Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls: 2 Volume set

As one might expect, given that many fine scholars contributed, this reference work can be highly recommended. It provides a good interim survey of on-going research from which anyone can learn much. As also ineluctable, no one publication on the lively scrolls research can be fully complete or error-free. There are so many excellent articles to be thankful for. Without minimizing how valuable this collection is, a few critical notes may be worthwhile. I haven't finished reading, so I may err too. It isn't illustrated, perhaps to keep this--relatively--less expensive. And many photos of scrolls and caves, etc., are indeed available elsewhere. Yet some articles are limited by this: scroll reconstruction and photography and computer imaging, for instance. While nearly all the important topics are covered adequately, there are absences. Though Epicurean and Cynicism articles are provided, Stoicism has no article, though the latter is much more relevant to Qumran Essenes or descriptions of them. Yes, Qumran Essenes, though several articles retain the now-pointless politically correct equivocation, as if a badge of methodological rigour. Qumran, we reliably read demonstrated here, was neither a fort to which all scrolls were brought from Jerusalem, nor a salt-seller motel, nor a luxury villa. The late S. Steckoll, though not a noted scholar, did dig at Qumran, so could have merited an article. The "yahad" ostracon (or not "yahad," depending on the scholar consulted) deserved an article, giving differing views (in mine, it relates to year two of initiation). Menahem the Essene (mistakenly indexed) could carry an article. The Qazone burials in the Lisan go unnoted, though known for years. Some articles are less than fully alive to latest research. "Essenes" mostly repeats a rather good book, but a 1988 one. It gives an explicit citation of evidence that the name came, via Greek spellings, from a Hebrew Qumran self-designation 'osey hatorah (observers of torah)--the source in effect predicted by scholars for centuries before the discovery--then unaccountably dismisses such as lack of explicit evidence (see DSS After 50 Years vol.2). We can now see the once-popular Aramaic proposals have no Qumran support. The Pliny article could have noted that his source's description of Essenes at Qumran was written in the rule of Herod the Great, when Ein Gedi (and *not* Jerusalem, as the H. Rackham [d. 1944], not Rackman, trans. has misled many to think) was still destroyed, an ashheap/graveyard, so not a toparchy, from fighting c. 40 BC. Yet another reason Y. Hirschfeld's Ein Gedi site, too late and too small, does not fit Pliny's Essenes. The Damascus article presents sect orgins in Babylon as if obvious, rather than a distinctly minority view. Numismatics well presents Herodian occupation at Qumran, but the later phase proposal raises questions, e.g., just who would accept Judaea Capta coins? Bibliography is endless. But surely the growing list of essays that 4Q448 is *against* Jonathan deserves to be noted. Not least because the two Jonathans --not Simon as one article has it--are the two which have been proposed most often over the last 50 years as "wicked priest," and the good chronological archaeology revisions here by Magness and others now tend to favor the later one, Jannaeus. Why no Dimant article in Angels bibliography? Why not S. Wagner in Pythagoraeans? But full consensus is not to be expected--and has never existed--in all aspects of scroll study. This Encyclopedia overall is an excellent and useful contribution to learning on this important history. I certainly recommend it, especially to libraries which aid history research.