Professor Gary A. Rendsburg holds the Blanche and Irving Laurie chair in Jewish History in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He also serves as Chair of the the Department of Jewish Studies and holds an appointment in the History Department. He previously taught at Canisius College from 1980 to 1986 and at Cornell University from 1986 to 2004.

Professor Rendsburg majored in English and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received his B.A. in 1975. He then pursued graduate work in Hebrew Studies at New York University and received his Ph.D. in 1980.

Professor Rendsburg's areas of special interest include literary approaches to the Bible, the history of the Hebrew language, the history of ancient Israel, and the development of Judaism in the postbiblical period. It is this last field that the subject of the Dead Sea Scrolls fits most prominently.

Professor Rendsburg held a national Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and taught as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Colgate University, the State University of New York at Binghamton, and the University of Sydney. He is a frequent guest of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has twice served as Visiting Research Professor and has twice held the position of Visiting Fellow at the university's Institute for Advanced Studies.

Professor Rendsburg is the author of 6 books and more than 120 scholarly articles. His most popular book is a general survey of the biblical world entitled "The Bible and the Ancient near East (1997), coauthored with the late Cyrus H. Gordon. His most recent book is "Solomon's Vineyard: Literary and Linguistic Studies in the Song of Songs" (2009), coauthored with Scott B. Noegel.

Professor Rendsburg has visited all the major archaeological sites in Israel, Egypt, and Jordan and has participated in excavations at Tel Dor and Caesarea. Most pertinent to this course, he has visited Qumran, the site of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, repeatedly over the span of several decades.

In 1947, the discovery of ancient documents in caves near the Dead Sea shook the world of Biblical studies. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain not only our oldest copies of the Bible but Jewish texts from the 3rd century B.C.E. through 68 C.E. that provide an unprecedented view of Jewish history, culture, and religion from before and during the time of Jesus.

All told, 930 individual documents emerged from the caves of Qumran, located on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea; 230 of these are biblical manuscripts, representing every book of the Jewish Bible save Esther, with Isaiah, Psalms, and Deuteronomy the best represented. These texts greatly enhance our knowledge of how the Bible was transmitted in that age, representing an intermediate phase between the period of their authorship in ancient Israel and the appearance of the great medieval codices.

The remaining 700 documents provide extraordinary evidence about Jewish life during the late Second Temple epoch. Some 100 of the texts are too fragmentary to permit firm identification or classification. Another 250 of the texts are the common legacy of all Jewish groups during this period. Of greatest importance, however, are the approximately 350 texts that reflect the theological stance and ritual observance of a group known as the Yahad, a Jewish sect most likely related to the Essenes.

Since the Yahad was in constant contact and conflict with other Jewish groups of the period, we can also learn much about the Sadducees and the Pharisees from the Dead Sea Scrolls. From these documents, we learn that the Qumran sect considered the Temple to be totally impure and polluted, and thus they withdrew from the main focus of Jewish religious life and did not participate in the Temple cult in Jerusalem. Instead , they considered their body politic holy unto itself, a surrogate for the holiness inherent in the Temple.

The Yahad led a communal lifestyle, keeping no personal possissions and eating their meals communally. To enter Yahad, one had to pass through certain initiation rites. The group applied the strictest interpretation to Jewish law, or Halakah, going so far as to refrain from toileting on the Sabbath. The group held that man had no free will but rather that all was predetermined or predestined by God. These positions conform to Josephus's description of the Essenes, leading scholars to make the connection between the Qumran sect and the Essenes.

We further learn that the Qumran group held to apocalyptic beliefs, anticipating a cosmic conflict in which the "sons of light" would defeat the "sons of darkness". Many of these beliefs resonate with the Christian movement, which began as a Jewish sect of the 1st century C.E. and which also was characterized by a communal lifestyle, distanced itself from the sacrificial system, and held apocalyptic beliefs. There are further points of similarity between the Dead Sea Scrolls community and the Jesus movement: Both groups believed in an ongoing revelation, both placed an emphasis on ritual immersion (baptism) not only for purification but for initiation, and both believed that the prophetic texts of old spoke to the present with new meaning and interpretation. This is not to say that Christianity and the Qumran community should be seen as one and the same - far from it, for as we stress in the course, the former relaxed Jewish law as much as possible, while the latter held to the most stringent interpretation of Halakah.

All of this information is forthcoming from the major documents, and we will read these compositions - namely, the Community Rule, the Damascus Document, Pesher Habakkuk, the War Scroll, The Temple Scroll, the Halakhic Letter, and the Thanksgiving Hymns. We progress both chronologically and thematically, beginning with the first scrolls to emerge from Cave 1, through which scholars determined the basic theological positions of the Yahad, and then proceeding to the legal texts, which were discovered and published only later, through which researchers learned about the strictures of the sect, especially in comparison to other, more moderate approaches attested in ancient Judaism. At times, we also will read more fragmentary texts, for even a few lines of a Qumran manuscript often reveal much about the sect's unique theological stance.

The course also tells the remarkable story of the scrolls' discovery, research, and publication. The first scrolls were found by accident by a Bedouin shepherd lad who was chasing a stray goat that had wandered into one of the Qumran caves. Scholars systematically explored other caves in the region until eventually 11 individual caves yielded texts. An international team was established to publish the manuscripts, although years, even decades, passed without sufficient progress. finally, in 1991, developments both in the United States and Israel led to a new generation of researchers gaining access to the scrolls, until eventually all of the documents were made available to both scholars and the public. Throughout this period, archaeologists excavated the nearby site of Qumran, and we will review these finds as well.

In short,history, religion, archaeology, textual study, Bible transmission, and more all play a role in this course. These disparate approaches - all necessary given the great diversity of rich material from Qumran- combine to bring the Dead Sea Scrolls to light for a 21st century audience.