Introduction Half a century has now passed since a bedouin shepherd discovered a long-hidden cache of scrolls in a cave in cliffs above the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. The details of that ...

Before us, across the flat-calm Dead Sea, the sun rises over the mountains ... The earliest texts date to 300 B.C.—a century before Qumran even existed as a settlement—and the latest to ...

As you leave Jerusalem and go to the south and to the east, toward the Dead Sea, the terrain changes rapidly ... we knew or sensed that Judaism in the 1st century of our era was a very rich ...