UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Penn State’s Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies (CAMS) will host two mid-March community outreach events centered around the Dead Sea Scrolls and the writings of the ancient world.
On Friday, March 15, renowned Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Sidnie White Crawford will present the public lecture, “The Qumran Collection as an Ancient Library,” from 5:30 to 7 p.m. in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library. Prior to the lecture, a public meet-and-greet will be held at 4:30 in 102 Weaver Building. Register here.
Then, on Saturday, March 16, CAMS will host an ancient writing workshop from 1 to 4 p.m. in 102 Weaver Building. Open to the campus community and the public, the workshop will feature presentations interspersed with writing demonstrations in a variety of ancient scripts, including Egyptian, cuneiform (Akkadian and Ugaritic), Phoenician and Coptic. Participants will have the opportunity for a hands-on experience with writing on clay (cuneiform), papyrus (Egyptian and other scripts), potsherds (Hebrew), wax tablets (Latin and Greek) and more. Register here.
Crawford’s talk will focus on the roughly 2,000 Dead Sea Scrolls discovered during the 1940s and ’50s in a series of caves near the Qumran archaeological site in the West Bank. Lost for more than 2,000 years, the scrolls preserve the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible and numerous previously unknown ancient Jewish writings. They have significantly enhanced academic understanding of the Bible, ancient Judaism and the Christian New Testament.
Crawford is the Willa Cather Professor emerita of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a visiting scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary. An internationally recognized scholar in the areas of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, she is the author of “The Text of the Pentateuch: Textual Criticism and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” published by De Gruyter in 2022; and “Scribes and Scrolls at Qumran," published by Wm. B. Eerdmans in 2019, which won the Biblical Archaeology Society’s Best Popular Book on Archaeology in 2021.
Crawford served as a general editor for the 30-year review of the “New Revised Standard Version” of the Bible undertaken by the National Council of Churches and released in 2022. She is currently chair of the Old Testament Editorial Board for “Hermeneia: A Commentary Series,” published by Fortress Press, and board chair emerita of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.