For over two decades the vast majority of the fragmentary materials from Qumran Cave 4 have been available to the public, and thus we are now beginning to see the contours of a changed landscape. Ancient Judaism and the Hebrew Bible are transformed before our eyes with the new information we currently possess. This book contributes to the rethinking of the Dead Sea Scrolls as an essential and integral part of Judaism in the Greco-Roman period. This requires a reconsideration of the normative model of sectarianism that has been projected onto the scrolls and fragments. Soon after the discoveries, the extraordinary finds of the Dead Sea Scrolls were assigned to the margins of ancient society by their association with a separatist community that had withdrawn to the desert. Notwithstanding the bitter polemic that some fragments exhibit, and the profound tensions in late Second Temple society that our ancient sources reveal, we can now see a picture that involves a more diverse network of communities and a richer variety of texts that continue to transform our understanding of the emergence of the biblical corpus.
My thinking on the Dead Sea Scrolls has been deeply shaped by the tradition of Groningen, where I currently teach and do research. This book started as a doctoral dissertation under supervision of Eibert Tigchelaar at KU Leuven. I am very fortunate to have been taught by a great scholar with a vast and extremely detailed knowledge, who is a sharp and critical reader with a curious and open mind. I am deeply grateful for his patience, generosity, and support. His work in deconstructing and reconstructing the basic terms of Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship, from manuscript to categorization, has been foundational for my own research. Another significant teacher in the Groningen tradition is Florentino García Martínez, who introduced me to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and has continued to be a source of inspiration and support across the years. Mladen Popović has created a vibrant and welcoming environment at the Groningen Qumran Institute and has set new standards for innovative and fundamental research. I am grateful for his collegiality, support, guidance, mentorship, and conversation.
Generous financial support of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls has enabled me to do research at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem under the guidance of Menahem Kister. His advice, generosity, and friendship have been crucial to my research and to my development as a scholar. His honesty, erudition, and command of the sources continue to be an example and an inspiration. I want to express my gratitude to him and to the many other incredible scholars and fellow students from whom and with whom I was fortunate to learn so much during my time in Jerusalem and afterwards. As a Postdoc at the University of Haifa, I had the good fortune of working with Jonathan Ben-Dov, who has been a wonderful teacher and mentor. His work on ancient astronomy and calendar has been most important for my own thinking on concepts of time. I am grateful for his support and hospitality.
Hindy Najman is an incredible scholar, teacher and mentor who has taught me to see many new possibilities and pathways forward in the fields of Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism, and in the academy more generally. Her scholarly brilliance and originality have inspired a generation of young scholars and no doubt will continue to do so for many decades to come. I have been fortunate to work closely with her at Oriel College and the Centre for the Study of the Bible, and I have benefitted tremendously from her mentorship and guidance. Her thinking on soul-formation, linguistic border crossing, reading practices and the vitality of scripture has been formative for my work. In 2017 and 2018 we presented several versions of a co-authored paper on heavenly and earthly time that has had a deep impact on my understanding of time in ancient Judaism and has shaped chapter 5 of this book. At the University of Oxford, I have profoundly enjoyed the many and endless conversations with senior scholars, peers, and students. I am grateful for all that I have learned and for the friendships that were forged.
It is not possible to list all the people who have contributed to this book with advice, feedback, and encouragement. Among my senior colleagues and teachers, I want to thank Wout van Bekkum, George Brooke, Esther Chazon, Sarit Kattan-Gribetz, James Kugel, Noam Mizrahi, Judith Newman, Carol Newsom, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Francis Schmidt, Michael Segal, Shaul Shaked
It is a great honour to publish my first book in the STDJ series and I want to thank George Brooke, the editor, for his critical and supportive feedback. His careful reading and encouragement have been most significant. Chapters one and five are new, while chapters two through four are revised chapters of my doctoral dissertation. These chapters have greatly benefitted from the critical reading and feedback by the members of my PhD committee, Charlotte Hempel, Annette Steudel, and Pierre Van Hecke. I want to thank them for their diligence and generosity. I also want to thank the anonymous readers of STDJ for their comments and suggestions. Mirjam van Willigen and Sarah Wisialowski have provided crucial editing support, and Mirjam van Willigen has also helped preparing the indices. I thank them both for their careful work and look forward to their future contributions to the field. I also want to express my gratitude to the typesetter and to Brill for their incredible work and support, especially Suzanne Mekking, Dirk Bakker, and Marjolein van Zuylen.
This book has been published Open Access thanks to the financial support of the Open Access Book Fund of the University of Groningen. I am grateful for their generous contribution and hope this book will be of benefit to many readers.
Finally, I want to thank my family and friends for their patience and support throughout the years in which I have worked on this book. Their presence in my life has made the completion of this work possible and joyful. Most of all I want to thank my parents for their continuous support and their wisdom. This book is dedicated to them.