The Department of Old Testament and Hebrew Scriptures in the Faculty of Theology and Religion hosted an international virtual Qumran conference between 11 and 13 May 2021. Qumran Studies are still scarce in South Africa and this was the first time that the Dead Sea Scrolls received exclusive attention in an international conference at the University of Pretoria; it was also the first exclusively international Qumran conference hosted from South Africa.
This conference was originally planned as an in-person conference for May 2020, but because of the Covid 19 outbreak, it was postponed for a year and became a virtual conference.
The theme of this conference was The Origin of the Sectarian Movement in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is a much-debated topic that led to a lively conversation.
Professor John J. Collins, the Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School, who is appointed as an honorary professor at the University of Pretoria in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, Department of Old Testament and Hebrew Scriptures, was the co-host of the conference with myself. Prof. Collins is a world-renowned Qumran scholar and his presence added to the lustre of the event.
This conference was an excellent event of internationalization and collaboration. More than a hundred persons attended this conference virtually, which included renowned international scholars such as Professors George Brooke, Eileen Schuller, Albert Baumgarten, Carol Newsom, Juta Jokiranta, David Hamidovic, Kenneth Atkinson, Jean Duhaime, Jonathan Ben-Dov, Henryk Drawnel, Bill Schniedewind, Alexander Rofé, Rob Kugler, Gert Steyn, Marcello Fidanzio, Heinz-Josef Fabry, and Jörg Frey, to name but a few.
What was once a disappointment, turned out to be a very successful conference. We also realized that a virtual platform might be the easiest way of getting so many scholars from all over the globe in “one room.”
The concepts of “origin” and “sectarian movement” activated interest and attendance, in such a way that we had to capture some of the thoughts, ideas and conversations in writing. That is the origin of this volume.
The lively conversations prompted all the conference contributors to renew end rethink their papers. This volume is, therefore, the result of thoroughly reworked, and in some cases, even entirely new, contributions with their origin in the conference on the sectarian movement(s) of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The outcome of this conference point to one fact, and that is that there is a need to revisit all hypotheses concerning the sectarian movement(s) in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It became clear that there is no straightforwardness in these studies and that there can no longer be “a consensus.” Studies on the sectarian movement(s) of the Dead Sea Scrolls have proved to be a complex study that encompasses a range of aspects. The most suitable concluding remark might be that the debate continues…