Introduction

The volume brings together ten distinguished Dead Sea Scrolls scholars to address several big-picture issues in contemporary Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship. Our goal in this book is to expand the contours of the scholarly conversations in order to locate them alongside broader issues and questions that are taking place in related fields dedicated to the study of Antiquity. In this introduction, we present a general overview of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their contribution to the study of ancient Judaism and Christianity. We then shift to considering how this conversation is best positioned alongside the more general study of antiquity by the ten contributions in this volume.