Ezra and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Home > Magazines > BAR > Summer 2022

Three fragments of the Book of Ezra have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest collection of biblical texts. Yet the figure of Ezra—and his importance as priest, scribe, and interpreter of the law—does not appear in the scrolls. Did the authors of the scrolls not know his story?

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

1. See Sidnie White Crawford, “Has Every Book of the Bible Been Found Among the Dead Sea Scrolls?” Bible Review, October 1996.

Endnotes

1.
Some scholars postulated that Ezra does actually appear in the scrolls as the cryptically named “teacher of righteousness.” Others identified this mysterious figure with Nehemiah. See, e.g., Theodor H. Gaster, The Scriptures of the Dead Sea Sect in English Translation (London: Secker Warburg, 1957), p. 108; Isaac Rabinowitz, “A Reconsideration of ‘Damascus’ and ‘390 Years’ in the ‘Damascus’ (‘Zadokite’) Fragments,” Journal of Biblical Literature 73 (1954), pp. 11#8211;35.

2.
The Book of Ezra-Nehemiah found in our Bibles depends on the Hebrew text of the Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, which dates to 1008 C.E. The book’s ancient Greek translation closely follows the Hebrew of the Leningrad Codex, which indicates that an original Hebrew-Aramaic text of Ezra-Nehemiah was already circulating in the second century B.C.E.

3. See Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, Ezra-Nehemiah: Israel’s Quest for Identity (London: T&T Clark, 2017).

4.
This article is based on the author’s research, which was made possible with support received from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.