The Mystical Quest That Animated the Dead Sea Scrolls

The collection of ancient manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls includes copies of various books of the Hebrew Bible as well as of several postbiblical apocryphal works. Besides these, they include a number of sacred texts that appear to be unique to a Jewish sect located at Qumran, from whose library all the scrolls come. In his book The Secret of Time, Arjen Bakker attempts to make sense of what these latter works have in common. Sarit Kattan Gribetz in her review explains that the Qumran community “aimed to transcend human boundaries in order to attain divine knowledge.”