The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, translated and with commentary by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, Jr., & Edward Cook

Retrieved from: BLLY
0060692006, 1996
Suggested by: My reading list
My Ratings: 10 Merit, 8 Interest, 7 Fun

Confession time: I only read the 40-page "Prolegomena" and browsed the actual translated scrolls. What I did read was greatly informative and changed the way I felt about reading the rest of the book, especially when I started actually looking at some of the passages. There are some major explanations of some of the transcriptions, and lots of shorter descriptive markers so it's not impossible to follow what's going on. Here are a couple of examples. The numbers are not "verses" in the Biblical sense; they show where the beginning of each line of text falls.

The behavior expected of the disciple, who is clearly also an initiate of the Yahad.

4Q421 Frag. 1 Col. 2 10[ ... ] the intelligent and insightful man 11shall be humble and defer [ ... ] he will endure rebuke 12of the Instructor, each [ ... ] to walk in the ways of God, 13to do righteousness
...

AND

A summary statement on the nature of the preceding psalm[which I have not appended].

Col. 4 1[ ... ] 2which [ ... ] and those possessed by [demons ... ] 3those crushed [by Belial .. on Isra]el, peace [eternal ...]

It's not 'reading.' It requires study, with notes and flipping to and fro, and discussion. While I could possibly manage to make some sense of it from lots of intensive time, I really feel that I would be better served, as would the subject, if I were to have some other people to bounce my sense of the texts off of. It's too complicated by far.

But, one can see, even from the limited reading I did, why these scrolls upset 2000 years of exegesis and interpretation. They are exciting, an almost literal taste of a past we didn't know existed.