Warring With Words: Scripting Militant Devotion in the War Scroll and the Book of Revelation

Abstract

This dissertation considers the question “What is (religious) violence?” from a new angle, as aset of ritual practices involving writing, hearing, and reading about violence that position marginalized community members as potential agents of militant power. Adapting approaches from sociology and ritual studies, this project argues that ritual violence is a potent site for forming communal self-concept, especially when acts of violence are anticipated, even embodied, in an oral collective reading context. This discussion focuses on two case studies from the first centuries BCE and CE: the War Scroll (1QM), a military manual from the community that produced the Qumran Scrolls, and the book of Revelation, an apocalypse produced within the early Christ movement. Both communities responded to Roman domination with literary anticipations of eschatological war and triumph over Israel’s enemies. The violence of the manual and the apocalypse—with their cultic uniforms for battle, embedded communal prayers, and rituals of writing—belong to an ancient literary landscape where, as John Austin put it, words do things. This dissertation explores how literary communal rituals could shape the selfperception of the listening audience and invite its participation in violent speech acts understood to have ritual potency. This approach reframes our understanding of textual rituals and literary violence, challenging interpretations that separate acts of violence from textual violence. By putting the book of Revelation in conversation with the War Scroll, this analysis refutes nonviolent readings of Revelation as a mandate for passive victimhood. Ultimately, it proposes that the War Scroll and Revelation do not just describe ritual practices; they are a kind of ritual practice, sites of realization that offer opportunities for sanctification and transformation in the present and a means by which seemingly powerless sectarian communities can participate in defeating their enemies.