Molly Zahn

Professor Zahn is a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Second Temple Judaism, and the Hebrew Bible. She joined YDS in 2022 after fourteen years in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on understanding how the scriptures of early Judaism, including but not limited to the texts that came to make up our Bibles, were composed and transmitted. This work contributes to new models of ancient Jewish textual culture, with attention to how texts were changed over time by successive groups of readers and how these different groups thought about divine revelation and textual authority. Prof. Zahn’s first book, Rethinking Rewritten Scripture (2011) analyzes the ways in which the text of the Pentateuch was still undergoing substantial development in the last centuries BCE. Her second book, Genres of Rewriting in Second Temple Judaism (2020), demonstrates that textual fluidity was the norm in early Jewish textual culture, and explores the implications of this observation for traditional models of the development and canonization of the books of the Hebrew Bible. Professor Zahn is also the author of numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes that explore the dynamics of textual development and the methodological implications of the Qumran scrolls for biblical scholarship. She serves as the Editor in Chief of the prominent Brill journal Dead Sea Discoveries and as the secretary of the International Organization of Qumran Studies. She is currently working on a commentary for the Hermeneia series on the Temple Scroll, a fascinating Dead Sea Scrolls manuscript that reconfigures received traditions from the Pentateuch, Ezekiel, and elsewhere to create a set of instructions for a monumental temple complex and associated laws, all presented as the direct speech of God from Mt. Sinai.

• What Is “Torah” in Second Temple Texts?