Dead Sea Scrolls Handbook, by Devorah Dimant and Donald Parry (Brill, 2014), 986 pages.
This new handbook from Brill is a unique volume that you may or may not want in your library.
Contents
Because texts are constantly being edited and readings are being better deciphered, the authors believe such a handbook is not superfluous, but supplements other textual editions already published (xix). There are no translations, commentaries, discussions of dating, or any other extra-textual information. This handbook is “the facts ma’am, just the facts.” It contains transcriptions of the Hebrew and Aramaic (no Greek) texts. The only exception is an apparatus for 1QS, CD, and 11QTemple.
The texts are drawn from a variety of sources, so this is a sort of eclectic edition composed of other printed editions. These sources include the Princeton volumes printed by Mohr Siebeck, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition by F. García Martínez and E. J. C. Tigchelaar, the Dead Sea Scrolls Reader, and texts prepared solely by the editors Dimant and Parry. Missing from this volume are the Greek texts and any texts that are too fragmentary to add any valuable information about the scrolls or the community. The editors indicate any fragments that have been omitted at the end of a text in brackets.
The scrolls are not arranged topically or by any other schema except the scroll numbers given by DJD. So the first scroll is 1Q14 (1QpMic), followed by 1QpHab, then 1Q15, and so forth. The table of contents at the beginning lists the page number for each scroll, while an appendix in the back lists the names of texts with their corresponding text number and page number.
The volume itself is well-bound, as is to be expected from Brill. Also notable is the great amount of white space surrounding the text. There is plenty of space in all four margins for note-taking if you choose to mark up your copy of the text. Since the texts are pulled from other editions (or, some being prepared by the editors), there is nothing notable about the transcriptions; they appear similar to any other transcription of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Evaluation
Would you want this volume in your library? It really depends.
First, you would only want this volume if your Hebrew is extremely proficient. Without a parallel translation, this volume would be useless to you if you cannot read the transcriptions. It may serve well as a secondary resource to check against other editions, especially where lacunas or difficult readings appear, but as a sole copy of the scrolls, it serves only the specialist.
Second, you may not want this volume if you already have other similar editions. For example, I have the Dead Sea Scrolls, morphologically tagged, on Bibleworks. That makes this Brill volume somewhat superfluous, except, as I just noted, as a secondary edition to compare questionable readings. But even in that case, one might simply want to check high-definition photographs of the scroll under review if possible.
Likewise, if you own the The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition by F. García Martínez and E. J. C. Tigchelaar, you might not need this new volume. The DSSSE is only about 400 pages longer, although it is two volumes and paperback. Nevertheless, because it has narrower margins, it is able to fit all the transcriptions in the volume (ordered in the same way) along with a parallel English translation. While specialists can work through the Hebrew of the DSS with no problem, it never hurts to have another specialist’s translation to compare with yours.
So would you like to own this volume? I may be selling it a bit short. But since I already own so many text editions of the scrolls, this new edition serves me only to compare my other texts with. But I hope I can say what an enormous labor this volume obviously was. The editors have created a splendid volume that will surely be helpful to many people. The only question is to whom it will be most beneficial.
Find it here on Amazon.
