The Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of 972 documents discovered between 1946 and 1956, are of immeasurable religious and historical significance. They include the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical-era documents. The manuscripts shed considerable light on forms of Judaism never known before. These forms contain hints of Christianity, or as put elsewhere, it was the Judaism amid which Christ and his first followers lived, thought, and wrote. Edmund Wilson's book is a record of this great scholarly find.Wilson was a ...
Read More
The Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of 972 documents discovered between 1946 and 1956, are of immeasurable religious and historical significance. They include the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical-era documents. The manuscripts shed considerable light on forms of Judaism never known before. These forms contain hints of Christianity, or as put elsewhere, it was the Judaism amid which Christ and his first followers lived, thought, and wrote. Edmund Wilson's book is a record of this great scholarly find.Wilson was a prolific literary critic and social commentator, not an academic, and therefore Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls reads like a journalist's reportage. This unique personal account weaves together threads of folklore, history, and intrigue. As Leon Edel writes in his foreword, 'Reading him, it is not difficult to imagine the ardor with which Edmund Wilson pursued his complex subject; it was the kind of subject he had always liked best, involving as it did history, politics, ancient lore, and all his faculties for imaginative reconstruction and historical analysis. . . . No book quite like this has been written in our century.'The scrolls of the Essenes, and the history of this Jewish sect's possible antecedence to Christianity, led the author to Israel and to the revelations contained in the scrolls. This book contains his resulting account of the scrolls' history. Originally published in 1978, this edition of Wilson's classic is made contemporary with a new introduction by Raphael Israeli, which illustrates the ongoing academic controversy surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Read Less
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Good. Good condition. (Voyages, Travel). A copy that has been read but remains intact. May contain markings such as bookplates, stamps, limited notes and highlighting, or a few light stains.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Good. Size: 12mo-over 6? "-7? " tall; Mass Market Paperback in Good Condition. Foreword by Leon Edel. Text clean, clear, no markings, no underlining or highlighting, pages lightly toned. Olive green wraps with white titles is clean, worn around edges, crease down hinge, spine creases. Hinges intact. Loosening of cover to crash about 2 inches up from lower edge. Edmund Wilson brought the knowledge of the Dead Sea Scrolls (which were discovered by the Bedouin) to the world. He went to Israel in 1954 to explore the newly discovered scrolls. He first published the scrolls' history and significance in 1955 and updated this in 1969. As a companion to this work, his essay on Israel from "Red, Blond, Black and Olive" (1956) is included in this volume. He describes a modern republic struggling to survive in a tense Middle East against a background of Biblical history. 420 pages. 7.25 x 4.25 inches. 1978, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York.
