strengthen their karmic affinity and improve their conditions for enlightenment.

This dissertation investigates ways in which early Jewish communities conceptualized the production and collection of writing. Through a study of 11QPsalms-a, the Qumran Psalms Scroll, it shows how modern book culture (shaped by the canon, codex, print, authorial copyright, and scholarly editing) has distorted our understanding of ancient texts and fostered anachronistic questions about their creation and reception. Taking seriously what early Jewish texts have to say about their own writtenness and building upon earlier scholarship on scriptural multiformity, the dissertation also uses theoretical insights from the field of Book History to study the identity, assembly, and literary context of the Psalms Scroll as an example of the ancient textual imagination. Physical and discursive evidence suggest that no concept of a “Book of Psalms” existed as a coherent entity in the ancient Jewish imagination, but that psalms collections were conceptualized and created in looser, unbounded ways. New metaphors made possible by electronic text, which likewise cannot be constrained into the categories of print book culture, can encourage new ways of imagining ancient concepts of fluid textuality as well. After a study of the status and compilation of the Psalms Scroll (Ch. 1-2), the dissertation engages the question of Davidic authorship (Ch. 3). David was not imagined as the author of a particular psalms collection, but as the inaugurator of a variety of liturgical traditions. The identity between an individual figure and a specific text should be unbound in favour of a looser relationship, allowing for the continuing growth of traditions inspired by the figure. Chapters 4 and 5 present a reading of the Psalms Scroll and Davidic lore alongside two other traditions: Ben Sira and angelic ascent literature. Both possess literary links with the Psalms Scroll, but also shed light on the ways in which ancient communities imagined writing and understood their own relationship to their texts. Thus, reading across canonical and generic boundaries embeds psalms traditions in a richer context of reception and provides a fuller picture of the ancient textual imagination. The conclusion makes a comparative gesture toward the Nachleben of psalms collecting in Syriac Christianity.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

The linguistic character of the “biblical” Dead Sea Scrolls has been of interest to scholars since the very beginning of scrolls research. However, scholars have disagreed over the nature of the language found in those scrolls. Some argue that the “biblical” scrolls are essential to our understanding of Second Temple Hebrew, while others set these scrolls aside in favour of the non-biblical texts. Yet, no one has undertaken a comprehensive analysis of the “biblical” scrolls, which is essential if we hope to settle this debate. This study fills that void by providing a comprehensive analysis of all the “biblical” DSS. Over forty different features are discussed through a comparison between the “biblical” scrolls and the other major witnesses to the Hebrew Bible. Current linguistic theories, including robust inferential statistical tools, are utilised within the analysis in order to provide conclusions based on sound methodology. This study begins with a global analysis of all the “biblical” scrolls, focusing on a comparison between the plene and defective manuscripts. Through that analysis, this study concludes that there are very few linguistic modernisations found in the “biblical” scrolls. In order to verify this conclusion, five individual scrolls are analysed. Finally, this study closes by providing a qualitative analysis of the “biblical” scrolls and shows their linguistic character to be most consistent with a scribal culture of linguistic stability and textual authority.

The Dead Sea Scrolls provide verifiable everyday depictions of mixed communities of elite and ordinary Essenes in the Second Temple period. However, to date, scholarship on purity and impurity in the Dead Sea Scrolls has been mainly concerned with establishing an elite - predominantly male focused - history. This thesis aims to redress this imbalance through the application of contemporary theories from Gender Studies to selected purity passages of the Dead Sea Scrolls, to challenge the view that women are an uncontrollable and leaky problem when they are impure and to bring the uncontrollable aspects of the impure and vulnerable male into discussion. This will be achieved in four ways. Firstly, by applying Raewyn Connell’s hegemonic masculinity framework, I will use references to the Rule of the Community (in its 1QS form) and the War Scroll (in its 1QM form), to demonstrate the vulnerable and uncontrollable aspects of ordinary male impurities. This will reveal the evolving vulnerability of men when impure and the dimensions at play between masculinity and purity/impurity. Secondly, the embodied and empowered aspects of impure women will be revealed through an application of embodiment theories to selected passages from 4QD (4Q266 and 4Q272) and 4QTohorot A (4Q274). This will demonstrate from an empowered and embodied perspective how the impure female is regulated. Thirdly, I will be applying Susies Scott’s three conceptual features for understanding the everyday to the Temple Scroll (11QTa) and the Rule of the Congregation (1QSa) to demonstrate the changing dynamics between ordinary impure males and impure females. When necessary Scott’s three conceptual features will be used throughout each of the three principal chapters to reveal how impurity disrupts the construction of daily life. Fourthly, underlying each of these points is the premise that gender and purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls communities are performative, dynamic and constantly changing categories. To conclude, the application of inter-disciplinary approaches provides an enhanced understanding of the everyday realities experienced by the pure and impure ordinary members of the Dead Sea Scrolls communities and forms the basis for additional studies in this topic area.

Thesis advisor: David S. Vanderhooft / In this dissertation, I explore the metaphorical value of law in the Hebrew Bible and Hellenistic Jewish literature. While the study of biblical law and Hellenistic Jewish halakah is well established, less attention has been paid to the intentional use of legal diction to create legal metaphors—metaphors that draw upon legal language for the sake of generating new ethical and theological insights. My argument is based upon Roger White’s theory of metaphor which states that a metaphor juxtaposes two otherwise unrelated vocabularies in order to produce new meaning. Thus, I draw upon comparative study of ancient Near Eastern law as a means of understanding the register of biblical Hebrew legal diction concerning land tenure and inheritance. With the legal background established, I investigate three sets of metaphors, one drawn from the prohibition against violating established property boundaries and two drawn from the legal domain of inheritance: the inheritance of wisdom and the inheritance of glory. These legal metaphors demonstrate the profitability of attending to legal diction. The boundary metaphor demonstrates that when attempting to describe the good or virtuous life, law served not only to provide a description of obligations, it also shaped the way in which early Jewish communities understood reality itself. The inheritance of wisdom metaphors demonstrate that sophisticated comparisons could be drawn between legal concepts and scribal learning, particularly when wisdom was thought of as a document. The inheritance of glory metaphors demonstrate the way in which semantic shifting impacts the meaning of a metaphor. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

The Book of Mormon contains twenty-one chapters of the Book of Isaiah: two through fourteen, twenty-nine, and forty-eight through fifty-four. The language is primarily that of the King James Version with some variations. The King James Version itself has been translated from the Massoretic Hebrew Text. It is a fair assumption that the variations in the Book of Mormon represent an older, more accurate text than the Massoretic Text.Textual critics are anxious to find ancient texts and versions of the scriptures in the hope that some of these texts may contain readings closer to the original than does the Massoretic Text thereby avoiding some of the errors of transmission to which the Massoretic Text has succumbed during its long history. It is generally expected among believers in the Book of Mormon that the variations in the Book of Mormon will be supported by comparison with the ancient versions and ancient Hebrew texts of Isaiah.

A well-known characteristic of the Qumran sectarian texts is the boast that community membership included fellowship with the angels, but scholars disagree as to the precise meaning of these claims. In order to gain a better understanding of angelic fellowship at Qumran, this study utilizes the fact that an important facet of Early Jewish angelology was the concept that certain angels were closely associated with Israel. Specifically, these angels can be placed in one of two categories: guardians (i.e., warriors who strove against Israel’s enemies, celestial or otherwise) and priests (i.e., the celebrants of the heavenly temple). A crucial component of the presentation of both angelic guardians and angelic priests was that they were envisioned within apocalyptic worldviews that assumed that realities on earth mirrored those of heaven, with the latter serving as the ideal, archetypal, or “more real” world. After discussing the conceptual backgrounds of angels associated with Israel in the Ancient Near Eastern texts and in the pre-exilic, exilic, and early post-exilic texts of the Hebrew Bible, this study sets out to compare how angelic guardians and angelic priests are presented in both the sectarian texts and the late Second Temple Period compositions of a non-sectarian provenance found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. While the non-sectarian compositions clearly posit a connection, correspondence, or parallel relationship between the angels and the Jewish people, an interesting facet of these works is that they imply definitions of Israel that are either quite generous or more stringent but paradoxically tempered by universalistic sentiments. Conversely, the witness of the sectarian compositions is that the Yahad viewed itself alone as the true Israel of God, with these texts evincing the belief that the angels associated with Israel had a unique connection to the sectarians, who had effectively usurped for themselves the privileges that were formerly those of the entire nation. Moreover, the texts which speak of angelic fellowship – both during the eschatological war and in the present time – suggest that sect members upheld the lofty self-estimation that they were either equal to the angels in some sense or had even attained a rank and glory higher than the angels. Given that the sectarians were convinced that their reconstitution of Israel’s covenant was the nation as it ought to be, there arguably would have been no better way for the Yahad to promote itself as such than to boast that the sect members were equal to – and even outranked – the guardians and priests of heavenly, archetypal Israel. Thus, while there has been scholarly disagreement as to the exact meaning of the sectarian angelic fellowship claims, this thesis demonstrates that at least part of the meaning is to be found in the contribution these claims make to the identity of the sect as the true Israel of God. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The psalms of the Hodayot tradition (the Thanksgiving Psalms from Qumran) have been customarily divided into two categories: the “Teacher Hymns” written by a leader of the sect at Qumran, and the “Community Hymns” associated with the ordinary members of the sect. These categories are considered problematic because of well-recognized problems pertaining to authorship and to the poor fit of many of the psalms in the categories. I propose a new set of categories for the Hodayot that classify the psalms on the basis of genre. It is my contention that genre offers a better frame of reference because it defines the psalms against the backdrop of the genres of early Jewish psalms and not solely in terms of the sectarian community. To propose new generic categories, I employ John Swales’s rhetorical moves analysis to classify the psalms on the basis of how their formal structures (what he calls “rhetorical moves”) work together to achieve common rhetorical objectives. Swales defines a composition’s genre primarily by its rhetorical objectives rather than a definitional checklist of features. I use rhetorical moves analysis to describe where the Hodayot psalms fall along the spectrum of descriptive and declarative praise in Claus Westermann’s schema for the genres of the biblical psalms. I conclude that there are two interlocking generic categories in the Hodayot: eschatological psalms of thanksgiving and psalms of hymnic confession. These generic categories have overlapping rhetorical strategies consisting of rhetorical moves that work closely together to achieve the primary communicative purpose of praising God descriptively and declaratively. In this respect, they serve the Maskil’s secondary rhetorical objective of instructing the audience in the sectarian discourses of praise and supplication, making the Hodayot tradition a part of the Maskil’s programme of instructing sectarians and evaluating their insight into the divine plan. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In this thesis I study the Thanksgiving Psalms from Qumran (1QHodayot a ), a collection of Jewish psalms from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The collection is typically divided into two categories: the “Teacher Hymns” written by a leader of a sect, and the “Community Hymns” that are associated with his followers. Scholars agree that these categories are inadequate, but no alternatives have been offered. I propose to use a more flexible approach that can classify all of the psalms by genre. The psalms are classified on a spectrum between two modes of praise by their objectives and strategies of persuasion. I argue that the psalms participate in two interlocking genres (the eschatological psalms of thanksgiving and the psalms of hymnic confession) and that all the psalms enable the speaker (the Maskil/Instructor) to achieve the two objectives of praising God and instructing his audience how to do the same.

It is widely agreed among scholars that the third part of the Hebrew canon, the Writings, is a miscellaneous collection of materials, as its name would seem to suggest. My thesis re-examines this assumption. The introduction sets out the critical issues, outlines the thesis and charts the larger picture from which the thesis makes a limited contribution. Chapter one explains my approach. In critical conversation with Brevard Childs and his adherents, I examine the need for contours within the canonical context that respect the discrete voice of each book, while understanding it in relationship to the larger collection in which it is located. The canon is not like a street map, rather, it is more like a topographical map providing contour and depth to the canonical terrain. Taking Childs’ approach one step further; I examine the formation of the Twelve Minor prophets and the Psalter in order to develop a redaction critical grammar for the compilation of texts into collections that serves as a methodological check for the project. This grammar includes the use of catchwords or phrases to bind adjacent books near their seams, the juxtaposition of similar or contrasting themes, framing devices, and superscriptions to provide an overall structure. Chapter two analyzes the formation of the Writings in antiquity. There were a number of different conceptions of sacred literature within Judaism, but probably within temple circles the canon of the Jews was closed prior to the end of the first century C.E. The Prologue to Ben Sira testifies to a tripartite arrangement of the Jewish canon, and 4 Ezra, which provides solid evidence that the canon was closed sometime prior to the end of the first century C.E., confirms the antiquity of a tripartite arrangement. Chapter three explores the various orders for the Writings. Within the conceptual world of Judaism, the concern with the order of the books is not the result of the invention of the codex or long scroll, but rather arises from the holiness attributed to these books in association with their strong connection to the temple and its sacred space. Despite the consensus that there are a vast number of orders for the collection, in fact there is only evidence that the Masoretic (Leningrad Codex) and the Talmudic (Baba Batra 14b) orders existed prior to the twelfth century C.E. The grouping of the Megilloth in the Masoretic tradition is probably not the result of liturgical practices within Judaism, as is commonly thought, which leaves room to re-examine the antiquity of this order. Both arrangements reveal a similar logic of association among the books of the Writings with the possible exception of Ruth. Chapter four explores the location of Ruth in the Former Prophets between Judges and Samuel and in the Writings after Proverbs and before the Psalter. Ruth has been purposefully figured into the Former Prophets and then later was integrated into the Writings after Proverbs as a wisdom book. In this case, different orders bear witness to the search for meaningful associations within the canon. Chapter five probes Esther’s position as part of the sub-collection of Lamentations, Esther, Daniel and Ezra-Nehemiah, in which it always follows Lamentations and is juxtaposed to Daniel. Within this canonical frame I explore Esther’s links to Daniel 1-6 and Lamentations 5 and the way this sets in relief Esther’s theology. Chapter six briefly observes some compilational phenomena in Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes and Lamentations. I also examine the structure of the Megilloth as a whole and the forces at work in this sub-collection. The thesis concludes, due to historical and exegetical reasons, that the codification of the Megilloth into a collection is an integral part of the canonical process rather than a formal feature that is the result of some supposed effort to close the canon.