Apocalyptic Subjects: Social Construction of the Self in the Qumran Hodayot

The Qumran community, it is now fairly widely agreed, did not engage in writing the genre of literature known as apocalypses. Yet the community was deeply influenced by the symbolic forms often found in apocalypses, especially those pertaining to dualism. The object of this study is to investigate how certain of these symbolic representations of dualism are employed in the Hodayot (Thanksgiving Scroll) for the purpose of the formation of the self, or, as I find it more useful to say, the formation of subjectivity among members of the Qumran sectarian community.