The dead sea scrolls and Bible 📜

The Dead Sea Scrolls 

and The Bible

Six of the seven chapters in The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible began as the speaker's Lectures at Oxford University Six, delivered during the first two weeks of May 2009.The first chapter, "The 'Biblical' Scrolls and their Implications" begins with a survey of the manuscript copies of books that eventually became part of the Hebrew Bible, citations of those books, and other evidence for their texts in the Judean Desert finds; but it is more concerned with providing specific examples from the manuscripts and with exploring where the newer data lead. Chapter 2, "Commentary on Older Scripture in the Scrolls" focuses on a major preoccupation of the authors  explaining the meaning of older, authoritative works for their time. Included are studies of the sources of interpretation — whether in the Hebrew Bible or other, older works — on which the writers could draw and the ways in which they went about handling these more ancient texts. The third chapter, "Authoritative Literature According to the Scrolls" deals with the assumptions that drove the scrolls writers and the ways in which they indicate which ancient texts functioned authoritatively at a time when there was not, as nearly as one can tell, a canon of scripture in the strict sense of
the term. In Chapter 3 , new testament information adduced is helpful  comparative roughly the same historical period. The fourth chapter contains an essay that was not delivered as one of the Speaker's Lectures. "New Copies of Old Texts" is a study of various Jewish compositions that were known before the scrolls discoveries (made between 1947 and 1956) but of which fragmentary copies from the original language texts have turned up in the caves at Qumran. The works covered
are Jubilees, Aramaic Levi, the Book of the Giants, the Wisdom of Ben Sira, Tobit, Enoch (especially the Greek fragments from cave 7 that may contain bits of the Epistle of Enoch), the Epistle of Jeremiah, and Psalms 151,154, and 155. All of these works, apart from Aramaic Levi, have found a place in
the Bibles of various groups — even the Book of the Giants among the Manichees — and for that reason can be said to fall under the overall rubric of The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible. In Chapter 5, "Groups and Group Controversies in the Scrolls," I turn to the question of whether the scrolls deal with the three "sects" that Josephus mentioned — Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes — and what they say about them, if they do mention them. The texts plainly, in my opinion, speak of thefirst and last of these groups, using specific names for both, while the evidence is weaker for the presence of Sadducees, though there is evidence for a"Sadducean" approach to law in the scrolls. Once again New Testament passages are summoned as comparative material. The final two chapters are directed principally at places in the Gospels, Acts, and letters of Paul where the scrolls provide illumination that enriches the reading of those texts. The sixth chapter, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament Gospels," examines several pericopes and topics (e.g., messianism, legal matters) that benefit the student of the New testament in understanding phenomena in the texts. The last chapter, "The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Letters of Paul," offers analyses of the first chapters of Acts that exhibit profound parallels with the scrolls, along with some differences, and a number of issues in Pauline studies (scriptural interpretation, 2 Cor. 6:14-7:1, works of the law) in connection with material in the scrolls.