The Dead Sea ScrollsThe Greatest Discovery of the 20th CenturyWhy should anyone be interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls? Why are they important? We trust that the present volume, which presents fifty texts from the previously unpublished corpus, will help answer these questions.The story of the discovery of the Scrolls in caves along the shores of the Dead Sea in the late forties and early fifties is well known. The first cave was discovered, as the story goes, by Bedouin boys in 1947. Most familiar works in Qumran research come from this cave - Qumran, the Arabic term for the locale in which the Scrolls were found, being used by scholars as shorthand to refer to the Scrolls.Discoveries from other caves are less well known, but equally important. For instance, Cave 3 was discovered in 1952. It contained a Copper Scroll, a list apparently of hiding places of Temple treasure. The problem has always been to fit this Copper Scroll into its proper historical setting. The present work should help in resolving this and other similar questions.The most important cave for our purposes was Cave 4 discovered in 1954. Since it was discovered after the partition of Palestine, its contents went into the Jordanian-controlled Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem; while the contents of Cave 1 had previously gone into an Israeli-controlled museum in West Jerusalem, the Israel Museum.The discovery of this obviously ancient document with Judaeo-Christian overtones among medieval materials puzzled observers at the time. Later, fragments of it were found among materials from Cave 4, but researchers continued using the Cairo Genizah versions because the Qumran fragments were never published. We now present pictures of the last column of this document (plates 19 and 20) in this work, and it figured prominently in events leading up to the final publication of the unpublished plates.These texts constitute some of the most thought-provoking in the corpus. We have placed them in the first Chapter because of the importance of their Messianic, visionary and mystical - even Kabbalistic - content and imagery. These are not the only texts with such import. This kind of thrust will grow to a climax in Chapters 5 and 7.But the Messianic theorizing these texts exhibit is particularly interesting - it has heretofore either been underestimated or for some reason played down in the study of the Scrolls. In at least two texts in this Chapter (not to mention other Chapters), we have definite Messianic allusions: the Messianic vision text we call, after an allusion in its first line, the Messiah of Heaven and Earth, and the Messianic Leader (Nasi) text. In both there are clear correspondences to recognized Messianic sections in the Prophet Isaiah. This discovery made front page news during the 1950s and 1960s, yet the translations were not easily available to the public until the latter 1990s. Now it is here, available in electronic format for as low a cost as possible. If you are a Bible scholar, this is MUST READING. As a scholar or teacher, you should be familia with the writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.***Robert Eisenman is Professor of Middle East Religions and Chair of the Religious Studies Department at California State University, Long Beach. He has published several books on the Scrolls, including Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran: A New Hypothesis of Qumran Origins and James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher, and he is a major contributor to a Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls.Michael Wise is an Assistant Professor of Aramaic - the language of Jesus - in the Department of Near Eastern Languagesand Civilization at the University of Chicago. He is the author of A Critical Study of the Temple Scroll from Qumran Cave Eleven and has written numerous articles on the Dead Sea Scrolls which have appeared in journals such as the Revue de Qumran, Journal of Biblical Literature, and Vetus Testamentum NB!!Please make sure that you can receive a 7Mb email before bidding on this item otherwise there would be a postage cost of R42.00 to put the item on cd and post it to you.
