Retrieving the World of Ancient Judaism

Now that the full corpus of the Dead Sea Scrolls is available to everyone, we can appreciate as never before the richness and variety of Jewish literature at the turn of the era. Of the approximately one thousand manuscripts that were hidden in the caves near Qumran, only about 600 can be recovered in significant part. About one-third of these are biblical manuscripts. The great bulk of the remainder contain texts that had been lost for nearly two thousand years. Other Jewish writings of the period between the Maccabees (second century B.C.E.) and the Mishnah (200 C.E.) were also […]