“The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible” by James C. VanderKam

James VanderKam

James C. VanderKam is John A. O’Brien Professor of Hebrew Scriptures at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the international team responsible for preserving and translating the Dead Sea Scrolls. In this post, he provides a brief overview of his forthcoming book The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible.

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In writing The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible, my intent was to take up familiar topics and questions within the broad area of the scrolls and the Bible, update the discussions about them, and press them forward. What is the full range of the evidence on the topics, now that all the scrolls have been available for some time? What contributions have the texts made to biblical studies, and what questions do they raise? While the topics may be familiar, my treatment of them contains new reflections.

The first three chapters take up the broad areas of text, interpretation, and authority. Chapter one not only assembles the evidence of the copies of “biblical” works but also surveys the citations from other kinds of texts (such as commentaries) and assesses their contributions to our understanding of textual history and fluidity.

Interpretation of older, authoritative works is the subject of chapter two. It contextualizes the sundry kinds of scriptural interpretation in the scrolls by first examining instances in the Hebrew Bible and in early works such as 1 Enoch and Jubilees before addressing the Qumran material itself.

The third chapter deals with the complicated question of what constituted authoritative literature for early Jews and how one can tell; it studies the materials in the scrolls within the broader context of other Jewish literature including the New Testament.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible

The fourth chapter assembles a different kind of evidence — the new textual data from the scrolls for Jubilees, Aramaic Levi, the Book of Giants, 1 Enoch, Sirach, Tobit, the Epistle of Jeremiah, and Psalms 151, 154, and 155 — and assesses it and its implications in the light of what had previously been known about these compositions.

Groups and group controversies occupy the fifth chapter. My purpose here was to gather the limited evidence in the scrolls for the familiar three groups — Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes — analyze it carefully, and determine what separated them from one another.

The last two chapters turn more directly to the pertinence of the scrolls to the study and appreciation of the New Testament, although material from the New Testament figures in other chapters as well. Some of the contributions the scrolls have made to understanding passages in the New Testament are familiar; some are less so. These two chapters tackle topics in the Gospels (chapter 6) and in Acts and Paul’s Letters (chapter 7), update the discussion, and examine the issues anew. Among the topics I have included are some of Jesus’s controversies about legal issues and Paul’s use of the phrase “works of the law.”

Click here to order The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible, by James C. VanderKam.

Click here to read a previous EerdWord post by Dr. VanderKam, commenting on Google’s digitization of the Scrolls.