The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible

by Eugene Ulrich

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 1999

Overview

The Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran provide the oldest, best, and most direct witness we have to the origins of the Hebrew Bible. Prior to the discovery of the Scrolls, scholars had textual evidence for only a single, late period in the history of the biblical text, leading them to believe that the text was uniform. The Scrolls, however, provide documentary evidence a thousand years older than all previously known Hebrew manuscripts and reveal a period of pluriformity in the biblical text prior to the stage of uniformity. In this important collection of studies, Eugene Ulrich, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, outlines a comprehensive theory that reconstructs the complex development of the ancient texts that eventually came to form the Old Testament.

Several of the essays set forth his pioneering theory of “multiple literary editions,” which is replacing older views of the origins of the biblical text. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible represents the leading edge of research in the exciting field of Scrolls studies.

Contents

Top Highlights

“does the way that the Scriptures were composed have a bearing on the text form we present as Scripture?” (Page 3)

“Our focus is on the method by which the literature was produced” (Pages 4–5)

Praise for the Print Edition

There are few scholars in the field of textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible with more breadth and depth of knowledge than Eugene Ulrich. . . . His theoretical writings on the subject of text criticism have been scattered in various Festschriften and other volumes. The present volume does a welcome service in bringing together these essays into one collection. . . . It is a “must-have” on any text critic’s shelf.

—Journal of Biblical Literature

Product Details

• Title: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible
• Author: Eugene Ulrich
• Series: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature Series
• Publisher: W. B. Eerdmans
• Publication Date: 1999
• Pages: 327

About Eugene Ulrich

Eugene Ulrich is Professor of Hebrew Scriptures at the University of Notre Dame. He is one of the three General Editors of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project (with E. Tov of Israel and É. Peuch of France), having begun working on the scrolls in 1971. He has published several volumes of critical editions of the biblical scrolls in Discoveries in the Judean Desert (Oxford University Press).

Having written or contributed to eighteen books on the scrolls, he was appointed an Area Editor to Oxford's Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of the translators of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, he has authored numerous articles and has served as editor of the Bulletin of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, and served on the editorial boards of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly and Dead Sea Discoveries.