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.

Before the Bible reveals the landscape of scripture in an era prior to the crystallization of the rabbinic Bible and the canonization of the Christian Bible. Most accounts of the formation of the Hebrew Bible trace the origins of scripture through source critical excavation of the archaeological "tel" of the Bible or the analysis of the scribal hand on manuscripts in text-critical work, but the discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of scripture formation. Judith Newman focuses not on the putative origins and closure of the Bible, but on the reasons why scriptures remained open, with pluriform growth in the Hellenistic-Roman period. Drawing on new methods from cognitive neuroscience and the social sciences as well as traditional philological and literary analysis, Before the Bible argues that the key to understanding the formation of scripture is the widespread practice of individual and communal prayer in early Judaism. The figure of the teacher as a learned and pious sage capable of interpreting and embodying the tradition is central to understanding this revelatory phenomenon. The book considers the entwinement of prayer and scriptural formation in five books reflecting the diversity of early Judaism: Ben Sira, Daniel, Jeremiah/Baruch, Second Corinthians, and the Qumran Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns). While not a complete taxonomy of scripture formation, the book illuminates performative dynamics that have been largely ignored as well as the generative role of interpretive tradition in accounts of how the Bible came to be.

An essential resource for scholars and students Since the publication of the first edition of Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters in 1986, the field of early Judaism has exploded with new data, the publication of additional texts, and the adoption of new methods. This new edition of the classic resource honors the spirit of the earlier volume and focuses on the scholarly advances in the past four decades that have led to the study of early Judaism becoming an academic discipline in its own right. Essays written by leading scholars in the study of early Judaism fall into four sections: historical and social settings; methods, manuscripts, and materials; early Jewish literatures; and the afterlife of early Judaism.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls altered our understanding of the development of the biblical text, the history and literature of Second Temple Judaism, and the thought of the early Christian community. Questions continue to surround the relationship between the caves in which the scrolls were found and the nearby settlement at Khirbet Qumran. In Scribes and Scrolls at Qumran, Sidnie White Crawford combines the conclusions of the first generation of scrolls scholars that have withstood the test of time, new insights that have emerged since the complete publication of the scrolls corpus, and the much more complete archaeological picture that we now have of Khirbet Qumran. She creates a new synthesis of text and archaeology that yields a convincing history of and purpose for the Qumran settlement and its associated caves.

This volume is offered as a tribute to George Brooke to mark his sixty-fifth birthday. It has been conceived as a coherent contribution to the question of textuality in the Dead Sea Scrolls explored from a wide range of perspectives. These include material aspects of the texts, performance, reception, classification, scribal culture, composition, reworking, form and genre, and the issue of the extent to which any of the texts relate (to) social realities in the Second Temple period. Almost every contribution engages with Brooke’s own remarkably wide-ranging, incisive, and innovative research on the Scrolls. The twenty-eight contributors are colleagues and students of the honouree and include leading scholars alongside promising new voices from across the field.

The Oxford Handbook of Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible is a collection of essays that provide resources for the interpretation of the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. The volume is not exhaustive in its coverage, but examines interpretive aspects of these books that are deemed essential for interpretation or that are representative of significant trends in present and future scholarship. The individual essays are united by their focus on two guiding questions: (1) What does this topic have to do with the Old Testament Historical Books? and (2) How does this topic help readers better interpret the Old Testament Historical Books? Each essay critically surveys prior scholarship before presenting current and prospective approaches. Taking into account the ongoing debates concerning the relationship between the Old Testament texts and historical events in the ancient world, data from Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian culture and history are used to provide a larger context for the content of the Historical Books. Essays consider specific issues related to Israelite/Judean history (settlement, state formation, monarchy, forced migration, and return) as they relate to the interpretation of the Historical Books. This volume also explores the specific themes, concepts, and content that are most essential for interpreting these books. In light of the diverse material included in this section of the Old Testament, the Handbook further examines interpretive strategies that employ various redactional, synthetic, and theory-based approaches. Beyond the Old Testament proper, subsequent texts, traditions, and cultures often received and interpreted the material in the Historical Books, and so the volume concludes by investigating the literary, social, and theological aspects of that reception.

When we encounter a text, whether ancient or modern, we typically start at the beginning and work our way toward the end. In Tracking the Master Scribe, Sara J. Milstein demonstrates that for biblical and Mesopotamian literature, this habit can lead to misinterpretation. In the ancient Near East, "master scribes"--those who had the authority to produce and revise literature--regularly modified their texts in the course of transmission. One of the most effective techniques for change was to add something new to the front, what Milstein calls "revision through introduction." This method allowed scribes to preserve their received material while simultaneously recasting it. As a result, many biblical and Mesopotamian texts continue to be interpreted solely through the lens of their final contributions. First impressions carry weight. Tracking the Master Scribe demonstrates what is to be gained when we engage questions of literary history in the context of how scribes actually worked. Drawing upon the two earliest corpora that allow us to track large-scale change, the book provides substantial hard evidence of revision through introduction, as well as a set of detailed case studies that offer fresh insight into well-known biblical and Mesopotamian texts. The result is the first comprehensive profile of this key scribal method: one that was ubiquitous in the ancient Near East and epitomizes the attitudes of the master scribes toward the literature that they left behind.

In focusing exclusively on the book of Exodus and its constant allusions in the New Testament, this new collection of studies seeks both to increase knowledge of the textual transmission of Exodus in the first century, and to encourage further methodological reflection on the use of Scripture vs. scriptural traditions as employed by ancient authors. First exploring the role of Exodus within Judaism in the Second Temple Period, the contributors then reflect upon the rhetorical impact of Exodus citations and allusions in the New Testament. By taking the reader from the Four Gospels through the Pauline and Disputed Letters and Hebrews, and all the way to Revelation itself, this volume demonstrates both the unity and the diversity of appeals to Exodus traditions in Jewish and Christian literature within the Second Temple Period.

A collection of essays commemorating the career contributions of Peter W. Flint An international group of scholars specializing in various disciplines of biblical studies—Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Second Temple Judaism, and Christian origins—present twenty-seven new contributions that commemorate the career of Peter W. Flint (1951–2016). Each essay interacts with and gives fresh insight into a field shaped by Professor Flint’s life work. Part 1 explores the interplay between text-critical methods, the growth and formation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the making of modern critical editions. Part 2 maps dynamics of scriptural interpretation and reception in ancient Jewish and Christian literatures of the Second Temple period. Features Essays that assess the state of the field and reflect on the methods, aims, and best practices for textual criticism and the making of modern critical text editions Demonstrations of how the processes of scriptural composition, transmission, and reception converge and may be studied together for mutual benefit Clarification of the state/forms of scripture in antiquity and how scripture was extended, rewritten, and recontextualized by ancient Jewish and Christian scribes and communities

Multilingualism remains a thorny issue in many contexts, be it cultural, political, or educational. Debates and discourses on this issue in contexts of diversity (particularly in multicultural societies, but also in immigration situations) are often conducted with present-day communicational and educational needs in mind, or with political and identity agendas. This is nothing new. There are a vast number of witnesses from the ancient West-Asian and Mediterranean world attesting to the same debates in long past societies. Could an investigation into the linguistic landscapes of ancient societies shed any light on our present-day debates and discourses? This volume suggests that this is indeed the case. In fourteen chapters, written and visual sources of the ancient world are investigated and explored by scholars, specialising in those fields of study, to engage in an interdisciplinary discourse with modern-day debates about multilingualism. A final chapter – by an expert in language in education – responds critically to the contributions in the book to open avenues for further interdisciplinary engagement – together with contemporary linguists and educationists – on the matter of multilingualism.