Women in the Damascus Document.

• Position: Book review

Women in the Damascus Document. By CECELIA WASSEN. Academia Biblica, vol. 21. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2005. Pp. xiv + 255. $39.95 (paper).

This topic seems at first sight unpromising: women seem to play little role in the Damascus Document (D). But given the still open question of women at Qumran and within the sects described in the Scrolls, together with the importance of celibacy and attitudes to sexual relations, even modest conclusions may be welcome. And if all the material in D relevant to women is comprehensively treated, a good deal can be said, and is said, in this fine study.

Wassen begins by identifying D as an Essene text. This is of course contested. But it cannot be denied that both D and Josephus's description of the Essenes include married as well as non-married members, while the stress on sexual relations as purely for procreation is easily inferred from D's rulings on divorce and on Josephus's account of the Essenes' concern for proof of female fertility before marriage. Hence it is precisely in respect of women that the Essene identification is strongest. Also contested is the structure of D (complicated by the differences between the Cave 4 fragments and the Cairo manuscripts) and the relationship of its community to the Serekh (S) texts. Here she follows the view that D is "foundational" to the Qumran "sect" (p. 27) and that it represents an early stage of sectarian formation.

She also focuses her attention on the Laws, and follows Davies and Hempel in distinguishing "halakhah" and "communal rules," the former characterized essentially by explicit or implicit derivation from scriptures, the latter having much in common with disciplinary rules in 1QS and 1QSa. She also uses the unpublished 1992 dissertation of Robert Davis, completed before disclosure of the Cave 4 materials, on the Laws of CD which differs somewhat from Hempel's later and fuller study. She offers a compromise and distinguishes between an "early law code" which she assigns to "pre-Essene circles" and "later communal laws" that arose in a pre-Qumranic Essene organization but remained influential at Qumran and underwent development (p. 42). The main chapters are devoted to a study of these two sets, but between them she discusses the brief "catalogue of transgressors" in 4Q270 and the "Admonition" which she regards as having originated separately but simultaneously.

The chapter on "The Early Law Code" deals in turn with laws about...