Q: How did you develop an interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls and their link to Torah?Read it all.
A: Actually, my first interest wasn’t in the Scrolls, but in what’s called in Hebrew “the outside books” – Jewish writings from the end of the biblical period that, for one reason or another, ended up being excluded from the biblical canon. Most Jews don’t hear much about these books: the book of Ben Sira, Maccabees, Judith, the book of Jubilees, and so forth. But early on, it struck me that if you read a bit between the lines of these books, you can learn a lot about how the Torah was being interpreted in the third or second centuries BCE. This is important for us today, because so many of those interpretations became a fundamental part of how we think about the Bible, and about Judaism, in our own day. So, I started working on these.
At that time, only part of the Dead Sea Scrolls had been published. But as more and more of the Scrolls began to appear, I gravitated to concentrating on them, because there was so much new material there.
More from Professor Kugel, e.g., here, here, and here.
