Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls by Bruce McComiskey;

Author:Bruce McComiskey;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

DISCURSIVE ENTITLEMENT, MORAL IMPURITY, AND RITUAL ERASURE IN THE TEMPLE SCROLL

The Temple Scroll describes sources of moral impurity, their discursive materialization or entitlement in the nation of Israel and the sanctuary, and the ritual erasure of discursive entitlement through required festivals and sacrifices.8 Although it is difficult to date the Temple Scroll (because 11QT is a copy of an older text and may be a composite of several different versions), it is clear that the purity regulations described there are more stringent than those described in the Torah, a hallmark of Essene sectarian ideology.9 The Temple Scroll begins with a detailed description of the altar, the sanctuary, and the court. These dimensions, designs, and materials are not selected for aesthetic reasons but for metaphysical reasons, since the structure of God’s Temple in heaven served as the blueprint or prototype for the Temple on earth (Price 2005, 49–52). Since the earthly Temple was a place for God literally to abide, it was imperative that this Temple remain pure and undefiled, just as the heavenly Temple was pure and undefiled. Unfortunately, the Israelites were human, not divine, and moral impurity was a condition of their very existence since the moral transgression of Adam and Eve. Moral impurity resulting from sin did not defile individual Israelites, as ritual impurity did; rather, moral impurity defiled the entire nation of Israel and the sanctuary that was their God’s residence on earth, making moral purity (in addition to ritual purity) critical to the continuation of the biblical covenants.

Discursive Materialization of Moral Impurity

Like ritual impurities, moral impurities are materialized through what Burke calls entitlement, a process in which material objects acquire meaning through their associations with specific discourses. In entitlement, language acquires a kind of spirit from its social uses, and words about things inspirit these things with meaning. Thus, things become the signs of words (not the other way around). Throughout the biblical texts, specific details are abstracted until a few salient objects take on all of the various meanings throughout the discourses of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. In the case of moral impurity and the discourses that describe it, those salient objects are the nation of Israel and the sanctuary. The demigod term that inspirits the nation and sanctuary of the Israelites with moral impurity is sin, and the term “sin” is an abstraction of biblical discourses about various actions that are abominations to God. The Torah describes numerous different sins that cause moral impurity: unjust treatment of other Israelites, sexual deviance, murder, polytheism, idolatry, swearing against God, apathy toward God, profaning a commandment, refusing to rebuke an Israelite sinner, and reneging on a vow made before God. Although the word “sin” appears throughout the Torah, its use is concentrated in the Priestly (P) literature, and especially in Leviticus and Numbers, which together contain about three-quarters of the Torah’s uses of the word “sin,” and many of those uses (about three-quarters) are part of the phrase “sin offering.” In the communal language

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