Repentance at Qumran: The Penitential Framework of Religious Experience in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Mark A. Jason offers a detailed investigation of the place of repentance in the Dead Sea Scrolls, addressing a significant lacuna in Qumran scholarship. Jason establishes the importance of repentance as a fundamental way of structuring and describing religious experience within the Qumran community. Jason shows that repentance was a central and decisive element in shaping that community’s identity and undergirded its religous experience from the start. Comparison with relevant texts from the Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha shows that the Qumran community represented a distinctive penitential movement in Second Temple Judaism.