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Have questions about the program? Click here for our inquiry form, send an email to Peter Megginson (Travel Study Director) at [email protected] or call 800-221-4644, ext. 424 (Toll-free).

Lectures

1. Archaeology, Science, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Since the discovery in the 1940s of the first Dead Sea Scrolls in Cave 1Q, the nearby site of Qumran has been extensively excavated. The archaeology of Qumran reveals a unique site in ancient Judea, a settlement with no family dwellings, almost no archaeological evidence for the presence of women and children, and a cemetery that contains almost entirely adult male burials. In addition, the Dead Sea Scrolls and their related artefacts have been subjected to a variety of scientific tests. These include Carbon-14 dating, DNA testing, chemical analysis of skins and inks, and high-resolution x-ray imaging. All of these tests have revealed new information about the physical composition of the Dead Sea Scrolls and thus of their manufacture, inscribing, and storage. The interpretation of these physical remains has been controversial; the lecture will present the most reasonable interpretation of the evidence, that Qumran was a Jewish Essene settlement that housed scribes and their support staff for the purpose of maintaining an Essene library and scroll collection site.

2. How to Identify a Library in the Ancient World

Collections of tablets, scrolls, and codices existed throughout the ancient Near East, coming to light in Mesopotamia, Ugarit, Egypt, and the Greco-Roman Empire. Some of these collections were housed in dedicated structures, while others were found attached to temples or in private houses. Were these collections deliberate, or merely random? In other words, were they libraries? This lecture will explore the questions of how ancient libraries are recognized, and how they were housed and catalogued.

3. The Qumran Scrolls as an Ancient Library

This lecture will consider specifically the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls, asking whether or not they can be classified as a library. What are the components of the scrolls corpus? Do they hang together as one collection, or are they several different collections? Under the definition we have established, are they are library, or simply an archive? If the scrolls do constitute a library, where were they housed at Qumran, and how did they end up in the caves where they were discovered?

4. Scribes and Scrolls: Scribalism in the Ancient World and the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are the only large collection of written material to emerge from the territories of ancient Israel and Judah (Greco-Roman Palestine). As such, the Dead Sea Scrolls rival other famous collections from antiquity such as the library of Asshurbanipal, the Oxyrhyncus Papyri, and the Nag Hammadi codices for the information that can be learned concerning the activity of scribes in antiquity, particularly Jewish scribes in the Greco-Roman period (3rd century BCE—1st century CE). The lecture will explore what we can learn about the practice of scribes in this period, both in material (e.g., writing surfaces, implements, inks, etc.), and in content (i.e., how traditions were passed on from one generation to another in written form). Special attention will be paid to the evidence for the history of the Pentateuch (the Jewish Torah, i.e., the biblical books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), in the last centuries BCE.

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