Interpreting and Living God’s Law at Qumran

Born 1957; 1987 Dr. theol., 1990 Habilitation at the University of Zürich; since 1995 Professor for Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at the Theological Faculty of the University Göttingen.
is research professor of Biblical Studies at the KU Leuven. His main field of research is the Dead Sea Scrolls.

is an associate professor at the Department of Biblical Studies, Tel Aviv University. His main field of research is Hebrew philology, with special attention to the interaction between historical-linguistic study of Biblical and Qumran Hebrew, textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, and the compositional history of biblical and Second Temple literature.

Born 1971; has been a research fellow at New York University (ISAW), The University of Durham, and the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem); currently associate professor at the department of Bible, Tel Aviv University.

Born 1966; 1991 BA; 1995 PhD; 1995-99 Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships at the Universities of Birmingham and Cambridge; 1999-2004 Maternity Career Break; 2005 Research Fellow, 2008 Senior Research Fellow, 2010 Senior Lecturer, 2013 Reader and since 2016 Professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Birmingham, UK.

is the chair of Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies and Archaeology, and teaches Talmud and Second Temple Jewish Literature at the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud, Tel Aviv University. Her main fields of research are Rabbinic Literature, Second Temple Literature and Early Halakhah.

Born 1946; 1972 PhD; 1985-91 Professor at the University of Notre Dame; 1991-2000 Professor at the University of Chicago; since 2000 Holmes Professor of Old Testament in Yale.

Born 1966; studied Theology and Jewish Studies at Erlangen, Jerusalem and Heidelberg; 1998 Dr. theol., Göttingen; 1999-2003 Wissenschaftlicher Assistent, Jena; 2004-09 Lecturer in New Testament, King's College London; 2009-14 Reader in New Testament and Ancient Judaism, Durham University; since 2014 Professor of New Testament and Ancient Judaism and academic head of the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum, University of Münster.

Geboren 1962; 1996 Promotion; 1998 Habilitation; seit 2010 Professor für Neues Testament an der Universität Zürich.

The text Miqsat Ma_ase Ha-Torah, Some of the Works of the Torah (4QMMT), is one of the most interesting texts among the famous Dead Sea Scrolls discovered near the settlement of Khirbet Qumran and its vicinity in the middle of the twentieth century and by now published in full. It is a writing in the form of a letter by an unknown author to an equally unknown addressee, written in second person singular and plural. This document is the earliest evidence of a proper interpretation of the Jewish Torah, the so-called Halakhah, from pre-Christian, Hellenistic times as it later became customary and widely attested in rabbinical Judaism. This volume - after a short introduction on the findings at the Dead Sea in general and the text Miqsat Ma_ase Ha-Torah in particular - provides a new edition and translation as well as several contributions from renowned scholars on the manuscripts, the language and content plus literary and historical contexts of this writing.