GENERATIONS have grown old and died since the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by an Arab shepherd boy in 1947, yet we still know very little of what they tell about early Christianity and the Jewish Diaspora. That's partly because most of the...

When Washington lawyer Hershel Shanks changed careers and got interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, he turned an arcane debate into an international spectator sport. Biblical archaeology may never by the same. It began, like too many change-of-life stories do, with an uncompleted...

[The Second Scroll is] a story of complicated form, in which, on the simple framework of a nephew's search for a long-lost uncle, Klein weaves a moving pattern of contemporary Jewish history seen as the fulfilment of age-old religious and national aspirations. The return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land, regarded as a miracle manifested by God, establishes in part the religious theme of the novel. Concurrent with the development of this theme and bearing on it is the question of faith in God and...