What is it about?
The Qumran covenanters believed that they were typologically reliving the Israelites wilderness experience. As a result they understood that they were being tested with the three tests encountered in that pericope based on נ-ס-ה: keeping the law, false prophecy leading to idolatry, and testing God. They conflated this with their contemporary interpretation of testing by Belial/The Devil and his three nets: fornication, wealth, and profanation of the temple. These were respectively juxtaposed with the wilderness tests. This study tracks the use of the phrase "with uplifted hand" in the Qumran literature and shows that acting in such a manner indicated failing these tests. This was grounds for group exclusion.
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Why is it important?
Realizing that the nets of Belial are interconnected with the wilderness tests helps to explain many issues in Qumran studies. An example is the conundrum of why in the Damascus Document 4:21-5:19 the three nets are listed but only two are discussed. This is because the text is actually stating that the "builders of the wall," who through scriptural allusion are being defined as false prophets and thus represent the net of "wealth," are caught in two more nets. Thus, all three are actually being discussed. There are many other ways in which understanding this paradigm of testing makes the Qumran text more understandable.
Perspectives
Much of my interest in the Qumran literature surrounds the use of scriptural phraseology and the transfer of its original context into the newly created text. Since the Qumran covenanters believed that all knowledge could be accessed through understanding their authoritative texts and that the meaning of scriptural prophecy was only interpretable by them an appreciation of how these messages were decoded is of utmost importance in Qumran studies. My work accentuates the very important part that keyword interactions played in this process.
David Katzin
University of California Los Angeles
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This page is a summary of: Acting [inline-graphic 01] 'With Uplifted Hand' Signifies Ensnarement by the Nets of Belial, Hebrew Studies, January 2019, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.1353/hbr.2019.0010.
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