Co-edited by BYU's Donald W. Parry; classifies texts by genre
A six-volume work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, "The Dead Sea Scrolls Reader" co-edited by a Brigham Young University professor, has recently been published.
Donald W. Parry, professor of Asian and Near Eastern languages at BYU, and Emanuel Tov, the J. L. Magnes Professor of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls publication project, began the series in the mid-1990s.
The first three volumes of the reader were published in 2004, with the final three volumes now available.
Discovered in a cave outside Jerusalem in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain documents from a religious community that inhabited the area sometime between the second century B.C. and the first century A.D.
The six-volume reader presents some 500 Dead Sea Scroll texts, most of which are seriously fragmented, including the Temple Scroll, the War Scroll, the Copper Scroll, Melchizedek, the Birth of Noah, the Rule of the Community and many others.
Designed for students and researchers, the work is comprised of Hebrew and Aramaic texts on the left-hand pages with English translations on facing pages.
"The Dead Sea Scrolls Reader" presents for the first time all the nonbiblical Qumran texts classified according to their genres, together with translations. Some 25 previously unpublished texts are included in this edition.
The purpose of the reader is to enhance and facilitate research using the individual texts within their respective genres, according to Parry.
The six volumes address the following topics: texts concerned with religious law, exegetical texts, parabiblical texts, calendrical texts, poetic and liturgical texts and additional genres and unclassified texts.
The 2,400-page work was published by E. J. Brill, an academic press in Leiden, Netherlands.
For more information, contact Donald W. Parry, (801) 422-3491.
