The Dead Sea Scrolls offer a window onto the rich theological landscape of Judaism in the Second Temple period. Through careful textual analysis, the authors of these twelve studies explore such topics as dualism and determinism, esoteric knowledge, eschatology and covenant, the nature of heaven and / or the divine, moral agency, and more; as well as connections between concepts expressed in the Qumran corpus and in later Jewish and Christian literature. The religious worldviews reflected in the Scrolls constitute part of the ideological environment of Second Temple Judaism; the analysis of these texts is essential for the reconstruction of that milieu. Taken together, these studies indicate the breadth and depth of theological reflection in the Second Temple period.

In this volume, Devorah Dimant assembles twenty-seven thoroughly updated and partly rewritten articles discussing various aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls that she published over the past three decades. An introductory essay written especially for this volume surveys the present state of research on the Scrolls. Dealing with major themes developed in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the author reflects the rapid expansion and change of perspective that has taken place in research on the collection in recent years following its full publication. Among the topics treated are the nature and contents of the Scrolls collection as a whole, the specific literature of the community that owned this collection, the Aramaic texts and the apocryphal and pseudepigraphic works found therein. The volume also includes discussions of particular themes such as the history of the community related to the Scrolls, its self-image and particular interpretation of biblical prophecies, and its notion of time.

Charts a new methodological course in Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship by employing memory theory to inform historical research. This is an instructive resource for scholars who are seeking an alternative to currently constructed approaches to the subject, and will be of appeal to those interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls more generally.

The Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran and the Concept of a Library presents twelve articles by renowned experts in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran studies. These articles explore from various angles the question of whether or not the collection of manuscripts found in the eleven caves in the vicinity of Khirbet Qumran can be characterized as a “library,” and, if so, what the relation of that library is to the ruins of Qumran and the group of Jews that inhabited them. The essays fall into the following categories: the collection as a whole, subcollections within the overall corpus, and the implications of identifying the Qumran collection as a library.

Biblical manuscripts from the Dead Sea and the Cairo Genizah have added immeasurably to our knowledge of the textual history of the Hebrew Bible. The papers collected in this volume compare the evidence of the biblical DSS with manuscripts from the Vienna Papyrus Collection, connected with the Cairo Genizah, as well as late ancient evidence from diverse contexts. The resulting picture is one of a dialectic between textual plurality and fixity: the eventual dominance of the consonantal Masoretic Text over the textual plurality of the Second Temple period, and the secondary diversification of that standardized text through scribal activity.

Winner of the 2015 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award Winner of the Frank Moore Cross Award for Best Book in Biblical Studies from ASOR Winner of the Biblical Archaeology Society 2017 Publication Award for Best Book Relating to the Hebrew Bible Eugene Ulrich presents in The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Developmental Composition of the Bible ( (also available as paperback) the comprehensive and synthesized picture he has gained as editor of many biblical scrolls. His earlier volume, The Biblical Qumran Scrolls, presented the evidence — the transcriptions and textual variants of all the biblical scrolls — and this volume explores the implications and significance of that evidence. The Bible has not changed, but modern knowledge of it certainly has changed. The ancient Scrolls have opened a window and shed light on a period in the history of the text’s formation that had languished in darkness for two thousand years. They offer a parade of surprises that greatly enhance knowledge of how the scriptural texts developed through history.

The eighteen studies in this volume in honor of Moshe Bernstein on the occasion of his 70th birthday mostly engage with Jewish scriptural interpretation, the principal theme of Bernstein’s own research career as expressed in his collected essays, Reading and Re-Reading Scripture at Qumran (Brill, 2013). The essays develop a variety of aspects of scriptural interpretation. Although many of them are chiefly concerned with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the significant contribution of the volume as a whole is the way that even those studies are associated with others that consider the broader context of Jewish scriptural interpretation in late antiquity. As a result, a wider frame of reference for scriptural interpretation impinges upon how scripture was read and re-read in the scrolls from Qumran.