With Over 159 Full-Color Photographs, Maps & Illustrations

Recently, just as the Dead Sea Scrolls have finally come into publication after years of painstaking work, distinguished Qumran specialist Émile Puech, one of the manuscripts’ official editors, and Farah Mébarki, a science journalist, decided to take stock of over a half century’s worth of research. Working from the definitive Oxford edition of the manuscripts, Puech includes here many never-before-published findings. In a new, multidisciplinary and illustrated approach, The Dead Sea Scrolls helps us appreciate the importance and impact of these texts, examining the scrolls within the broadest contexts: historical, geopolitical, religious, linguistic, scientific, technological and archeological. Through these means, they help us understand much about the daily life of its authors, the Essenes, as well as what distinguished theirs from other branches of Judaism of the time. Their influence upon different contemporary religious movements leads the authors to ask important questions. Why, for example, were the Essenes the only important group of religious Jews to be left out of the evangelical texts? Is it possible that St. John the Baptist came into contact with them? Was Jesus aware of their teachings?

Includes a linguistic glossary, chronology, biblical table, as well as biographies of the principal players in Qumranian scholarship.