Did/Could Women Pray the Qumran Thanksgiving Psalms?

The seventieth anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1947–2017) calls for a celebration of the achievements of the past decades and a thanks-giving for the work of all those scholars who have toiled long and hard to bring us to the point where all the scrolls have been published. We now begin an era in which new questions can be articulated and explored. In this article, I ask one such question: Did/could women pray the Qumran Thanksgiving Psalms? The question is set against the background of changing scholarship on women in the scrolls, especially in the last thirty years. Specifically, the focus is on reading strategies for approaching the Thanks-giving Psalms, given both their very negative appraisal of the human condition and their promise of some type of “common rejoicing” with the heavenly world.