The Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran provide the oldest, best, and most direct witness we have to the origins of the Hebrew Bible. Prior to the discovery of the Scrolls, scholars had textual evidence for only a single, late period in the history of the biblical text, leading them to believe that the text was uniform. The Scrolls, however, provide documentary evidence a thousand years older than all previously known Hebrew manuscripts and reveal a period of pluriformity in the biblical text prior to the stage of uniformity.

In this important collection of studies, Eugene Ulrich, one of the world's foremost experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, outlines a comprehensive theory that reconstructs the complex development of the ancient texts that eventually came to form the Old Testament. Several of the essays set forth his pioneering theory of "multiple literary editions," which is replacing older views of the origins of the biblical text.

"The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible" represents the leading edge of research in the exciting field of Scrolls studies.

Three scrolls of the two books of Samuel were discovered in Cave 4 at Qumran and their full publication has been long awaited. Ever since the 1950s, they have been at the forefront of scholarly investigation of the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. It is no exaggeration to say that the critical study and exegesis of the books of Samuel are no longer possible without these three scrolls in conjunction with that of the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint.