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"The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Lost Scriptures of Early Judaism"

Eva Mroczek, University of California, Davis
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
7:00-8:30 PM
Off Campus Location
West Bloomfield Lecture Series on Wrestling with Angels: The Struggle Between Sacred and Secular in Jewish Life

In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd searching for a lost goat near the shores of the Dead Sea happened upon the greatest archaeological find of the 20th century: ancient manuscripts hidden in caves by a Jewish community living two thousand years ago. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain not only the oldest manuscripts of biblical texts ever found, but also the remains of many other books that were considered holy. Early Jews were reading tales about the patriarch Enoch, who went to heaven and saw the secrets of the universe, alternative versions of what God told Moses on Mount Sinai, and many more Psalms of David than we can find in our modern Bibles.
How did the Dead Sea Scrolls change what we know about the Bible and the history of Judaism? What do they tell us about how ancient Jewish communities understood their past, their future, and their relationship to God? And how did modern scholars, both Jewish and Christian, try to make sense of these discoveries? In this talk, we will consider the rich variety of early Jewish literature beyond the Bible, moving between the ancient texts and the world of the 20th century shepherds, scholars, and archaeologists who first brought the Scrolls to light.

Eva Mroczek (PhD 2012, University of Toronto) is Assistant Professor of Premodern Judaism at the Department of Religious Studies at UC Davis. Her first book, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity, is coming out in April with Oxford University Press. The book discusses how early Jews imagined sacred writing in a literary culture before the categories of "Bible" and "book" had emerged. Her work on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the literatures of Hellenistic and Early Roman Judaism has appeared in venues like the Journal of Ancient Judaism, Judaisme ancien, the Journal for the Study of Judaism, and Book History. She has also contributed public scholarship to Religion Dispatches and the Marginalia Review of Books. She has two current projects: one focuses on the contrast between the secular-political reception of the figure of King David in contemporary biblical studies and his aesthetic and mystical significance in Jewish reception history; the other is a study of legendary and scholarly narratives about the discovery of ancient manuscripts from antiquity to the present.

Sponsored by: Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies and JCC's Seminars for Adult Jewish Enrichment
Building: Off Campus Location
Location: 6600 W Maple Rd, West Bloomfield Township, MI 48322
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Jewish Studies, Lecture
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Judaic Studies