Vision Narrative And Wisdom In The Aramaic Texts From Qumran

The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran have attracted increasing interest in recent years. These texts predate the “sectarian” Dead Sea scrolls, and they are contemporary with the youngest parts of the Hebrew Bible. They offer a unique glimpse into the situation before the biblical canons were closed. Their highly creative Jewish authors reshaped and rewrote biblical traditions to cope with the concerns of their own time. The essays in this volume examine this fascinating ancient literature from a variety of different perspectives. The book grew out of an international symposium held at the University of Copenhagen in August 2017.

This volume is a collection of scholarly articles on the Aramaic Dead Sea scrolls, some of the oldest and most fascinating literary compositions among the ancient Jewish manuscripts found in the Qumran caves.

This volume contains studies that explore the content and meaning of the Qumran manuscripts of the Aramaic Books of Enoch, the Book of Giants, and related literature. The essays shed new light on the lexicon, orthography and grammar of the Aramaic scrolls, as well as their relationship to schematic astronomy in ancient Mesopotamia. Contributors examine the origin of the angelic tradition of the Watchers, the textual and literary relationship of the Aramaic scrolls to the Book of the Watchers, and the culpability of humanity in the spread of evil on earth according to the myth of the fallen angels.

This book provides the first comprehensive treatment of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls from the caves of Qumran. These nearly one hundred scrolls open a window onto a vibrant period of Jewish history for which we previously had few historical sources. Scholars and advanced students will find a general introduction to the corpus, detailed, richly-illustrated profiles of individual scrolls, and up-to-date studies of their Aramaic language and scribal practices. The goal of the book is to foster and support further study of these scrolls against the historical backdrop of early Judaism and ancient Mediterranean scribal cultures.

Previous scholars have largely approached Wisdom and Torah in the Second Temple Period through a type of reception history, whereby the two concepts have been understood as signifiers of independent, earlier “biblical” streams of tradition that later came together in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, largely under the process of a so-called “torahization” of wisdom. Recent studies critiquing the nature of wisdom and wisdom literature as operative categories for understanding scribal cultures in early Judaism, as well as newer approaches to conceptualizing Torah and authorizing-compositional practices related to the Pentateuchal texts, however, have challenged the foundations on which the previous models of Wisdom and Torah rested. This volume, therefore, brings together several essays that aim to reexamine and rethink the ways we can describe the developments of texts categorized as “Wisdom” that proliferated during the Second Temple Period and whose contents point to an engagement with a “Torah” discourse. By asking anew the question of whether “Wisdom” was transformed by/into “Torah” during this period, this volume offers reformulations on the discursive space between Wisdom and Torah through analyzing new identifications, confluences, and transformations.

The Hellenistic period was a pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish priesthood. The waning days of the Persian empire coincided with the continued ascendance of the high priest and Jerusalem temple as powerful political, cultural, and religious institutions in Judea. The Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran, only recently published in full, testify to the existence of a flourishing but previously unknown Jewish literary tradition dating from the end of Persian rule to the rise of the Hasmoneans. Throughout this book, Robert Jones analyzes how Israel’s priestly institutions are represented in these writings, and he demonstrates that they are essential for understanding the Jewish priesthood at this crucial stage in its history.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have expanded the corpus of early Jewish apocalyptic literature and tested scholars’ ideas of what apocalyptic means. With all the scrolls now available for study, contributors to this volume engage those texts and many more to reexplore not only definitions of the genre but also the influence of the Dead Sea Scrolls on the study of apocalyptic literature in the Second Temple period and beyond. Part 1 focuses on debates about categories and genre. Part 2 explores ancient Jewish texts from the Second Temple period to the early rabbinic era. Part 3 brings the results of scroll research into dialogue with the New Testament and early Christian writings. Contributors include Garrick V. Allen, Giovanni B. Bazzana, Stefan Beyerle, Dylan M. Burns, John J. Collins, Devorah Dimant, Lorenzo DiTommaso, Frances Flannery, Matthew J. Goff, Angela Kim Harkins, Martha Himmelfarb, G. Anthony Keddie, Armin Lange, Harry O. Maier, Andrew B. Perrin, Christopher Rowland, Alex Samely, Jason M. Silverman, and Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg.

The annual Review of Biblical Literature presents a selection of reviews of the most recent books in biblical studies and related fields, including topical monographs, multi-author volumes, reference works, commentaries, and dictionaries. RBL reviews German, French, Italian, and English books and offers reviews in those languages.