"Sealed until the End: Time, Liturgy and Divine Thinking in the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls"

Date: 

Monday, January 27, 2020, 4:00pm

Location: 

Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Room 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138

Speaker: Arjen Bakker (University of Oxford, Oriel College)

Dr. Bakker will speak about concepts of time that emerge as expressions of divine thinking and mystery in ancient Jewish texts. Through liturgical activity and the division of time in calendar and chronology these texts reveal the ambition to participate in heavenly structures and divine knowledge. Across the late books of the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls we can see how these concepts played an important role in interpretation, rewriting, collecting and composing new works. This casts light on an important dimension behind the growth and development of the biblical corpus.

Arjen Bakker (PhD Leuven, 2015) is lecturer in Hebrew Bible at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the formation of the Bible in the Hellenistic Period and on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the centres for Qumran research in Haifa and Groningen before coming to Oxford in 2017. His first monograph The Secret of Time: Reconfiguring Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls will be published by Brill later this year.

Presented by Ancient Studies at Harvard