This landmark reference work is the first of its kind. Featuring 450 articles by an international community of scholars it is the definitive account of what we know about the Dead Sea Scrolls--their history, relevance, meaning, and the controversies that surround them.
Discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd, the collection of 800 manuscripts is older than any other collection of manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures by almost one thousand years. What do the scrolls tell us about the people who wrote them? What do they tell us about early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism? How do...

This collection of articles on the Dead Sea Scrolls by fellows at the Institute for Advanced Studies of The Hebrew University (1989-1990) represents the ongoing work of editing and interpreting one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the century. This volume includes articles on the contents and significance of the scrolls, the biblical scrolls, the legal rulings of the sectarians and their prayer texts.

Already before its publication, it was clear that the "Temple Scroll" represented a major contribution to the history of Jewish law in Late Antiquity. The present volume brings together the author's studies on this important scroll. He has sought to uncover the hermeneutics of the Zadokite/Sadducean legal system and to compare and contrast it with other texts of its own type as well as with those in rabbinic literature preserving the Pharisaic-rabbinic approach.

Major changes are occurring in our understanding of the fascinating texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their significance for the study of the history of Judaism and Christianity. One of the most significant changes -- that one cannot study Qumran without Jerusalem nor Jerusalem without Qumran -- is explored in this important volume.

Although the Scrolls preserve the peculiar ideology of the Qumran sect, much of the material also represents the common beliefs and practices of the Judaism of the time. Here Lawrence Schiff man mines these incredible documents to reveal their...

For more than four decades Robert Chazan has been a copious source of original insights into the history and culture of medieval European Jewry, challenging conventional wisdom with profound erudition and sober analysis. In this volume, thirteen leading Judaicists and medievalists engage subjects that have been of particular concern to Professor Chazan during his distinguished career: the history of the Jewish communities in Western Christendom during the Middle Ages, Jewish-Christian interactions in medieval Europe, medieval Jewish Biblical exegesis and religious literature, and historical...