Introduction II: recent history of Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship

The article surveys recent scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls and traces the contours of interpretative trends in scroll research since the 1990s. The publication of all of the Dead Sea texts in the early 1990s has given scholars unprecedented access to the entire corpus. Many aspects of the scholarly consensus that emerged out of the enterprise of the first generation of scroll researchers in the 1950s have proven remarkably resilient. However, in other respects, the scrolls have raised new questions about their authors and their community, as well as the early Jewish environment in which the corpus came to be written.