Rethinking Gender in the Community Rule : An Experiment in Sociology

The insights of sociology and feminist critical scholarship have allowed scholars in the last decade to rethink common assumptions with regard to gender in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Both the basic question of the presence or absence of women in communities associated with the Scrolls, and also more complex questions concerning gendered sectarian identity, are now open to critical discussion and reassessment. An exploration of the treatment of women and men in the Damascus Document and the Rule of the Congregation (1QSa), in light of sociology and contemporary feminist critical thought, provides us with a new model for understanding the concept of gender in the Scrolls. This model can then be applied to a reading of the Community Rule (1QS) in ways that introduce new understandings of the text’s constructions of masculinity, and its notable silence on the subject of women.