"מחזור" הברכות של כת מדבר יהודה

The life of the covenanters of the Judaean desert was based on a special calendar-reckoning which differed from the calendar employed by normative Judaism. Because of the resulting different timing of festivals the covenanters were cut off from the communal institutions of contemporaneous Jewry, foremost from the participation in the Temple service which ordered sacrifices to be offered on the altar at times not appointed in the sect's calendar. Members of the sect were thus deprived of the most prominent medium, at that time, of communication with God, as individuals as well as a community. The voluntary abstention from temple ritual gave rise to a situation in the sect which is similar in some respect to circumstances which were to determine socio-religious developments in normative Judaism after the destruction of the Temple. In both these instances the lack of the medium of sacrifice seems to have promoted the emergence of institutional prayer. Starting from this premise the author endeavours to trace in the rediscovered writings of the sect and foremost in the last two columns of DSD, remnants of a fixed "Order of prayer". The psalm affixed to DSD (ix, 26–xi, 22) is subdivided into three literary units, the first two of which constitute the subject of this study. The first unit (ix, 26–x, 8) lists the fixed times of prayer throughout the day and throughout the year and was aptly styled "The psalm of the appointed times" (מזמור העתים). The second unit (x, 8–xi, 15) is designated here "Psalm (or Manual) of Benedictions". A detailed analysis of this psalm reveals striking points of resemblance with some of the basic benedictions incorporated in the "ʿAmida", one of the earliest Jewish liturgical compositions, and a paraphrase of Deut. vi, 7, the opening line of the Shemaʿ prayer, another stock element of early Jewish liturgy. The arrangement of benedictions in the Sectarian psalm differs from the order of benedictions in the ʿAmida. This feature is adduced as further evidence for the assumed antiquity of the sect's order of prayer since it is paralleled by another variant arrangement of benedictions from the ʿAmida in Ben-Sira's Song of Praise (li, 21–25). A laxity in the order of benedictions of the ʿAmida in early times is attested for by sayings of the Sages (Bab. Tal. Ber. 34a). The reconstruction of an early sectarian order of prayers based on DSD ix–xi is complemented by further remnants of such prayers in DSW and DST and especially by a fragment of a "prayer for the Day of Atonement" published in QI (34 bis). A comparison of this prayer uttered at the ceremony of admission of novices to the sect (DSD i, 22 ff.; ii, 25–iii, 12; CDC xx, 27–34) prompts the assumption that this ceremony was actually performed on the Day of Atonement and served as a substitute for the service in the Temple from which the Sectarians had excluded themselves. The daily routine of a sectarian from the Judaean Desert which emerges from the foregoing analysis is then compared with Josephus' report on the life of the Essenes. This comparison brings out definite similarities and furnishes complementary evidence for conclusions submitted in the discussion.