The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Composition of the Bible
Eugene Ulrich
With creationism, jihadism, and the “Christian right,” it has become more obvious how potent a force religion is in modern culture. In contrast, there is little serious study or discussion attempting to clarify, justify or critique its role, or to challenge fundamentalist beliefs about sacred books. The popular imagination envisions direct dictation of Scripture from God to a few specific holy men (Moses, Isaiah, Matthew, Paul, etc.). But ever since the Enlightenment, scholars have theorized that the Scriptures are the end product of a long process of anonymous composition-by-stages, as successive communities passed on the sacred traditions but revised them in light of new historical and religious developments. The 230 biblical manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls—a millennium older than our previous texts—now provide documentary evidence of the dynamic process by which the biblical books took shape. These manuscripts offer many surprises and open a window on a period of the Bible’s development that had been lost in the darkness of history. This seminar will offer a brief introduction to the scrolls and then survey key biblical manuscripts to see what they teach us, as well as how they are providing revisions for recent translations of the Bible. In light of that new documentary evidence, we will examine earlier examples of the composition-by-stages of such passages as the creation and flood stories, the historical books, the prophetic books and the Psalms. Knowing how this powerful machine is put together will hopefully help us use it more judiciously.
My expectations were met to my delight! I enjoyed digging into the origin of the Bible and look forward to researching and studying the Bible in another way.
Dr. Ulrich was very well-versed in his Bible and very respectful of the variety of opinions.
The knowledge of Eugene Ulrich is truly amazing. I wish this course could continue for at least 3 more sessions. It is fascinating and exciting.
I have answers to many questions for my students in the Bible as Literature. There are several new books I want to read as a result of this seminar.
| Eugene Ulrich, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology, teaches and writes in the areas of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint. A member of the translation teams of both the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible and the New American Bible, he recently co-authored The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible. He is one of the three General Editors of the Scrolls International Publication Project and Chief Editor of the Biblical Scrolls. Having published five volumes of critical editions of the biblical scrolls in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert from Oxford University Press, he was an Area Editor for Oxford’s Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Prof Ulrich received the Award Medal of the University of Helsinki in 1997, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was appointed to the Grinfield Lecturership at the University of Oxford for 1998-2000 and invited as a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. |