The Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of 972 documents discovered
between 1946 and 1956, are of immeasurable religious and historical
significance. They include the oldest known surviving copies of
Biblical-era documents. The manuscripts shed considerable light on
forms of Judaism never known before. These forms contain hints of
Christianity, or as put elsewhere, it was the Judaism amid which
Christ and his first followers lived, thought, and wrote. Edmund
Wilson's book is a record of this great scholarly find.
Wilson was a prolific literary critic and social commentator,
not an academic, and therefore Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls
reads like a journalist's reportage. This unique personal account
weaves together threads of folklore, history, and intrigue. As Leon
Edel writes in his foreword, "Reading him, it is not difficult to
imagine the ardor with which Edmund Wilson pursued his complex
subject; it was the kind of subject he had always liked best,
involving as it did history, politics, ancient lore, and all his
faculties for imaginative reconstruction and historical analysis. .
. . No book quite like this has been written in our century."
The scrolls of the Essenes, and the history of this Jewish
sect's possible antecedence to Christianity, led the author to
Israel and to the revelations contained in the scrolls. This book
contains his resulting account of the scrolls' history. Originally
published in 1978, this edition of Wilson's classic is made
contemporary with a new introduction by Raphael Israeli, which
illustrates the ongoing academic controversy surrounding the Dead
Sea Scrolls.
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