Before I applied to graduate school in 2010 I worked as a security guard (and sometimes tour guide) for the Milwaukee Public Museum’s exhibit, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible, which included some of the most prominent scrolls available from Qumran. In between scolding people for sticking gum under display cases or for trying to use a laser pointer (!!) on the scrolls, I would often hear visitors exclaim how exceptional the Dead Sea Scrolls were for the visitors’ understanding of antiquity. They would marvel at the scrolls, the interpretations, and artifacts displayed. The Dead Sea Scrolls acted as their window into the diverse world of Early Judaism but oftentimes visitors missed this diversity, as well as the importance of socio-historical context for understanding the Second Temple Period and Early Judaism.
In my upper-division undergraduate course, “Early Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls” I wanted to emphasize the Dead Sea Scrolls’ larger Second Temple context, their diverse traditions, and the prerogatives of the Dead Sea Scroll community. As part of this endeavor, I created an assignment called the “Dead Sea Scrolls Brochure” that asked students to compose a sort of imaginary travel brochure meant to recruit people to join the community. I wanted students to synthesize the history and literature of early Judaism, as well as how Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls fit into this wider history and culture. In order to complete the brochure students were asked to choose the topics most relevant to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and early Jewish communities, including topics like the calendar, purity, apocalypticism, and interpretation (among many others) and to locate these issues in the broader early Jewish landscape.
Figure 1: Two Inner Panels of Abraham Kister's Brochure
The “Dead Sea Scrolls Brochure” assignment has two parts: the physical brochure and a 2-page reflective explanation of the brochure. In order to prevent formatting and other technology issues for students, I created a very simple template composed of six separate panels in Word, Google Doc, and pdf formats, so students could choose from a variety of programs or platforms to create the brochure. Each student was also asked to cite at least three different primary sources, and at least one piece of secondary material assigned in class. Furthermore, students were encouraged to use images of Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls, or other images relevant to Early Judaism in their design of the brochure with proper citation. For the second major component of this creative assignment, students wrote a reflective explanation of their brochure that explained why they chose to compose the brochure in the way they did, focusing in particular on why they chose to emphasize certain facets of the Qumran community, justifying those decisions with citations from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and describing how these facets informed the early Jewish landscape.
The brochures were impressive. Students engaged in many of the scholarly debates relevant to the Dead Sea Scrolls and composed brochures that showcased the features and prerogatives of the Qumran community from both insider and outsider perspectives. Many students chose to include quotes from Josephus on the Essenes, Philo of Alexandria, and Pliny the Elder to describe the community as imagined “reviews” of the community. Students also importantly contextualized these outsider perspectives with citations from the Community Rule (1QS) and the Damascus Document. Students cited these latter documents in sections titled like “Community is Everything” as part of thei to show the emphasis on community found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, with subsections like “Community is Everything.” These citations helped students understand the difference between insider and outsider perspectives of ancient communities. Many students incorporated the archaeological data of Qumran, speaking, for example, of the archaeological evidence for toilets or a mikveh, with one student including these under an “Amenities” section. Students were thus able to recognize the necessity of using multiple methods in order to best understand Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Other topics students included in the brochures dealt with the calendrical issues of the Dead Sea Scrolls, with one student providing a section entitled “Time is of the Essence,” advertising Qumran’s calendar politics and citing scrolls like Pesher Habakkuk that showcased their distinct calendar. Students referenced these calendrical issues in descriptions of the conflict between the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest (Pesher Habakkuk xx), as well as contextualized the calendrical concerns of the Dead Sea Scrolls with other calendars used by early Jewish communities, showing how time and the calendar were contentious issues in the Second Temple Period. In this brochure project, students were also able to assess the apocalypticism of the scrolls as found in texts like the War Scroll. Another popular subject was the process for becoming a member of the community as described in 1QS. Students made tables that summarized the necessary steps to join the community and the punishments for disobeying the community’s rules.
Figure 2: Madeleine Whalen's Brochure with the top-right panel as the front panel
Overall, these brochures allowed students to synthesize the many traditions associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls in order to assess what the big picture issues were for the community and for the scholars who research the scrolls. The process of composing the brochure helped students situate the Dead Sea Scroll community in its socio-historical context. The brochure also illuminated to students the literary and rhetorical features of the scrolls: the authors of the scrolls in a way were advertising and/or promoting the idea of their community, akin to a brochure. Overall, composing a brochure from the perspective of the Dead Sea Scrolls made it possible for students to synthesize and review the diverse traditions and features of the Dead Sea Scrolls and locate them in the ancient Jewish landscape.
The brochure assignment also acted as an excellent means for students to practice their research and writing skills. While grading, I was impressed with the evidence students chose to support the various sections of the brochures. The exercise of creating a travel brochure more obviously showcased the need to cite appropriate and relevant data for their arguments than in a traditional paper. Furthermore, the activity showed students how to synthesize different types of evidence: primary texts, secondary academic sources, images, and archaeological evidence and (in the explanation) how to justify, utilize, and cite these various sources in a succinct and clear manner. A final benefit of this assignment over typical papers is that I was able to assess students’ overall engagement with course content as a whole because students needed to synthesize a wide array of topics into a single project with a single argument.
Finally, I must admit that these brochures also happened to be much more fun to grade. At a time when I felt like it was difficult to learn more about my students in a remote environment when I could not see their faces on Zoom, I found it helpful to see their creative writing and design skills in action. Furthermore because of the openendedness of the assignment, I was also able to see what issues discussed in classes that students engaged with most, making it easy for me to adjust lectures to student interests. Overall, this assignment gave students an opportunity to engage with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and, significantly, with the many issues related to Early Judaism.