historical perspectives: from the hasmoneans to bar kokhba in light ...

JUDEAN NATIONALISM 27
dence from other sources on the practice of public reading from
authoritative texts, the large numbers of Qumran scrolls could demonstrate
that the practice of public reading was relatively widespread
in Judea. This is especially true if Golb is right or if we accept
Stegemann's arguments on the extent of the Essene movement. And
if we agree that many of the scrolls functioned as performance texts,
then the impact of the number of texts involved can be multiplied.
The presence of twenty-seven copies of Deuteronomy does not mean
that this book could reach only twenty-seven people at one time.
That number of texts could easily reach hundreds, even thousands,
of people at any one time. The public reading of books allowed
them to reach large audiences throughout the country, including the
nonliterate masses. In other words, public reading converted the
books into a mass medium. Considering the content of the books
read out loud, such as Deuteronomy and Isaiah, what this mass
medium created among the Judeans was a consciousness of common
descent and a shared culture. In other words, thanks to Qumran,
we can now understand how a mass national consciousness could
have been constructed in Second Temple Judea. This, in turn, allows
us to interpret various historical phenomena, such as the expansion
of the Hasmonean state and the anti-Roman movements, as expressions
of Judean nationalism without the fear that we are guilty of
anachronism.