The Community Rule: A Critical Edition with Translation (Early Judaism and Its Literature)

An authoritative critical edition

The discovery and translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls transformed our understanding of the life and history of ancient Jewish communities when both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity were emerging. As part of this rich discovery, the Community Rule serves to illuminate the religious beliefs and practices as well as the organizational rules of the group behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, there is no single, unified text of the Community Rule; rather, multiple manuscripts of the Community Rule show considerable variation and highlight the work of ancient Jewish scribes and their intentional literary development of the text. In this volume, Sarianna Metso brings together the surviving evidence in a new edition that presents a critically established Hebrew text with an introduction and an English translation.

Features:

• A critical apparatus and textual notes
• All the surviving evidence of the Community Rule
• A new method for presenting complex developments and transmission history of ancient texts

Sarianna Metso is Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto and an Associate Member of the University of Toronto Centre for Jewish Studies. She is the author of The Textual Development of the Qumran Community Rule (Brill) and The Serekh Texts (T&T Clark).