For as long as I can remember, it seems, new books keep appearing on the Dead Sea Scrolls (which were discovered in 1947, two years before I was born). At some point I became interested in the subject, but in looking to learn something about it I had a hard time distinguishing between objective books and those that had a particular religious or academic axe to grind. For someone in my shoes, this volume from the Oxford "Very Short Introduction" Series is made to order. The author Timothy H. Lim is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh; he is the author or editor of several academic books dealing with the Dead Sea Scrolls and he is a member of an international team of editors that is producing consensus editions of the texts. Nothing in the book's principal 120-page text made me question my initial assumption that what the work presents is a balanced summary of the weight of current scholarship concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thus, it serves, I think, as a good introduction to the subject.



Among the matters addressed are the scrolls themselves, the archaeology of Khirbet Qumran, the prevailing hypothesis that associates the scrolls with a community of Essenes that lived at Qumran, a description of that Essene community, and the reasons for concluding that the scrolls relate to the Jewish faith rather than the early Christian faith. A fair portion of the book, and the most interesting to me, has to do with how the scrolls contribute to the current assessment of the "reliability" (for want of a better word) of the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament. (The book also raises a few examples where the Masoretic Text appears to be flawed, one of which is its presentation of Goliath as an improbable giant of 9 feet 9 inches in height, in contrast to two other texts, one from the Dead Sea Scrolls, that present him as being a much more plausible 6 feet 9 inches tall.)



Lim identifies, and debunks, some of the more sensational works that purport to interpret or base historical conclusions on the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of the more infamous such works, which Lim calmly addresses and dismisses, is "Jesus the Man" by Barbara Thiering, which purported to show that Jesus did not die on the Cross, but survived, married Mary Magdalene, and fathered several children.



Lim's writing style is a little dry and academic, but by and large it is plain enough that I could understand it without undue effort. The only part of the book that became tedious and made demands on my concentration similar to those from my college days was the chapter on the Qumran community.



By no means is THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS the be-all and end-all for the interested layperson, but it does provide a reliable orientation for further, more in-depth reading. And if I never get around to such reading, I at least now know something rather than next-to-nothing about the subject.