This book attempts to find more sophisticated ways to approach the relationship between the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls, in this case the Hodayot prayers, and their socio-historical contexts. It challenges the consensus that the literary heterogeneity of the large cave 1 scroll, 1QHodayota, betrays a community’s division into leadership and ordinary membership. It argues instead that all of the scroll’s quite different looking compositions expressed the sentiments of a unified worshipping community that saw itself as holding a mediating position in the agency of God. Through engagement with an array of methods, most prominently from the field of sociolinguistics, a socio-religious pattern emerges from the collection, which is quite different from hierarchic socio-historical patterns often deduced from the Hodayot and other Dead Sea scrolls.