“How many of us have 900 books in our library? How many would
have 25 percent of our library represented by Bibles? That shows you
the nature of the Qumran community: The Bible was at the center of
everything they did. In fact, as we walk through the other 700-some
nonbiblical scrolls, every one is in some way, shape, or form focused
on the Bible. This is a rabbi’s library, as it were.”
Martin Abegg Jr., Co-director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute and
Chair of the Religious Studies Department at Trinity Western University
“Communities produce Bibles that embody, in their physical forms [textual
affiliation, language, para-canonical material, format, etc.], the
groups’ values, identities, stories. We can identify at least four very
different kinds of Bibles at Qumran, representing not just Qumran, but
other communities as well. Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship may help us
to understand the relationship between communities of faith and their
Bibles, and perhaps even to have some greater self-awareness about
our own Bibles and the messages we fashion them to carry.”
Stephen Delamarter ’75, Professor of Old Testament at George Fox
Evangelical Seminary
“With the help of the Qumran hymns, we can see that salvation by
God’s grace alone is not a uniquely Christian idea. What is unique in
Christianity is the manner of God’s gracious work: in and through
Jesus. We also find a contrast in the Qumran hymns between living
under God’s power and living under the power of darkness. What is
different is the possibility of complete change. The Qumran hymns
express joy that one has been elect to the kingdom of light. Colossians
1:13 expresses joy that God has rescued his people from the
kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of his beloved Son. For the
Qumran community, this was impossible.”
Daniel Falk, Assistant Professor of Ancient Judaism and Biblical Studies
at the University of Oregon
“At Qumran we find religionists who were intolerant of any deviation
from what they understood to be orthodoxy. As their sense of being
threatened grew, their intolerance intensified. They pushed their religious
imagination further and further toward — and then beyond —
the margins of their fellow Jews’ acceptable range of ethnic and
religious self-definition, eventually to the point of cutting themselves
off and calling their contrary co-religionists ‘Sons of Darkness.’”
Robert Kugler, Paul S. Wright Professor of Christian Studies at Lewis
and Clark College
“We know that the Qumran community was fascinated with ritual purity.
For them, ritual purity had to do with life and death issues — clean
and unclean animals, dead bodies, bodily discharges. And who is
responsible, ultimately, for life and death? God. So, to successfully
account for these rules and regulations, they built a ‘high fence’ —
it’s called ‘building a fence around the Torah’ — to protect God, but
also to protect themselves from accidentally breaking certain rules
and regulations in the Torah.”
Ian Werrett, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at
St. Martin’s University
