As father of all humanity and not exclusively of Israel, Noah was a problematic ancestor for some Jews in the Second Temple period. His archetypical portrayals in the Dead Sea Scrolls, differently nuanced in Hebrew and Aramaic, embodied the tensions for groups that were struggling to understand both their distinctive self-identities within Judaism and their relationship to the nations among whom they lived. Dually located within a trajectory of early Christian and rabbinic interpretation of Noah and within the Jewish Hellenistic milieu of the Second Temple period, this study of the Noah traditions in the Dead Sea Scrolls illuminates living conversations and controversies among the people who transmitted them and promises to have implications for ancient questions and debates that extended considerably beyond the Dead Sea Scrolls.

About the author(s)
Dorothy M. Peters, Ph.D., University of Manchester, is Sessional Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Trinity Western University.

Noah Traditions in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Conversations and Controversies of Antiquity
Dorothy M. Peters
Publication year: 2009
Series: SBL – Early Judaism and Its Literature, 26
ISBN-13 (i)The ISBN (International Standard Book Number) has been changed from 10 to 13 digits on 1 January 2007: 978 90 04 16915 9
ISSN: 1569-3597
Cover: Cloth
Number of pages: xxiv, 248 pp.
List price: € 104.00 / US$ 154.00