ABSTRACT
The focus of this book is the previously unknown wisdom writings that have been discovered at Qumran. But this is not the whole story of wisdom at Qumran. Any assessment of the significance of the discovery of the Qumran scrolls would have to give a very high place to the biblical manuscripts. The standard editions of the Hebrew Bible are based largely on manuscripts from around 1000 CE. At Qumran there were found at least fragments of every book in the Hebrew canon of Scripture except Esther. Whether Esther’s absence should be attributed to historical accident or to the absence of the divine name in its Hebrew version, can be debated. Indeed, J.T. Milik has argued for a primitive version (“proto-Esther”) of Esther in Qumran texts (Milik 1992:321-99). But the most important point is that we now have access to manuscript evidence for the Hebrew Bible 1,000 or more years earlier than had been available before the discoveries at Qumran.
