Fighting Mortality: Acts of Performance in the Communal Meal and War Scroll

Since their initial discovery in the late 1940s, the Dead Sea Scrolls continue to ignite the imaginations of scholars and generate an extensive, and ever growing, amount of scholarship. While scholars have examined different components of both the site of Qumran and the scrolls in reference to purity, it is on the communal meal and the War Scroll that this article focuses. This article proposes a connection between the sectarian communal meal and their eschatology, based not upon previously established similar purity laws, but rather the parallel desire to combat mortality evident in the purity laws of the communal meal and the End of Days narrative in the War Scroll. It is through the lens of performance and the performative that this articles locates the desire to combat mortality in both the communal meal and the War Scroll