This volume is devoted to 4QInstruction, the last lengthy text of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be officially published. It is also the largest wisdom text of this corpus. The central concern of this study is how this composition should be understood in relation to the sapiential and apocalyptic traditions.
Features of 4QInstruction that are examined include its appeal to revelation, its presentation of poverty, and its eschatology. The document's relationship to both 1 Enoch and the Dead Sea sect is also discussed.
This study will prove useful to anyone interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls,...

The papers in this volume were originally read at the Sixth International Orion Symposium. The primary focus of the volume is on the wisdom texts from Qumran that have been fully edited only in recent years, especially 1Q/4QMysteries and 4QInstruction.
Prior to the discovery of the Scrolls, our knowledge of wisdom literature in the Second Temple period was limited to contemporary biblical books, apocryphal works, and pseudepigraphical writings. These recently published compositions now allow for a more nuanced picture of wisdom literature and its impact on and interaction with other...

This volume investigates critical practices by which the Qumran community constituted itself as a sectarian society. Key to the formation of the community was the reconstruction of the identity of individual members. In this way the "self" became an important symbolic space for the development of the ideology of the sect. Persons who came to experience themselves in light of the narratives and symbolic structures embedded in the community practices would have developed the dispositions of affinity and estrangement necessary for the constitution of a sectarian society. Drawing on various...

These two big volumes give for the first time an analytic, technical and photographic description of the best quality of the Qumran Copper Scroll. They are indispensable for those who want to study the Scroll and secure its preservation.

Archaeology plays an ever increasing role in Qumran studies. Fifteen renowned experts discuss the latest archaeological discoveries and break new ground for a lively debate about the character of the famous site on the shore of the Dead Sea.

This book contains papers presented at a symposium on "Reworking the Bible at Qumran" convened in 2002 by the Institute of Advanced Studies and the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The core theme is the use and interpretation of the Bible in apocryphal and related works found at Qumran. Nearly half the papers treat legal interpretation; the other half, examines narrative exegesis. Key issues include the question of the authority of the reworked biblical texts, their exegetical techniques, motifs, and genres....

Using a division between substantive and formal law as the key element for understanding the applicable law in papyri, this study offers a new understanding of the distinct parts Roman and local law played in the legal reality of second-century Arabia.

This volume analyzes the wide variety of the Qumran community's liturgical practices in light of their social and ideological structures, discussing their implications for community identity formation, boundary formation, and instruction of new members.

Conflicting rules of the correct procedures of the Temple cult, whose significance demanded absolute exactitude and uniformity, precluded common public rituals and created the schism

This volume consists of nineteen essays, written by internationally renowned scholars such as George Brooke, John Collins, Heinz-Josef Fabry, Andre Lemaire, Julio Trebolle, Emanuel Tov, James VanderKam and others, presented to Emile Puech, palaeographer and Dead Sea Scrolls specialist, on the occasion of his 65th birthday. All contributions deal with aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including fundamental essays on 4QMMT by Steudel, Kratz and Berthelot, and two papers on resurrection and afterlife. Other essays are concerned with textual criticism and the Hebrew Bible, the Astronomical Enoch,...