Donald W. Parry – författare

The modern history of the three Samuel scrolls from Cave 4 at Qumran began in 1952 when they were discovered with the great mass of scrolls from Cave 4 in clandestine excavations by Bedouin. Twenty-seven additional fragments, parts of columns II and III of 4QSama, were found in the excavations of R. de Vaux and G. Lankester Harding, and given preliminary publication by F. M. Cross in 1953, upon which they achieved immediate fame. There followed publication of several fragments of 4QSamb in 1955 and 4QSamc was pre-published by E. Ulrich in 1979. The scholarly world has eagerly awaited the full presentation of the three scrolls in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series. Ever since the 1950s, they have been at the forefront of scholarly investigation of the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. It is no exaggeration to say that the critical study and exegesis of the books of Samuel are no longer possible without these three scrolls in conjunction with that of the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. The final publication of 4QSama, 4QSamb, and 4QSamc in this volume thus crowns the publication activity of the last decade.

This is volume 1 of a two volume set, which replaces the six volumes of the first edition. This volume contains Texts concerned with Religious Law, Exegetical Texts and Parabiblical Texts.The purpose of The Dead Sea Scrolls Reader is to enhance the research facilities of the individual texts within their respective genres. The nature of the Dead Sea Scrolls publication project was such that texts belonging to the same literary genre were published in different volumes in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD) series, although those from cave 4 were often published by subject. The dispersion of these texts in several different volumes complicates their analysis, a problem that is now overcome in DSSR.This second and revised edition of the DSSR forms an updated and expanded publication, as follows:- DSSR II replaces preliminary editions of DSSR I with fine-tuned, published editions.- DSSR II presents improved or revised texts.- DSSR II features texts not published in DSSR I.- DSSR II reassembles segmented texts.- DSSR II deletes extremely fragmentary texts.- DSSR II updates names of compositions.The Dead Sea Scrolls Reader, Volumes 1–2, 2nd ed., rev. and exp. (ed. Donald W. Parry and Emanuel Tov in association with Geraldine I. Clements; Leiden: Brill, 2014) was published with an Index, but that Index did not contain any references to the page numbers. These are now provided in the Revised Index edited by Sister Raghida Obeid, OLM, The Lebanese Maronite Order, Lebanon and Rome. The document can be found in the 'Downloads' tab.