wilderness.19 Mark has his own agenda and underscores the wilderness as a place of covenant making.20 For the Israelites, the wilderness was the place where God singled them out as his people and made his will known to them in the form of a covenant. Indeed, as one scholar says, “the whole phenomenon of the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls must be set within the hermeneutical framework of an Exodus-New Exodus typology.”21 Rikk E. Watts contends that the exodus motif, or more precisely Isaiah’s new