The Foundation for Jewish Studies

Speaker: Hershel Shanks, Founder & Editor of Biblical Archaeology Review

Location: Washington DCJCC

Part one discusses the ruins of Qumran near the 11 caves in the Judean Desert where more than 900 scrolls were found, comprising what has been called the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century. This lecture considers whether the people living at Qumran were a strange sect of Jews called Essenes, what the scrolls tell us about the development of the Hebrew Bible, and how the scrolls also help to elucidate Judaism in the crucial period before the Roman destruction of Jerusalem.