Tag Archives: Dead Sea Scrolls

Lecture: How Many Books of Esther Do We Have?

My friend Szi-chieh Yu helpfully introduced me to this wonderful website called the Bible Project. It contains many beautiful animated videos that render biblical stories accessible to everyone, everywhere. The animations are simply lovely! I notice that it defines and explains the Bible from a Protestant Christian perspective. It stresses a unifying principle underlying the Protestant Bible. As one of the videos points out, it is helpful to bear in mind that today the Bible the Protestants are using is not exactly the same as the Eastern Orthodox Christians and the Catholic Christians. The Protestants are using the Jewish Tanakh as their Old Testament (with a different structural arrangement). The Jews and the Protestants, however, can interpret the scriptural texts rather differently.

The Project’s video entitled “What Is the Bible?” also highlights that the Protestant Bible has undergone a long process of compilation. Biblical scholars have continued encountering historical artefacts (e.g., Dead Sea Scrolls, Cairo Genizah, Nag Hammadi Library, etc.) and internal literary evidence (e.g., stylistic breaks, doublets, thematic tensions, etc.) that point to the fluidity and diversity of the early scriptural traditions.

If you wish to know how diverse the early literary traditions surrounding the story of Esther (one of the stories found in the Protestant Bible today) were, why don’t you pop by for the Ancient History Public Lecture tomorrow evening (19:00-20:00)? In the lecture, we will also explore how the early Jewish and Christian writers grappled with the textual fluidity and diversity. See you there! 🙂

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Announcement: Two Articles Passed the Double-Blind Peer-Reviews

A year after the defense of my dissertation.

5 months after the tutorial I led.

Another semester has just gone by.

A tiny update from me to you: Two of my articles have passed the double-blind peer-reviews (abstracts can be found in my academia.edu).

They are accepted by two good academic journals.

ZAWThe first one is called Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (European Science Foundation Ranking A). Here is the link to the journal’s website:

http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/zatw

So if any of you has some new ideas about the scholarly research of any parts of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, you can just write it down, and email the editors for a peer-review. Don’t worry, they accept articles written in not only German, but also English and French.

RdQ104The second one is called Revue de Qumran (European Science Foundation Ranking A). Here is the journal’s beautiful website:

http://revuedequmran.fr/

Again if any of you has some new ideas about the scholarly research of any parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, just send your articles to the editors for a peer-review.  Articles in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish are welcome.

If the information provided by the editors is correct, my articles will be in print in December 2015. Of course, I will then make proper thanks to the kind and friendly people who have not given up on me and have helped in the improvements of my articles 😀

Presentation: Fiery “Sheol” in the Dead Sea Scrolls

When I throw this question at my boyfriend, who is a law student and thus a “non-specilaist” of the Bible: “How does the underworld look?” The first word comes out of his mouth is “fire”! When I am in the Vatican, looking at the fresco of the Last Judgment by Michelangelo, at the right hand corner, at the bottom, I see that the boatman Charon shove the damned souls into the fiery hole. When I read John Milton’s Paradise Lost, I imagine Satan falling into the “bottomless perdition” filled with “penal fire”. When I go to church on Sunday, I listen to the Lukan story of the rich man and Lazarus, where the former thirsts for water in the eternal flame.  Here comes one interesting fact: If we try to find a reference to fire in the “Sheol” (a uniquely Hebraic term to designate the abode of the dead) of the Hebrew Bible, we would be disappointed. Instead of with fire, the Hebrew Bible often associates “Sheol” with water (e.g. Job 26:5-6; Ezekiel 31:15; Psalm 69:2, 14). Where are all these images of fiery underworld coming from? I do not know the answer.

But tomorrow in one of the sessions of the SBL international meeting at St. Andrews, I would like to share with you how several Qumran texts (e.g. 1QM XIV, 16-18; 4Q 491 8-10i 13b-15; 1QHa IV 25-26a; 4Q184 1 6-10) attest to a fiery underworld, expressed through the term “Sheol”! First, I would like to draw your attention to how this fiery “Sheol” stands in contrast to the more watery “Sheol” in the Hebrew Bible. Second, I relate this fiery “Sheol” in the Qumran texts with the other fiery underworld in the Second Temple literature, esp. that of 1 Enoch. Rather than probing the origin of this fiery imagery, the focus will be on the literary function of this fiery imagery within the Qumran texts. At the end, I conclude that this fiery aspect of “Sheol” within the Qumran texts contributes to an annihilating concept of punishment after death in the Second Temple period. (Note: In case you are wondering how I get into this “deadly” business, it is because we also get the prevalent motif of death and Sheol in Ezekiel’s oracles against Egypt, which form the focus of chapter 3 of my dissertation)

So I send you my greetings from St. Andrews and look forward to seeing you and discussing with you here! 🙂

Here are the details of the session:

Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls
7/08/2013
9:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Room: Meeting Room 301 – Physics (15)Sidnie Crawford, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, Presiding
Helen R. Jacobus, University College London
Calendars from Jewish Documents in the Cave of Letters and Elsewhere in the Judean Desert (25 min)
Discussion (10 min)
David Willgren, Lund University
Psalm Use in the Dead Sea Scrolls (25 min)
Discussion (10 min)

Break (35 min)
Lydia Lee, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
“Sheol” in the Dead Sea Scrolls (25 min)
Discussion (10 min)

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Scottish pipe music in the university of St. Andrews to mark the end of the conference 🙂