Public Lecture: "The Lost Cosmic Epic of Judaism"
“The Lost Cosmic Epic of Judaism: How a Tattered Scroll Reveals a Forgotten Jewish World.”
A public lecture by the Simon and Riva Spatz Chair in Jewish Studies, Dr. Eva Mroczek.
How much ancient culture has been lost forever?
While knowing our record of the past is fragmentary, we usually have no way of knowing just how much we are missing. But one two-thousand-year-old Dead Sea Scroll offers a rare insight. The Genesis Apocryphon, an Aramaic retelling of primordial stories in the first-person voice of biblical heroes like Noah and Abraham, has survived only in three disintegrating sheets of parchment. The surviving sheets come from the end of the text, rolled up in the inner part of the scroll and numbered from seventeen through nineteen: the previous sixteen sheets worth of literature, a massive epic describing the world before Noah, have turned to dust.
What might this composition, more extensive than the Bible, have been like? Can we imagine how this ancient Jewish writer understood the secrets of heaven and the origins of evil? What would have been different if more had survived? And can this rare knowledge of the scope of our loss — the limitations of our knowledge— have something to teach us today?
Category
Lectures, Seminars
Time
Location
Room 1011, Kenneth C. Rowe Building
Dalhousie University, 6100 University Avenue.