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The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest Known Bible Translated for the First Time into English

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The Dead Sea Scrolls may well be the most important archaeological discovery of the twentieth century; it is certainly among the top discoveries in any case. It has shed important light on one of the most influential and formative documents of the world, namely the collection of writings which we have come to know as the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament. A thousand years older than the next-oldest copies we have of these documents, this treasure trove has delighted, tantalised, and irritated scholars, clerics, and other interested parties since their chance discover some half-century ago.

`Preserving parts of all but one biblical book, the scrolls confirm that the text of the Old Testament as it has been handed down through the ages is largely correct. Yet, they also reveal numerous important differences.'

(Do you know which book is not included? For the answer, see the bottom of this article.)

This book presents material from all 220 of the biblical scrolls (there are hundreds of other scrolls that were not biblical, i.e., not copies of biblical texts). These were newly translated by Eugene Ulrich, Peter Flint, and Martin Abegg, who hold important positions in the continuing research and scholarship about the scrolls. These editors have also added commentary to help illuminate further the textual variations between the scrolls and the texts we have today.

`At the time of Jesus and rabbi Hillel--the origins of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism--there was, and there was not, a 'Bible'. This critical period, and the nature of the Bible in that period, have been freshly illuminated by the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls. There was a Bible in the sense that there were certain sacred books widely recognised by Jews as foundational to their religion and supremely authoritative for religious practice. There was not, however, a Bible in the sense that the leaders of the general Jewish community had specifically considered, debated, and definitively decided the full range of which books were supremely and permanently authoritative and which ones--no matter how sublime, useful, or beloved--were not.'

The editors first discuss what a Bible is, and what constitutes the arrangements, order, and contents -- the Jewish Tanakh and the Protestant Old Testament contain the same materials, arranged differently; the Catholic Old Testament follows the same order as the Protestant but has other books (in whole or part), which hearkens back to early biblical development and whether the scriptures follow rabbinical council decisions or the Septuagint.

The text is heavily annotated, with verse numbers, explanatory notes, gaps and fuzzy sections due to scroll problems, variant readings, and footnote annotations which include scroll identification (cave, scroll number, book, etc.) and ancient biblical texts (Masoretic text, Septuagint, and Samaritan pentateuch).

This is an incredibly useful text for those who are interested in what information the Dead Sea Scrolls have to bear on the actual text of the Bible. Here for the first time is a collection of the biblical scrolls laid out in the traditional Biblical order, which enables the average reader as well as the scholar and cleric to follow the texts with ease.

To answer the question above, the missing book among the biblical scrolls is the book of Esther. Why would Esther be missing? The editors give some possibilities:

`First, the fact that the festival of Purim was a later addition, not mentioned in the Books of Moses, might have caused the Dead Sea Scrolls community to reject the book. Second, the mere fact that the story concerns the marriage of Esther--a Jew--to a Persian king was likely repugnant to the group's conservative sensibilities. Third, the book itself makes no mention of God whatsoever. Finally, the emphasis on retaliation in the final chapters of Esther is contrary to the teachings of the Dead Sea Scrolls.'

A truly fascinating and useful text.

This book is a must for anyone interested in the Bible. This is the first and only complete English translation of the important Biblical texts found at Qumran. These texts date back a 1000 years earlier than the ones used for most English Bible Translations. Now you can read what some Biblical texts said at the time of Jesus. Some of these texts date to 200 BC/BCE. Abegg, Ulrich and Flint have done an excellent job producing a book that will allow the lay person access to these important texts. Any one who takes the Bible seriously should have this on their self. The layout is easy to follow and the footnotes are handy for anyone needing to compare variant ancient readings. In addition to the books found in the Hebrew Bible, some other texts that were held in high regard at Qumran are in the book.Read for yourself what the Bible said 2000 years ago.

In most books on the Dead Sea Scrolls (like the classic The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (Penguin Classics)), one has to wade through much cultic discussion to find the materials related to the Bible. This book, in contrast, collects the Bible information from the Dead Sea Scrolls in an extremely useful format for the Bible study or Torah study student. Differences with the conventional Masoretic text are displayed in italic. The reader can then easily find the changes in the Bible text from the Dead Sea Scrolls version and learn how the Bible has grown. This is a great reference book.

This book is an excellent source of information concerning the Biblical books (includes both OT books and those in the Apocrypha, a la Tobit) found at Qumran. However, instead of translating 1 Enoch, the editors simply said that it was available elsewhere and that it would do no good to reproduce it in the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible. I think that was a mistake, and I hope to see it corrected in future editions. Some of the related Essene Enochian writings could also be included with the translation of I Enoch in the next edition. That would be cool. Overall, an excellent job was done with this Bible. I look foward to future editions.

Over 90% of this book is made up of an English translation of the 10th century Masoretic Hebrew Text interspersed with less than 10% translated Dead Sea Scrolls material. The Masoretic Text is only separated by brackets instead of being differently colored or bold/light/italic faced which any reasonable writer-editor-publisher would have insisted on. Thus if we're looking up the first line of The Ten Commandments we get:

"[5."You shall not bow down yourself to them, nor serve them, for I the Lord] your. [G]od..."

Translating this means we just have the word "your" and "...od" from the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is impossible to know if these words really were meant to be part of this sentence or not. By doing this, the authors make it appear that there are only a few thousand minor differences between the Dead Sea Scrolls Text and the later Masoretic Texts. In fact, what we find is thousands of differences in just the small portion of the Dead Sea Scroll texts we have, which represents less than 10% of the entire Masoretic Texts. (And we can't even judge how much of this 10% is in the right order) So on the one hand if one carefully analyzes the text, one does find that the Biblical Text in the 1st Century was incredibly different from the 10th century Biblical text, but the book seems designed to purposefully to give the opposite impression. Very misleading, but still valuable. Hopefully, someone will publish just the Dead Sea Scroll fragments, so readers can make their own assessment of what was found.

Among the 800 manuscripts found at Qumran, some 220 are biblical texts._The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible_ is for those who would like to be able to compare these variant readings and do so in English.

The works are presented according to the usual Hebrew Bible method, the Tanakh: first comes the Torah followed by the Nebuim and then the Kethubim. Like BHS and UBS, variant texts are presented in footnotes along with the references which identify the source of these texts.

So for example...in the book's text, Deut 8.12 reads: Otherwise when you have eaten and are full, and have built (fine) house(s) and have lived in them... In this case the text has been amended based upon integrating material from other scrolls. The reader is directed to 5QDEUTcorr LXX. However a variant reading in 5QDEUT MT SP says that the reading of in them is not found in the MT nor the Samaritan Pentateuch.

Perhaps the most significant textual variant is noted on page 224 and 225. 4QSAMa records a variant reading which is recorded no where else but Josephus in which it is explained why Nahash wanted to gouge out the right eye of "every one of you" from Jabesh-gilead. This reading indicates the pluriformity of texts prior to the Common Era.

If one is interested in what the Dead Sea Scrolls had to say about the text of the Bible, this book has the answers. Between this book and works by Florentino Garcia-Martinez or Michael Wise, there should be no more mysteries about what was contained in the DSS.

I have to agree with the reviewer who asks for a transcription of the original text. This book is good and valuable, though not too many earthshaking surprises so far - but I have found some fascinating alternate readings. Many of us already have access to the MT and the LXX in Hebrew and Greek, respectively, but not to the DSS biblical texts in Hebrew. This book (or future editions) would be greatly enhanced if the Hebrew of the DSS reading that differs from the "traditional" text - indicated in this book by italics - were included, either in the text itself or in the appropriate footnote. I suggest showing the Hebrew for an entire verse, not just for the words in italics, as this makes reading such things in context much easier. Listing the Hebrew would also show what is meant by words that are only partially italicized. Without this feature, I cannot give this more than 3 stars, though for those who do not read Hebrew, this is a unique book that they would want to have, and four or five stars wouldn't be unwarranted. For those of us who can read or deal with the Hebrew text, though, there is a constant and unsatisfied "itch" to read the Hebrew behind the italics! Put this feature in and raise the price of the book by $10 - and I'll sell my "English only" copy and buy the new one!

September 11, 2007: Now that Amazon has provided a "Comments" section, please read my continuing annotations there, especially regarding further thoughts on the exclusion of 1 Enoch and Jubilees.

January 2, 2007: I've reconsidered the wisdom of excluding Enoch and Jubilees. My reasoning, based on Kenneth Hanson's observation in "Secrets from the Lost Bible", goes like this: If the apocrypha were so imporant to the Qumran Community that they kept multiple copies of these scrolls, then they must have been highly important. Who decided to leave out Enoch and Jubilees? The present editors, based on modern conventions, and not those of the ancients. Was "Biblical" different to the Essenes than to us? If so, then a proper Dead Sea Scrolls Bible should accurately portray the ancients' values, not our present ones.

February 22, 2006: The Book of Esther is the only known Bible book not represented among the Dead Sea Scrolls. In a 2004 Penguin edition of The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls In English, scholar Geza Vermes suggests that this may be just accidental, rather than intentional. The latest edition of Vermes' long standing work, which contains the greater body of noncanonical scrolls and fragments, recommends our present work, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible by editors Abegg, Flint & Ulrich, as the standard for Biblical DSS.

January 13, 2006: I now understand why neither the Jubilees nor the Book of Enoch were included in this anthology, except as a placeholder reference page. Jubilees and Enoch are not considered canon, and so do not properly fall into inclusion with the purely Biblical books as the editors of Dead Sea Scrolls Bible intended.

Incidentally, I am beginning to recognize the Florentino Garcia Martinez re-translation as the most important single compilation of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the lay library. If you don't own one yet, they ain't making any more of them. There are several scroll fragments of The Book of Enoch represented in the Garcia Martinez that you cannot get in the other major English translations extant. Reading them is an enjoyable excercise in reconstructing a single coherent document from several "broken" or fragmented documents.

My Living Review

I am into Exodus of this fine Bible, and as I study and read, I will avail myself for further commenting. I like to skip through the anthology, to break up the monotony.

First, a couple of criticisms:

(noted by previous reviewer) The changing of the names of God, including YHVH, or Elohim, into "the Lord". There is a clue here as to the paradigm from which the editors are framing the context of this Bible translation. The editors seem to have fallen back on traditional and safe renderings, when in doubt. I suppose the solution here is for me to read the original Hebrew and Aramaic.

Another clue to the editors' conservative frame of reference is found at least in the beginning (pun intended), in the Book of Genesis. I recently heard a rabbi speak about the phrase, "Let there be light". What this rabbi said was interesting, and made sense. The Creator, as this gentleman put it, would not have said, "Let there be light", which has the connotation of asking or requesting that another entity do the actual turning on of the light. What the Supreme Being really said, according to this rabbi, was something more along the lines of, "Light: Be it!" In this case, no intercession is inferred. I'll leave you to ponder and discuss this, as it is like the "number of angels dancing on the head of a pin" argument. But my point is that the editors were not thinking out of the box: If you have 2,000 year old Aramaic right in front of you, "Let there be light" is not an inspired (pardon the irony) translation.

(also noted by previous reviewers) Lack of reference headers at the top of each page. This book is over 600 pages long, and it is ever so irritating to put it down, and have to back peddal a few pages to remind myself which Biblical book I happen to be reading at this time. Maybe something good will come out of this discipline of memorizing which page corresponds to which Book. This problem is one of those annoyances that should be refined and cured in later editions. I suppose the Honda Civic wasn't a very fleshed out automobile, either, when it first came to market. This is one of the first indications that the editors seemed to be trying to beat someone else to the punch with this title or anthology of DSS.

A third criticism, a continuation of my previous statement, is the apology that the editors proffer for speeding this translation through to publication. Perhaps after maturing in further editions, a finer translation will be cultivated? Let us pray!

A fourth criticism is the use of little gray triangles to denote sections where two or more verses are missing. Is this gray triangle an original invention? I don't like it, it's too-- modern? Gimmicky? I think a better and simpler symbol to use should be the pipe symbol "|". For example, where one verse is missing, the symbol can be |. Where two or three verses are missing, multiple pipes in a row can be used, like || or |||. The pipe has got to be more enduring than the silly, ugly graphic triangle that stands out like a cornstalk in a barley patch. Can you guys take care of this, please?

Let's get past the small stuff: I am loving this book as an attempt to breath life into an old story. But this time, we get to see it pretty much as it was written and socked away long before Emperor Constantine's time. I feel like I have a leg up on established Christian sects, e.g. the Catholics and Protestants, who have been humbly democratized by these treasures. I am finally understanding something about the DSS, that we were lucky enough that several copies of most of the books are extant, making a reasonably accurate, complete and resolved composite. For example, by now many of you are familiar with the use of brackets [this is bracketed text] and why portions are bracketed. What I trust in this edition of the Bible is that what lies between the bracket is not just an educated guess, but is often taken from another scroll where that section of text was still intact. If there are three copies of Exodus, we can reassemble most of the Book of Exodus. And that is what the editors have done here. We have reasonably complete Biblical books that are at least 2,000 years old. It's like finding an ancient jar of strawberry jam, and being able to pick out enough of the preserved jam from the mold to make a sandwich. Sure, you don't have the whole quart of jam, but the jam you are lucky enough to be eating is 2,000 years old and delicious.

I have other books, like Eisenman and Wise's "The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered", and Wise, Abegg & Cook's "Dead Sea Scrolls", Vermes's translation in to English of non-canonical texts, which I like very much. You may wonder how they can all be different, and yet, they are, both in translation style and topic. For instance, "Uncovered" presents a more esoteric selection, Kabbalistic or Gnostic in their allegory. The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible are manuscripts that were later deemed canonical and thus, entered as books of the Bible. I will promote this book a few notches in my list of DSS recommended reading, it serves a real purpose in the wealth of other publications on the DSS.

A lucky age in which we live, reading what the bishops of Nicea did not. Ofcourse, you can't just throw out a translation of the earliest Biblical manuscripts ever, without referencing the source(s) of our modern Bibles. These editors have done that, by providing the italicized differences with the Masoretic text and/or other DSS copies, and also comparisons with the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagent (LXX). This is mildly useful, as the Masoretic text, to my less trained eye, doesn't reveal any substantial differences. To me, it looks like the Dead Sea Old Testament manuscripts differed very little from what we read in modern times. Amazing!

You should not give away your usual reference Bible, however, as there tend to be missing chunks of continuity, naturally. In the Book of Genesis, some serious chunks are missing, and we stumble into the scene where God is instructing Noah on how to build an ark (pg. 8, Ch. 5 to 6), before the story of Caine comes to its end as we normally read it. This kind of jumping from the middle of one story to the middle of another is frequent enough that I had to pull a King James off the shelf to see what it was I was missing. No fault of the editors, though.

added 10-18-2005: Check out the detailed treatment of the Psalms, starting in the "Other Books" section on pg. 505. This is succulent education, as is the history and sensual subtext of the Song of Songs.

Most features of the book and its format have been covered by previous reviewers, so I will just add two points.

-First, the price is a bit high (so get it used if you can), but it certainly is nice to have all the biblical material from Qumran in one place, easily accessible.

-Second, be aware that it has an unfortunate omission in the page layout--references. Readers of the English Bible are used to seeing a reference on the top of the page to the book, chapter, and verse which begins the page. This feature is lacking in the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, and makes flipping through the text in search of a particular passage difficult, especially since (a) deuterocanonical (i.e., apocryphal) works are included, thus altering the relative locations of the canonical books, and (b) most texts are quite fragmentary, thus altering the familiar lengths of individual books. When you flip to a random page, all you see are the chapter and verse numbers--no indication of which book you are in. The end result is that it can be very difficult to estimate where a particular passage may fall in the text, so I have often had to resort to the table of contents (quite an embarrassment after all those "Sword Drills" in Sunday School!).

I still recommend getting this book, though, if you're engaged in biblical studies.

The title of this volume is a bit deceptive. It promises the Bible, but, except for Isaiah, gives the reader fragments, with most textual gaps filled in using the standard Masoretic Text. That being said, the text is nonetheless useful and extensively cross-referenced to other recensions of the Biblical scrolls, highlighting the large number of variant readings and, from the modern point of view, additions. The introductions are good and the translations are in clear, modern English. This edition is marred by a couple of mystifying editorial decisions. One is having introductions to two non-canonical scrolls, Jubilees and Enoch, with no accompanying translations of extant fragments. The other is not having informative headers to let the reader know which scroll is being looked at. As with Harper's edition of the non-canonical Dead Sea Scrolls, I have to ask, what is gained by inconveniencing the reader?