The Self As Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran‪.‬

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 Newsom's 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 Grossman's 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.