1 Life and Death in the Visions of Amram from Qumran Liora Goldman – Oranim College and University of Haifa Alexander Massmann and Christopher B. Hays (eds , ) Deathless Hopes: Reinventions of Afterlife and Eschatological Beliefs, Altes Testament und Moderne 31, Vienna and Zurich: LIT, 2018, pp. 81-91 1. Introduction Life and death are central motifs in the Visions of Amram, an Aramaic composition from Qumran identified as belonging to the testamentary genre, 1 and composed in the testamentary form known to us from the Greek Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. An extensive refashioning and rewriting of the biblical idea of the bequest of a worldview and mandate to one’s sons, the Visions of Amram recounts Amram’s gathering his offspring together around his deathbed to impart to them his last will and testament. The composition contains a blessing for his sons, a narrative of events from Amram’s life, and an account of the visions revealed to him concerning Moses’s and Aaron’s future. Initially, in the standard edition of the Visions of Amram, published in 2001 by Émile Puech, this composition was identified as consisting of seven scrolls: 4Q543– 4Q549. 2 The scrolls 4Q543, 4Q544, and 4Q547 are dated paleographically to the second half of the second century BCE, 4Q545 and 4Q546 are customarily dated to the first half of the first century BCE, and 4Q548 and 4Q549 to the second half of the first century BCE. 3 The text, in its various copies, has only been preserved in a 1 Jörg Frey argues that the Visions of Amram constitutes a prominent example of the Qumran testamentary genre; see Frey, “Origins of the Genre,” pp. 357-–359. 2 Puech, DJD XXXI, pp. 283–405. 3 Puech, DJD XXXI, pp. 285.