A Wealth of Information

Every school and public library needs a copy of this new Oxford Handbook.

Pastors, preachers, and professors alike cannot keep up with every bit of research and scholarship. One area many of us would like to know more but don’t have the time to do is the Dead Sea Scrolls. But Oxford now has a handbook that puts at your fingertips and one pull of a book off a shelf a wealth of information: The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Oxford Handbooks).

I heard this was coming out and so I pre-ordered months back, and I am not disappointed. All the right authors, all the big topics, excellent and up-to-date bibliographies … this book will be the standard go-to text for more than a decade, if not longer.

Some highlights for me: Martin Goodman’s construction of the kind of Judaism we find at Qumran, Mike Wise’s study of the Teacher’s movement, and Tal Ilan’s study of women at Qumran, a series of entries on “sectarian” themes, a wise selection of authors on the Biblical texts and languages, major religious themes (purity by Jon Klawans, messianism by Michael Knibb, and then some stuff on the Scrolls and early Christianity, including a piece by Larry Hurtado on monotheism issues. And much more beside.

Just a wonderful new resource for libraries, and if you’ve got the funds and like the Scrolls, a must.