Review of \u3ci\u3eOut of the Cave: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Dead Sea Scrolls Research,\u3c/i\u3e by Edna Ullmann-Margalit (original) (raw)
Edna Ullmann-Margalit, a professor of the philosophy of science 1 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has turned her interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls into a fascinating study of the scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls. As she makes clear in the introduction (p. 17), Ullmann-Margalit makes no claim to expertise in the Scrolls, but is rather engaged in “second-order” scholarship; her subject is the study of the Scrolls. The book is divided into an introduction and three chapters: Chapter 1, “Writings and Ruins: The Essene Connection”; Chapter 2, “A Hard Look at ‘Hard Facts’: The Archaeology of Qumran”; and Chapter 3, “Sects and Scholars.” In the introduction, Ullmann- Margalit lays out her primary goal, which is “to subject to scrutiny the inner logic of the main theory of Qumran studies as well as of the rival theories.” The main theory is the Qumran-Essene hypothesis, which Ullmann-Margalit defines as follows: “the scrolls found in the caves [in the vicinity of Qumran] belonged t...
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Strata: Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, 2017
Qumran is probably one of the most renowned and disputed sites in the ancient Near East. In large part this is because of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves in its immediate vicinity. The year 2017 marks the seventieth anniversary of the discovery of these scrolls, which changed the scholarly landscape of ancient Judaism and biblical studies and also put Qumran on the archaeological map. In celebration of this important milestone, this paper traces seventy years of scholarship on the archaeology of Qumran, with a view to highlighting key methodological issues surrounding the many heated debates about its nature and function as well as its relationship to the scrolls.
Introduction to The Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls have revolutionized the study of the Hebrew Bible’s formative stages as well as our understanding of Jewish religion before the age of the Rabbis and of Christianity. The discovery of these texts nearly 70 years ago at Khirbet Qumran and other sites around the Dead Sea has lead to a flurry of scholarly activity along with a host of interpretations and hypotheses which we are still now struggling to evaluate. Through a careful reading of select texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus, we will begin to interact with many of the unanswered questions at the heart of Qumran studies: who wrote the scrolls, who stored them away in caves, who was the iconic teacher of righteousness, and what exactly do the scrolls teach us about the creation of scripture and early usage of some texts that would eventually become the Bible and other texts that would largely fade out of existence? We will also read some of the latest research on Qumran in order to better understand the nature of the settlement at Khirbet Qumran and its interaction with the world around it.
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These two massive volumes comprise the proceedings of a conference of the same name held at the University of Vienna in February 2008. The purpose of the conference, and the proceedings volumes, in the words of the editors, is “to integrate the Dead Sea Scrolls fully into the various disciplines that benefit from the discovery of these very important texts” (vol. 1, p. x). As a result, the papers contained in these volumes are wideranging, written by specialists in the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) as well as in other disciplines. The volumes will thus appeal to scholars in a variety of disciplines, including archaeology of the ancient Near East. ... In as large a collection as the editors present here, the reader should expect essays of uneven quality. But there is much in this collection to entice scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as connected disciplines
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