Rethinking the Contours of the Biblical Corpus through the Lens of the Dead Sea Scrolls

This paper focuses on the Apostrophe to Zion.This text participates in a widespread practice documented in much second temple and early post-70 CE literature of recollection/remembering and recalling as a kind of performance. The use and incorporation of earlier textual traditions in response to historical exigencies are contextualized in a new acrostic of redemption, hope and new scripture.

When we are called upon to exercise what Jonathan Lear has described as our imaginative capacity to overcome the loss and destruction of our own worlds, we can do so productively through re-performing the texts through interpretation and philological analysis. Recollection in Apostrophe to Zion calls upon the reader to overcome the gap between the past and the future. The work of recollection and memory can prove to be healing insofar as it sustains a past history, and insofar as it actualizes the formation of text, individual and community.