Mapping Fixed Prayers from the Dead Sea Scrolls onto Second Temple Period Judaism

When situating fixed prayers from the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus within the broader literary horizons of Second Temple period Judaism a number of discernible features emerge that allow us to group together prayers into clusters or streams of tradition according to a coherence and affinity of ideas. This article focuses on two distinct clusters of prayers: the first is influenced by the type of apocalyptic thinking espoused 1 Enoch, particularly the book’s views on cosmology and angelology; the second is influenced by a penitential theology inspired by the cycle of national reward and punishment that is illustrated in Deuteronomy and by the priestly laws of reparation in Leviticus.