The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible

Ulrich, Eugene.The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible.Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999. ISBN:0-8028-4611-4.(Part of the series Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature.)

Eugene Ulrich is the chief editor of the biblical scrolls from Qumran, and is the John A. O’Brien Professor of Hebrew Scriptures at the University of Notre Dame. This book is written with the scholarly consensus on scrolls studies and other Biblical literature in mind, but it also meets a need for serious, constructive criticism and creative new ideas presented for the non-expert.

Those with limited background in Biblical studies will find this book tough going, but one does not need to be an expert in Hebrew or in textual criticism of the Hebrew scriptures to benefit from much of the material. Most of this collection consists of previously published essays or of papers presented at conferences. It is arranged in a quite logical order, but nonetheless one will find some repetition of ideas that would not be expected if it were not a collection.

It is divided into two sections:The Scrolls and the Hebrew Bible, and The Scrolls, The Septuagint and the Old Latin. It does not purport to be a full treatment of the textual criticism of the Hebrew scriptures. In fact, Dr. Ulrich recommends Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible by Emmanuel Tov (as do I) for that purpose. Rather, this work seeks to clarify a number of issues in the relationship of the scrolls to the topic of textual criticism.

The section specifically on the Hebrew text is quite interesting and rather thorough, especially considering that this is a collection of essays. Ulrich reviews the impact of the scrolls on the text of entire Hebrew Bible in some detail. Particularly welcome, however, is his treatment in the second section of both the relationship of the Septuagint to the Hebrew text, and also the impact of the Greek scrolls on our understanding of the history of the Septuagint text and also of the Old Latin.

If you have done some basic reading on textual criticism and have at least a basic knowledge of characteristics of the Hebrew language (some Hebrew texts are not transliterated, but generally one can follow the argument without them), this book will provide an excellent follow-on study. I don’t recommend it as a first book on the Dead Sea Scrolls. For that I currently recommend a book such as Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls by Lawrence H. Schiffman, which, despite its slightly polemical title, is a very well balanced examination of the scrolls and their impact on a number of fields.