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)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/19901 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Walsh, Matthew |
| Contributors | Schuller, Eileen, Religious Studies |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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