Sherman Community Lecture in Jewish Studies 2021

"Questioning Qumran: Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls"
Prof George Brooke (University of Manchester)

Time and date: 9 December 2021, 8pm (online).

ABSTRACT: Not being part of the principal narrative about early Judaism from Ezra through Hillel to Rabbi Judah the Prince, the Dead Sea Scrolls are overlooked by many Jews. In this talk some significant questions will be posed to the evidence of the 1000 scrolls from the Qumran Caves to highlight some of their spiritual riches. The Scrolls offer new insights about the transmission and development of the Jewish scriptures and their interpretation, about the varieties of Judaism in antiquity, and about the range and depth of Jewish prayer in the two centuries before the fall of the Temple in 70 CE. It will be suggested that the Scrolls have much to contribute to modern Jewish self-understanding.

BIOGRAPHY: George J. Brooke is Rylands Professor Emeritus of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester where he taught Biblical Studies and Early Judaism from 1984 until 2016. He completed his Ph.D. in 1978 at Claremont Graduate School, California, under the direction of William H. Brownlee. In 1999 he was the President of the British Association for Jewish Studies. Awarded a D.D. from Oxford University in 2010, he was President for 2012 of the British Society for Old Testament Study. He is a Visiting Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Chester. He is President of the European Association of Biblical Studies (2021-2024). He has an honorary doctorate from the University of Lausanne.

He was a founding editor of the journal Dead Sea Discoveries (Brill, 1993–2003) and edited the Journal of Semitic Studies for nearly 30 years. Amongst his publications are Exegesis at Qumran (1985; reprinted, 2006), The Allegro Qumran Collection (1996), The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament (2005), Reading the Dead Sea Scrolls: Essays in Method (2013), and The Dead Sea Scrolls and German Scholarship (2018). He has also edited more than twenty books including most recently the T&T Clark Companion to the Dead Sea Scrolls (with Charlotte Hempel, 2019). His popular book, The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls (co-authored with Philip Davies and Phillip Callaway, 2002) has sold several thousand copies in English, German, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian and Japanese and has been released in a revised paperback form (2011).