Ezra's Legacy and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Law and Narratives of Exclusion
Professor Charlotte Hempel's project explores the evidence provided in two crucial sources on the history of Jewish law: Ezra-Nehemiah and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Participants in the 2019 international conference [Photo by Mike Fried].
About the project
About the project
This project explores the evidence of two crucial witnesses along this journey: Ezra-Nehemiah and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Ezra-Nehemiah offers an account of a programme of reform inspired by the mission of the fifth century BCE priest-scribe Ezra to return the law from the Babylonian exile to Jerusalem and promulgate its correct interpretation among the people. The Dead Sea Scrolls have revealed a substantial number of previously unknown Jewish legal texts. Since the full publication of the Scrolls scholars have begun to integrate this new material into what we know of the history of Jewish law from the Pentateuch to the emergence of classical Jewish texts like Mishnah and Talmud that were codified several centuries later. The nature and place of Jewish law in Ezra-Nehemiah and the full corpus of the Dead Sea Scrolls offers a rich and largely unexplored field of enquiry.
Until now the lack of explicit engagement with the figure of Ezra in the Dead Sea Scrolls has often been taken to suggest that both literatures emanate from circles that were at odds with each other. At the same time scholars have increasingly challenged accounts of the seminal impact of extraordinary individuals in favour of recognizing that significant changes are more credibly perceived as the culmination of sustained periods of complex developments within larger communities. By shifting attention away from the portrayal of the single-handed achievements of individuals such as Ezra or the Teacher of Righteousness mentioned in a small number of Dead Sea Scrolls this project will expose a series of contact points between the circles behind both literatures that have hitherto been overlooked. Close attention will also be paid to narratives of exclusion, i.e. traces in our sources of voices that have been side-lined such as the members of the movements whose vision and practice departs from the dominant agenda promoted in the literature we have at our disposal.
Project conference December 2019
Project conference December 2019
This international conference explored the wider horizons of the agenda of Professor Charlotte Hempel’s AHRC Project on Ezra’s Legacy and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Law and Narratives of Exclusion.
The Conference covered aspects of research on Ezra-Nehemiah and the Dead Sea Scrolls in the broadest sense including the history of Jewish Law, Prayer in the Second Temple Period, the role of founder narratives and figures, the linguistic landscape including multi-lingualism, gender and sexuality studies, the social movements and tensions depicted in both literatures and the contribution of archaeology.
Participants
- Lindsey Askin, University of Bristol, UK
- George Brooke, University of Manchester, UK
- Michael DeVries, University of Birmingham, UK
- Jasmine Foo, King's College London, UK
- Lisbeth F. Fried, University of Michigan, USA
- Charlotte Hempel, University of Birmingham, UK
- Reinhard Kratz, University of Göttingen, DE
- Noam Mizrahi, Tel-Aviv University, IL
- Hindy Najman, Oxford University, UK
- Roger Nam, George Fox University, Oregon, USA
- Judith Newman, The University of Toronto, CA
- Laura Quick, University of Oxford, UK
- Lawrence Schiffman, NYU, USA
- James M Tucker, University of Toronto, CA
- Hugh Williamson, Oxford University, UK
- Sarah Wisialowski, Oxford University, UK
Publications, lectures and public engagement
Publications, lectures and public engagement
2023 Hempel C, The Community Rules from Qumran: A Commentary. Paperback, Minneapolis MN: Fortress
2023 Hempel C., “Yahwistic Diversity in the Land of Israel: The Contribution of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Hensel B., Adamczewski B., Noquet D. (Eds), Social Groups Behind Biblical Traditions. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck
2023 Hempel C., “Curated Communities: Refracted Realities at Qumran and on Social Media,” in Travis B. Williams, Chris Keith, and Loren Stuckenbruck (Eds), The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture. Leiden: Brill
2022 Hempel C., “Community Formation in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Beyond the Watershed Paradigm,” in Geyser-Fouche A., Collins J. J. (Eds), Emerging Sectarianism in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Continuity, Separation, and Conflict. Leiden: Brill
2022 Hempel C., “Ezra and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Biblical Archaeology Review, 48:2
2021 Hempel C., “Self-Fashioning in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Thickening the Description of what Rule Texts Do,” in Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Jonathan Ben-Dov (Eds), Social History of the Jews in Antiquity. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck
2021 Hempel C., “A Tale of Two Scribes: Encounters with an Avant-Garde Manuscript of the Community Rules,” in Jean-Sebastien Rey, Martin Staszak (Eds), Hokhmat Sopher: Mélanges offerts au Professeur Émile Puech en l’honneur de son quatre-vingtième anniversaire. (pp. 115-128). Leuven: Peeters
2020 Hempel C., “The Apotropaic Function of the Final Hymn in the Community Rules,” in Ariel Feldman, Timothy Sandoval (Eds), Petitioners, Penitents, and Poets: On Prayer and Praying in Second Temple Judaism. Berlin: De Gruyter
2018 Hempel C., “Legal Texts (Qumran),” in Loren Stuckenbruck, Daniel Gurtner (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism. London: Bloomsbury
2018 Hempel C. and Brooke, G. J., (Eds), T&T Clark Companion to the Dead Sea Scrolls. London: Bloomsbury
2018 Hempel C., “Biblical views: Where are the Scribes in the Dead Sea Scrolls?” Biblical Archaeology Review, 44 (4)
Lectures and public engagement
2024
“The Dead Sea Scrolls and Palestinian Judaism”
21st Annual Lecture from the International Centre for Biblical Interpretation
University of Gloucestershire
2023
Panelist, 25th Annual Bible and Archaeology Fest.
Biblical Archaeological Society, Washington DC
2022
“Why Isn’t Ezra Mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls?”
US Blog: From the Desk
2022
“The Size of the Playground for Dead Sea Scrolls Researchers”
Keynote Lecture, The University of Agder. Kristiansand, Norway [PDF, 346 KB]
2021
“The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Contours and Texture of Palestinian Judaism”
Montefiore Lecture at the University of Southampton
2021
'A Manly Swot: Ezra's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats’
Ethel M. Wood Lecture, King's College London
2021
“Ezra’s Legacy in the Dead Sea Scrolls”
Lecture to Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, Manchester
2020
Public Panel on The Silence about Ezra in the Dead Sea Scrolls in Birmingham
with Professors Charlotte Hempel (Chair), Hindy Najman, Lawrence Schiffman, and Hugh Williamson (Panellists)
2020
“Virtue Signalling in the Dead Sea Scrolls”
Public Lecture on the Dead Sea Scrolls at New York University
Capacity building
Capacity building
2018 Founding Director of The Second Temple Early Career Academy (STECA), an international virtual common room for early career researches in Second Temple Judaism
Aim: To create a virtual common room to support early career researchers wherever they are based. STECA is dedicated to support and nurture a new generation of resea
Project contact
Project contact
If you would like to talk to Charlotte about her work in around the Dead Sea Scrolls, please contact her.
Funding
Professor Charlotte Hempel’s project ‘Ezra's Legacy and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Law and Narratives of Exclusion’, is funded by a £154,899 Fellowship grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.