Human Choice and Divine Control in Qumran and the Hebrew Bible

The Aramaic composition known as Visions of Amram (4Q543–547) claims to contain the final words of Amram (father of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam), including his narration of a vision that he saw earlier in his life. In a particularly intriguing portion of the vision (partially preserved in 4Q543–544 and 4Q547), Amram sees two beings. They describe a fundamental dualistic division of the world, with one of the beings ruling over all that is light and the other one ruling over all that is dark. According to the most widespread view, the beings allow Amram to choose whether he wants to belong on the side of light or on the side of darkness in this great dualistic divide. Based on this passage, Visions of Amram has been presented as seemingly advocating some kind of “free will” theology, with an emphasis on human choice, a position that stands in marked contrast to the deterministic thoughts expressed in several other Qumran texts. The actual text from Visions of Amram, however, is very fragmentary, and the notion of human choice is in fact the result of scholarly reconstruction. Taking this passage as its starting point, the paper investigates the tension between human choice and divine determinism and control in selected texts from Qumran and the Hebrew Bible.