The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, by C. D. Elledge.The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls by C. D. ElledgeReview by: Dennis PardeeJournal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 70, No. 1 (April 2011), pp. 123-124Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/658851 .

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Book Reviews F 123

absent from the standard Ugaritic ritual texts.2 The fact that the hāṭā(ʾ)t was clearly a sacrificial type in the biblical texts but finds no obvious counterpart in the extant Ugaritic texts may be taken as a reasonably clear indication, though an argument from silence, that a decontamination sacrifice was not a part of the Ugaritian system. If that conclusion be granted, however provisionally, one must also conclude that decontamination from sin was not an important goal of sacrifice at Ugarit. On the other hand, the appear­ance of the verb ḤṬ ʾ in a very peculiar but clearly oft­repeated rite (RS 1.002 and parallels) as well as in an incantatory text (RS 78/20) where this root is in par­allel with RŠʿ, ‘evil,’3 shows that the concept of sin was

2 D. Pardee, Les textes rituels, Ras Shamra – Ougarit XII (Paris, 2000), 923–24, 931; idem, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, Writings from the Ancient World 10 (Atlanta, 2002), 236–37.

3 These two texts were reedited in Pardee, Les textes rituels, chap­ters 2 and 81 (pp. 92–142, 875–93) and presented in briefer form in idem, Ritual and Cult, texts 22 and 49 (pp. 77–83, 159–61).

not absent from the Ugaritic cult nor from Ugaritian views on the origins of illness. It would have been of interest to read Gane’s view on the contribution of these meager data to the origins and development of the biblical traditions on the sin offering.

What this book needs most is a list of works cited. In the footnotes, there appears to be no system of bibliographical citation: first citations are complete but subsequent citations may be either complete or abbre­viated according to the “Journal of Biblical Literature” system (abbreviated title, no publication date). With­out a comprehensive bibliography, such citations are of no more use than the traditional “op. cit.” and hence extremely frustrating. There is an author index and one of biblical passages, but no index of non­biblical texts, nor of subjects, nor of Hebrew words. In sum, this is an interesting book to read, but a difficult one to consult except to check the author’s views on a specific biblical passage or citations of a specific author.

The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. By C. D. Elledge. Archaeology and Biblical Studies 14. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005. Pp. xii + 148. $15.95 (paperback).Reviewed by deNNis paRdee, University of Chicago.

The author’s intent has been to provide an introduc­tion to the Dead Sea Scrolls for a general readership. The attempt must be judged unsuccessful for the following reasons.

1. To begin with the beginning: what piqued my interest when asked to review the book was its title. I was curious to see how a book devoted to the im­plications of the Dead Sea Scrolls for biblical research would be organized. I was disappointed, however, for the title is just a bit misleading. Relatively small portions of the book are devoted to the biblical manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls or to the implications of the non­biblical scrolls for biblical interpretation. These topics are addressed explicitly in chapters 5 and 7, which deal respectively with the Hebrew Bible (pp. 87–96) and the New Testament (pp. 115–30)—the intervening chapter deals with Second­Temple Judaism, which is reflected, to much debated degrees, in various books of the Hebrew Bible and more obviously in the so­called “apocry­phal” books. Thus, inverting the primary points of reference in the title would perhaps have led to a less marketable result but one that would have been more accurate.

2. Although a great many useful details are provided on the history of discovery, publication, and interpreta­tion of the vast body of texts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, no bibliography is provided, neither a general one in the alphabetical order of authors’ names, nor one organized by topics. Bibliographical information is provided in endnotes (located at the end of the book, not after each chapter) and in the so­called “Journal of Biblical Literature” format, that is, with the full citation at first mention and subsequent references in an ab­breviated form, roughly the modern equivalent of “op. cit.” The system is not totally useless but it is frustrat­ingly time consuming. If it is to be easily exploited, it must be accompanied by a list of works cited.

3. The scrolls are assigned to the Essenes who are supposed to have stored the texts that had been inscribed in the community’s scriptorium at Khirbet Qumran in the caves located at various distances from the site itself. The identification of the scriptorium is based on the discovery there of “two inkwells” (p. 20).1 No mention is made of the fact that several

1 According to E. Tov (“Scriptorium,” in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Schiffman and VanderKam [Oxford, 2000]; reviewed in this journal in vol. 64 [2005]: 290–92, 831), three

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124 F Journal of Near Eastern Studies

hundred scribal hands have been identified as respon­sible for the more than eight hundred different manu­scripts that have been discovered to date;2 hence no explanation is offered for how so many scribes would have made do with so few inkwells.

4. Nor does the author, in adopting the outdated Essene hypothesis, take into account the fact, now widely recognized, that the range of theological per­spectives represented in the texts precludes them from having originated with only one of the many groups representing the various strains of Jewish thought in the period represented by the scrolls, which extended from early in the second century b.c. to late in the first century a.d.3

inkwells were found in the scriptorium; and according to M. Broshi (“Inkwells,” in the same publication, p. 375), a grand total of four on the entire site.

2 I purposely use a round number because, owing to the frag­mentary nature of many of the texts, estimates of the total number of distinct manuscripts discovered range between eight hundred and nine hundred. The encyclopedia cited in the previous footnote gives the number as “more than eight hundred” (L. H. Schiffman, James C. VanderKam, “Preface,” p. viii).

3 Strangely, the author knows of the existence of the encyclo­pedia cited in the two previous notes, but he appears not to have profited from the recognition expressed by some authors of this collective work that the discovered scrolls cannot possibly represent a single theological current and the relatively few scribes who would have set down in writing the documents of such a group. See the discussion in the review cited here above, n. 1, and the quotation there of E. Tov, one of the most important figures in Dead Sea Scrolls research, to the effect that “The scribes who wrote the texts found in the Judean Desert were in a few cases local, but most of them wrote elsewhere in ancient Israel” (p. 830; as becomes clear from perusing the longer discussion on p. 827, “ancient Israel” does not designate the Israelite period but ancient Israel as opposed to modern Israel).

5. I am not an expert myself in this huge field and hence cannot say whether the author’s documentation is adequate or not, but it is perhaps not out of place to cite what appears to be a telltale detail: the author makes reference (p. 24) to an ostracon which is said to prove the existence of a “community” (yaḥad) at Qumran, but he is seemingly unaware of a refutation of the reading proposed in the editio princeps.4 In the very next issue of the journal in which the original claim was made, one of Israel’s leading epigraphers provided a close­up photograph and new hand­copies of the text itself in support of her claim that the word yḥd is not in fact present on the ostracon.5 The original publication is cited as one of five arguments indicating “a strong relationship between the site, the caves, and the Scrolls” (p. 23), but the refutation of the crucial reading goes unmentioned.6

The author has correctly realized that for the scrolls to make sense to a broader audience they must be placed in a plausible historical, cultural, religious, and literary context. He unfortunately has chosen one that is far too narrow to accommodate the multifarious data present in the texts themselves.

4 Frank Moore Cross and Esther Eshel, “Ostraca from Khirbet Qumrân,” Israel Exploration Journal 47 (1997): 17–28 (ostracon no. l).

5 A. Yardeni, “A Draft of a Deed on an Ostracon from Khirbet Qumrân,” Israel Exploration Journal 47 (1997): 233–37.

6 Above, I described the author as “seemingly unaware” of the refutation—the adverb is necessary because, in the presentation of the reading and argument put forward in the editio princeps, one finds the caveat “If their reconstruction is correct . . .” (p. 24). Whatever the basis of this qualification may be, even the readers of a general work deserve to be made more specifically aware of the tenuous nature of a particular argument.

Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt. By Jan Assmann. Translated from the German by David Lorton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 490 + 7 figs.Reviewed by Foy scalF, University of Chicago.

The work of Jan Assmann, one of the most prolific Egyptologists of our time, has been made increasingly more available to English speakers through the efforts of Cornell University Press (CUP) and their steadfast translator of Egyptology books, David Lorton.1 Death

1 Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (Ithaca, 2001), a translation of Ägypten: Theologie und Frömmigkeit einer frühen Hochkultur (Stuttgart, 1984).

and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, a slightly abridged and updated translation of Tod und Jenseits im alten Ägypten (2001), exhibits the same high standard of quality we have come to expect from past CUP volumes. The present volume straddles the line be­tween scholarly tome and advanced student reading. Divided into two parts, “Images of Death” and “Ritu­als and Recitations,” the book’s seventeen chapters

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