394 Daniel C. Timmer sword and to judgment and to captivity, and to be plundered and devoured” (23,22). The fact that God uses “the sinners of the Gentiles” to effect his semi- eschatological punishment makes clear that this prediction is directed against unfaithful Israelites (15). Despite the punished generation’s prayers for deliverance, “there will be none who will be saved” (23,24). While Jubilees 23 contains only predictions of the judgment that awaits impious Israelites, the passage’s note of finality and the concomitant unanswered prayers of the condemned for deliverance provide interesting parallels to the curses of the Community Rule, which deployed the same unanswered-prayer motif to propagate condemnations of those outside and to affirm that no hope remained for them (“May God not be merciful when you entreat him,” 1QS 2,8) (16). Its use of election (of which the group is the unique object) as the primary means of identifying the curse’s target requires that moral qualifiers play a secondary role in its soteriology and sociology. This sharpest of all possible dualisms, which the curses of the covenant ceremony bring into the present year after year at Qumran, is extremely effective in setting its community over against the rest of contemporary Judaism and giving it a sharply exclusivist self-identity (17). In the world of Second Temple Judaism it was of course impossible to neglect obedience entirely, and Qumranite reappropriation of Israel’s covenants was also driven by the group’s self-image as those who had confessed their sin and fulfilled God’s law. The link between the group’s identity as those who truly forsook sin and followed torah and their prerogative to curse others may have been prompted by Deut 30,7, which promises not only that after confession of sin on the part of Israel God will suspend his curses and restore their fortunes, but also that “YHWH your God will put all these curses on your enemies and on the adversaries who took advantage of you.” In light of the contextual emphasis on full repentance in Deut 30,1-2, the Qumran group may have been able to turn these promises regarding divine action into curses they themselves pronounced against others because it “viewed itself as having fulfiled [sic] the requirements of confession and was confident of its standing as God’s returned exiles. . . . The curses would function to separate members of the covenant from those who (15) On the eschatological tone of the passage, see G.L. DAVENPORT, The Eschatology of the Book of Jubilees (Studia Post-Biblica; Leiden 1971) 32-35, and note the phrase “In those days. . .” that begins 23,24 and reappears in 23,26. (16) R.A. WERLINE, “The Curses of the Covenant Renewal Ceremony in 1QS 1.16-2.19 and the Prayers of the Condemned”, For a Later Generation. The Transformation of Tradition in Israel, Early Judaism and Early Christianity (eds. R.A. ARGALL – B.A. BOW – R.A. WERLINE) (Harrisburg, PA 2000) 280-288. (17) In an eschatological setting such as that envisioned for the prayers of the condemned here, “if a person is in the group of the wicked to be condemned, no possibility may exist for moving into the group of the blessed, not even by prayer” (WERLINE, “Curses”, 288). This further clarifies why a non-covenantal blessing was integrated in Qumran’s covenant renewal ceremony, something Nitzan tentatively attributed to the group’s priestly self-understanding and the order of the covenant renewal ceremony in which the blessing implied the successful bringing of sacrifices for sin (NITZAN, “Benedictions”, 264, 271; Qumran Prayer, 133-134). While her reasons stand, the election- based blessing and curse, incontrovertible and irreversible from the Qumranites’ point of view, are sociologically highly effective boundary markers precisely because they are theologically grounded in the deepest and firmest way possible.