Book Note - DJD XXII (original) (raw)
Related papers
At this juncture, it is advisable, I think, to give a brief update regarding the so-called unpublished texts from the Judean Desert. I use the term "so-called unpublished texts," since the terms "published" and "unpublished" mean different things to different people. For scholars, any responsible transcription of a text, together with an apparatus of notes and accompanying photographs, is considered a publication. Such a publication may appear in a dissertation, an article in a scholarly journal, or a book. All these publications provide the public with the essential information needed for further study of the texts under consideration. On another level, however, these publications are considered preliminary, since all the Qumran texts, and actually most texts from the Judean Desert, are to appear in the official publication, namely DJD, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, published by Oxford University Press. That series is to contain the official publication of all the texts, the editio princeps. Things get a little complicated, however, since the editio princeps may be preceded by preliminary publications, and are often followed by re-editions. The usual course would be that the publication in the DJD series improves on preliminary editions, if any, and that re-editions subsequent to DJD improve on DJD.
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.
Review of Devorah Dimant and Donald W. Parry, eds. Dead Sea Scrolls Handbook. (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
Review of Biblical Literature, 2016
The Dead Sea Scrolls Handbook is a transcription-only assemblage of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek manuscripts discovered at Qumran. It is intended to serve as a practical and convenient resource for scholars. According to its editors, what differentiates this volume from previous publications is its easy-to-handle, single-volume format and its numerically ordered presentation of all the sizable Qumran manuscripts. As such, the Handbook abrogates translation, editorial commentary, and textual analysis in order to augment the accessibility of the transcriptions themselves.