The Fifteenth International Orion Symposium, in conjunction with the University of Vienna, Institute for Jewish Studies, and the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies

"The Texts of the Bible from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Biblical Manuscripts of the Vienna Papyrus Collection"

April 10–13, 2016

The discovery and publication of over 200 biblical manuscripts among the Dead Sea scrolls has fundamentally changed our understanding of the biblical text and its history. These copies reflect the earliest evidence currently available for the books of the Bible, and therefore provide invaluable evidence for the state of the biblical text in the Second Temple period. The comparison of these manuscripts to one another, and to later texts found in the Cairo Genizah and other repositories, allows for a comprehensive assessment of the dynamic processes of transmission and textual development of the Bible in antiquity and in the early medieval period. These and other issues were addressed in this two-part symposium: the first part focusing on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Second Temple period and late antiquity; the second part on the Vienna papyrus collection and early medieval trajectories of the biblical text. Symposium papers discussed:

• Biblical and nonbiblical Qumran scrolls in light of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek biblical texts.
• The dynamics of textual transmission in light of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls and with respect to the biblical manuscripts in the Vienna papyrus collection.
• The material, scribal, literary, and liturgical aspects of the biblical texts and of their use, their transmission, and their translation.
• Political, historical, cultural, and material circumstances that influenced textual developments in the Hebrew biblical text and in its Jewish translations into Greek, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic.
• The social and historical contexts of the Jewish textual history of the Bible.

The Symposium was generously supported by the Sir Zelman Cowen Universities Fund, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Europe, Integration, and Foreign Affairs, the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, and Brill Academic Publishers.

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