Reviews

The Dead Sea Scrolls—as esoteric and daunting a collection of ancient documents as we are ever likely to find—have become a fixture of popular culture. TV personality David Letterman, known for his nightly Top Ten lists, once featured the Top Ten Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls. (My favorite was number 4: “Without going into details, Episcopalians are in a lot of trouble.”) Though well known, the Scrolls are also deeply misunderstood. A Scrolls scholar told me that on a recent trip to Israel he accompanied a tour group as its bus approached Qumran, the settlement along the Dead […]