Bible Review

Maurice Baillet, QumraÆn Grotte 4, Vol. III (4Q 482–520), Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. VIII (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1982).

Precisely when the posts were introduced we do not know. But a fragment of a disc presumably attached to a post was found in the synagogue at Ein Gedi, dated to the third to sixth centuries A.D. See Hershel Shanks, Judaism in Stone (New York: Harper & Row/Washington, D. C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1979), p. 134.

See André Lemaire, “Fragments from the Book of Balaam Found at Deir Alla,” BAR 11:05.

See Raphael Levy, “First ‘Dead Sea Scroll’ Found in Egypt Fifty Years Before Qumran Discovers,” BAR 08:05.

See Frank Moore Cross “New Directions in Dead Sea Scroll Research: I. The Text Behind the Text of the Hebrew Bible,” BR 01:02.

A wadi, or nahal, is a riverbed that is dry most of the year.

The Book of Wisdom, or Wisdom of Solomon, is part of the Catholic Bible. It refects the concerns of Jewish intellectuals living in first-century B.C. Alexandria, Egypt.

A non-biblical book that originated in third-century B.C. Judaism (see “The Strange Visions of Enoch,” BR 03:02, by Matthew Black and “Don’t Let Pseudepigrapha Scare You,” BR 03:02, by Hershel Shanks).

This passage from the Ecclesiasticus is an elaboration of Psalm 6:5: “None talk of thee among the dead; who praises thee in Sheol?” See also Psalm 88:10–12:

“Dost thou work wonders for the dead?

Do the shades rise up to praise thee?

Selah

Is thy steadfast love declared in the grave,