Join us for a colloquium on the Dead Sea Scrolls, featuring three leading authorities on these manuscripts and their historical context. Each speaker will present a research paper followed by a formal response by a member of the Penn State faculty and time for Q&A.

Matthew Goff (Florida State University): "Donkey-Centaurs?  The Strange Case of Translating Lilith in Antiquity"

Lilith, arguably the most feared demon in the history of Judaism, comes up once in the Hebrew Bible—Isa 34:14.  In the LXX, oddly, lilith is translated "donkey-centaurs"  The Qumran Isaiah scroll helps out here because it reads "liliths" whereas the MT has the singular.  I'll spare you the details but I'll argue the LXX translation—thinking of lilith-demons as donkey-centaurs—makes sense if you understand the Mesopotamian demonic lore embedded in the Lilith tradition, mediated in the cultural context of the Hellenistic world. This fits with the theme of the workshop, thinking about the DSS in relation to the ANE and the Hellenistic age.    I'll be adapting material from my book project on demons.

Maxine Grossman (University of Maryland): “Remaining surprised by the Dead Sea Scrolls: Social Norms in the Sectarian Rule Texts”

Early readers of the Dead Sea Scrolls noted their difference from existing rabbinic traditions. In rejecting rabbinic Jewish attitudes toward marriage and family, the scrolls hewed closer to Christian social values and religious expectations. Later interpretations found a home for the scrolls in the diverse social world of Second Temple Jewish sectarianism. How do contemporary readings of the scrolls allow us to locate them in our current understanding of ancient Judaism — and early Christianity — and what might be the value in continuing to be surprised by the evidence they provide?

Alex Jassen (New York University): The Dead Sea Scrolls as the Greatest Archaeological Discovery of the
Twentieth Century – Compared to What?

In 1948, the biblical scholar William Albright identified the newly unearthed Dead Sea Scrolls as the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th Century. The Dead Sea Scrolls came at the end of a half century of major discoveries such as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, the Cairo Genizah, Nag Hammadi, and as well as many forgeries or suspicious finds. In this paper, I examine the ways in which scholars, journalists, and public figures drew on these other rediscovered lost worlds to create a model and comparative dataset in which to situate the fantastic new discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.