Chapter 6 examines the Sectarians’ portrait of the end-time destruction of its enemies. The depictions of eschatological violence offer insights into how the Sectarians responded to their present overmatched position while simultaneously affirming their special status. Sectarian texts imagine an imminent end of days that would usher in a period in which all of its enemies – both foreigners and other Jews – would be vanquished in the end-time battle.

Chapter 4 analyzes several common features in New Religious Movements that turn violent – a millennial and apocalyptic worldview, totalistic organizational rules, isolation, and real or perceived persecution – and how these features can help make sense of the infusion of violent expectations in the sectarian movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls as represented especially in the Rule of the Community.

Chapter 7 focuses on the War Scroll, the most sustained portrait of the imagined end-time war against the Sectarian enemies. Alongside its elements of fantasy, the War Scroll simultaneously contains many prescriptive details for the eschatological war that the Sectarians believed was imminent. This chapter characterizes the War Scroll using the language of social anthropologists as a violent imaginary and argues that it functions as a propagandistic tool to prepare the Sectarians for this war.

Isaiah is resistance literature: The authors of this book knew the claims of different empires, and argued against them. Much of the first thirty-nine chapters of the book were written in the Assyrian period, when the Assyrian empire tried to force the elites of other Near Eastern kingdoms to accept the legitimacy of Assyrian domination. In a carefully-formulated program of subversive reading, passages in Isa 1–39 react against Assyrian claims of empire, arguing that Yhwh, rather than the king of Assyria, is the universal sovereign. “Isaiah and Empire” by Shawn Zelig Aster shows how passages in Isa 2, 10, and 37 react against Assyrian claims of empire. But just as these chapters react against Assyrian claims, so do Isa 40–45 react against the later imperial propaganda of Cyrus. These chapters claim that Yhwh, rather than the Babylonian god Marduk, sent Cyrus, and argue that Cyrus was sent to benefit Jerusalem, rather than Babylon.