Women, Children, and Celibate Men in the Serekh Texts

The Serekh or “Community Rule” (in all its variant manuscript forms) is one of the most famous of all the Dead Sea scrolls. It is commonplace to see it as referring to a sect of celibate men; the assumption is that it “contains no allusions to the presence of women in the group which it regulates.” However, in an important study, Eyal Regev has recently challenged the notion that celibate men are the focus of the Serekh texts, or of any manuscript in the scrolls corpus, by stressing that there are no explicit statements that deal with the issue of sexual asceticism, unlike what is found in monastic rules, or among the Shakers. Rather, other yaḥad documents (e.g., 4Q502 Ritual of Marriage or 1QSa Rule of the Congregation) refer to marriage, reproduction, and children. If this is so, why assume that the Serekh can only refer to a group of celibate men, even without explicit mention of women and children? Regev's view has essentially been the position of Lawrence Schiffman for many years, given the numerous references to issues of women and family in the halakhic texts of the scrolls corpus.