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A Review of “The Blemished Body: Deformity and Disability in the Qumran Scrolls”

Dorman plainly states her purpose: she will explore disability in the Qumran texts (i.e., in the Dead Sea Scrolls) and consider these in their broader late Second Temple (ca. 200 BCE—100 CE) context of attitudes toward the human body. Although she recognizes that ideas about disability vary from culture to culture, this understanding breaks down by the end of her analysis. “It is sensible,” she concludes, “to state that these regulations [of persons with disabilities] applied to every kind of disability and not only to the ones mentioned in the texts” (p. 256). It is exactly here that this careful book’s conclusions exceed the data. Very few disabilities are actually mentioned in the Qumran texts, and these few do not seem to extend the biblical body map. Dorman does a service for all who are interested in the history of disability by collecting nearly all the passages from among the Dead Sea Scrolls that mention what contemporary readers would understand as disabling conditions. For these passages—from the “Rule of the Congregation” (1QSa 1:25–2:11), the “Damascus Document” (CD 14:12b–17a, 15:15–17 and parallel texts), the “War Scroll” (1QM 7:3b-8 and parallels), the “Temple Scroll” (11QTa 35:2–3 45:12–14), and the controversial Miqtsat Ma’ase ha-Torah (4QMMT B 49–54 and related fragments)—she provides a background and introduces in a way accessible to the general reader. Her analyses of grammar and lexicon, her discussion of the minutiae of textual reconstruction and the joining of fragments, and some of her discussion of their meaning and significance will be accessible only to scholars of the field (as might be expected of a published dissertation).