The Seventeenth International Orion Symposium, “(Con)textual Perspectives on the Dead Sea Scrolls,” was originally intended to mark the silver anniversary of the Orion Center in 2021. The vagaries of the COVID epidemic led us to mount a rescheduled, online symposium (a first for the Center!), held in February 2022.
The symposium was conceived as a chance for scrolls scholars to share aspects of their current research, set in relation to broader contexts (literary, cultural, historical, text-critical). Scholars from Israel, North America, and Europe convened online over the course of four days, examining a diverse group of texts and writing practices from an equally diverse range of perspectives, using a variety of traditional and innovative methodological frameworks. The online setup gave us the opportunity to open the sessions to auditors from all over the globe—from Israel to Peru to Burundi to Kuwait—for rich opportunities of exchange. The webinar format also allowed us to experiment with novel meeting options, including recap sessions at the beginning of each program day which brought the previous day’s content into the current day’s sessions; “discussion rooms” for presenters and chairs, which provided a forum for exploring some ideas in more depth; and “fireside chats” with senior colleagues in the field, to hear their perspectives on the last seventy years of research.
The fully online format of the symposium presented new challenges of organization extending through time zones and continents, and many hands contributed to its success. We want especially to express our appreciation to Ms. Ruchama Roth, Orion administrator, for coordinating the myriad university departments and personnel instrumental in the successful running of the symposium. At the planning stages, Prof. Lawrence Schiffman and Kirsten Howe of NYU, as well as Dr. Joshua Scott of the Enoch Seminar, generously shared their experience in the organizing of online conferences. Our “in-house” tech team, led by Dr. Michael Johnson, included Shlomo Brand, Orion Bibliography Research Assistant, Shiran Shevah (former Orion Bibliographer), and Orion interns Daniel Park and Minwoo Nam; they were responsible for the smooth running of the online sessions. And of course, we are indebted to all the presenters who put their developing research and expertise on the table for such a wide audience.
The editors are grateful to Profs. George Brooke and Jutta Jokiranta for accepting the volume into the series, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, and to Katelyn Chin and Katerina Sofianou of Brill Academic Publishers, and Bart Nijsten of TAT Zetwerk for seeing the volume through production. We want to recognize Ben Frankel for his careful editorial assistance, and we thank the Silas S. Perry Foundation for Biblical Research for its support for the preparation of the volume. And last but not least, we want to thank the Orion Foundation, along with the Hebrew University and the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies, for their ongoing sponsorship of the Center’s work, and the Symposium in particular.
From the first Orion Symposium in 1996 (“Biblical Perspectives”) to this seventeenth symposium, the Center has aimed to foster innovative research on the scrolls, and to encourage integration of that research into the larger body of knowledge about Jewish literature, history, and religion from the Second Temple period through to the early Christian and rabbinic corpora. The Seventeenth Symposium and this resulting volume constitute a fitting celebration and continuation of the Center’s work.
Ruth A. Clements
Michael B. Johnson
Noam Mizrahi
Michael Segal
July 8, 2025 // 12 Tamuz 5785