If your eReader travels everywhere with you, why not take the Dead Sea Scrolls with you too? The Biblical Archaeology Society has just released eReader versions of two of our most popular books on the scrolls: The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls. The new electronic versions of both books, which take advantage of all of the portability, functionality and convenience that your eReader provides, will allow you to dive into the history and intrigue surrounding the scrolls like never before.
The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls
By Hershel Shanks
(Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2012), $9.99
Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls
Edited by Hershel Shanks
(Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2012), $7.99
Almost everyone has heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but few people can explain what they say or why they are significant. In The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hershel Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, gives a powerful account of their religious and historical context plus their dissemination, meaning and implications. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which were found in the caves above Qumran starting in 1947 and include more than 900 Biblical, sectarian and apocryphal writings of Second Temple Judaism, provide inimitable insight into the turbulent religious world at the time of Jesus, when Jewish society was richly varied and hotly contentious. This clear and engaging summary, written with the lay reader in mind, remains the fullest account of what the scrolls reveal about a lost era in the history of two world religions, Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism.
In Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by Hershel Shanks, the world’s leading scroll scholars provide rich, authoritative insight into some of the key questions surrounding these ancient manuscripts. Were the Dead Sea Scrolls written by the Essenes, an ascetic sect of Jews that may have included John the Baptist among its members? Is the Copper Scroll a secret map to the treasures of the Jerusalem Temple? In what way do these books prefigure the teachings of early Christianity? These questions and more are addressed by such prominent Bible scholars as Frank Moore Cross, Lawrence Schiffman, James VanderKam and P. Kyle McCarter, Jr.
Each book, which can be purchased and downloaded for Kindle or Nook, includes all of the features you’ve come to expect from your eReader, including convenient in-text links that can jump directly to specific chapters, notes and illustrations. In addition, The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been updated with vibrant color images throughout.