Books in Brief

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After two millennia hidden in caves near the Dead Sea, followed by four decades hidden in 045scholars’ studies, most of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been published—and published and published. About 400 articles, essays and books 044about the scrolls appeared in 2000 alone, according to one comprehensive list. Here’s a 045sampling of some recent titles.—Ed.

044

The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition

Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J.C. Tigchelaar
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000) 2 vol., 1,385 pp., $100.00 (paperback)
To order, contact the press by phone: 800–253-7521 or online: www.eerdmans.com.

When scholars talk about publishing a scroll, they are referring to the preparation of the first critical edition, which includes a transcription of the original text, a translation, photographs, extensive notes, an introduction and commentary. These critical editions are critical to scholars, but they are also daunting and cumbersome, which is why this handy two-volume set of almost all the nonbiblical scrolls will prove invaluable to anyone who wants to compare several scrolls at once.

The book includes, on facing pages, a fresh Hebrew or Aramaic transcription of the scroll (from 1Q1 to 11Q31) and an English translation. It also cites the critical editions, PAM (photo) numbers, etc., needed to track down further information.

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Fifty Years After Their Discovery

Edited by Lawrence H. Schiffman, Emanuel Tov and James C. VanderKam
(Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2000) 970 pp., illus., $104.00 + $13.00 postage (hardback)
To order, contact the press by phone: 011–972-2–625-7991 or e-mail: ies@vms.huji.ac.il or online: www.huji.ac.il/ies.

The 50th anniversary of the discovery of the first scroll in a cave near Qumran, on the western shore of the Dead Sea, was celebrated in 1997 with numerous conferences and books. One of the heftiest products from the jubilee year is this collection of 100 papers given during a Jerusalem Congress sponsored by the Israel Exploration Society and the Shrine of the Book (the section of the Israel Museum that houses the intact scrolls). Written by the top scholars in the field, the essays range from the broad (“Have the Dead Sea Scrolls Revolutionized Our Understanding of the New Testament?”) to the narrow (“A New Reading 11QTa 52:13–16”).

Frank Moore Cross offers personal reminiscences of the earliest work on the scrolls in the 1950s. He describes his reaction to discovering a version of Samuel that had been believed, until then, to have been preserved only in the Greek Septuagint (“surprise, shock, and excitement”) and the reaction of Roland de Vaux (first excavator of Qumran) when Cross watered down the strong cognac that the Frenchman had brought to a birthday celebration at the dig (“a sin which de Vaux never forgot—or forgave”).

The Temple Scroll and Related Texts

Sidnie White Crawford
(Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000) 104 pp., $14.95 (paperback)
To order, contact the press by phone: 011–44-114–255-4433 or online: www.shef-ac-press.co.uk.

The story of the Temple Scroll is a good story, involving Israel’s most celebrated archaeologist, Yigael Yadin; the mysterious agent Mr. Z; the crafty antiquities dealer Kando; and, of course, the scroll itself: a 27-foot-long 045Hebrew scroll containing a detailed Temple plan that was purportedly given by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai.

This story is not told in great detail in this volume, however. But you are told where to find it: In Yadin’s own 1985 book The Temple Scroll (Random House), which also includes an English translation of the longest Dead Sea Scroll. The hefty bibliographies (organized by subject) in this slim paperback will be the book’s greatest asset for many upper-level college and graduate students. Others will appreciate the clear descriptions of the scroll’s contents, the thorough accounting of the various versions that have been discovered, and the comparisons to related texts.

The volume is only the second one (Charlotte Hempel wrote the first, on the Damascus texts) in Sheffield’s Companion to the Qumran Scrolls series, which may well become the Cliffs Notes of Dead Sea Scroll studies. Like Cliffs Notes, this volume does not include the original Hebrew text or a translation (although it does reprint chunky quotations). For this, readers will have to turn to Yadin’s or García Martínez’s or Puech’s or Crawford’s edition. The bibliography will tell you where to find them.

The Dead Sea Scrolls at Fifty

Edited by Robert A. Kugler and Eileen M. Schuller
(Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature/Scholars Press, 2000) 227 pp., 12 b&w photos, $49.95 (paperback)
To order, contact the press by phone: 888–747-2354 or online: www.sbl-site.org.

This collection of 20 talks given at the Society of Biblical Literature’s annual meeting reviews the history of Dead Sea Scroll research. The papers assess the contribution the scrolls have made to the study of the Hebrew Bible, early Judaism and the New Testament.

In a tongue-in-cheek epilogue, Lawrence and Marlene Schiffman borrow the language of the ancient scrolls to make predictions for the future of their field: “And it shall come to pass in the third week of the second Jubilee that computer technology will make it possible to join many fragments one to another…And the Prince of Lights shall gradually overcome the evil angel Lacunael, so that better, often less speculative restorations shall be revealed to all the Sons of Dawn.”

The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Christ

Michael O. Wise
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999) 342 pp., $25.00 (hardback)
To order, contact the press by phone: 212–207-7000 or online: www.harpercollins.com.

The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Israel Knohl
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000) 159 pp., 11 b&w illus., $22.00 (hardback)
To order, contact the press by phone: 800–777-4726 or online: www.ucpress.edu.

The possibility of finding connections between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament has excited scholars and general readers alike. Some have searched for parallels between Jesus and the “suffering servant” mentioned in the scrolls.

The “suffering servant” is an image first used by Isaiah. According to Isaiah 53:3, 5, this “man of suffering” is “wounded for our transgressions.” In the later Christian era, Isaiah’s reference to the servant was interpreted as a prophecy of Jesus. But many scholars believe there is no evidence that Jews at the time of Jesus associated the suffering servant of Isaiah with a messiah or that they pictured the messiah as suffering for the sins of the people. For this reason, many scholars have determined that Jesus would not have seen interpretation must have been introduced after his death by his followers.

In these readable and controversial books aimed at general readers, Michael Wise and Israel Knohl have independently identified references to a messianic suffering servant in a handful of Dead Sea Scrolls. Thus, they claim it is not only possible for someone to have come up with the idea of a suffering messiah by Jesus’ time, someone had already done it.

Wise and Knohl even go so far as to identify the suffering messiah of the scrolls. But, of course, they don’t agree about who it is.

After two millennia hidden in caves near the Dead Sea, followed by four decades hidden in 045scholars’ studies, most of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been published—and published and published. About 400 articles, essays and books 044about the scrolls appeared in 2000 alone, according to one comprehensive list. Here’s a 045sampling of some recent titles.—Ed. 044 The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J.C. Tigchelaar (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000) 2 vol., 1,385 pp., $100.00 (paperback) To order, contact the press by phone: 800–253-7521 or online: www.eerdmans.com. When scholars talk about publishing a scroll, […]