A Missing Link Discovered
Daniel Falk Finds Life in Dead Sea Scrolls

Daniel Falk, a recent arrival in the Department of Religious Studies, has spent a lot of time poring over photographs of old manuscript fragments. But as Oregon's resident expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, he is piecing together more than two-thousand-year-old texts. By studying the liturgical writings of an ancient Essene settlement, Falk has gained insight into Jewish practices and prayers during a period scholars know little about.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient writings discovered, in 1947, in caves on the Dead Sea's western shore. The most famous of these, found near the ruins of a settlement by Wadi Qumran, date from the third century B.C. to the middle of the first century A.D., and apparently served as a kind of library for an isolated Jewish community. The manuscripts consist of biblical texts (along with what is known as the Apocrypha), hymns, prayers, and rules for community living. The biblical writings predate other extant manuscripts of the Bible by a thousand years. This has provided scholars with startling evidence that ancient scribes were exceedingly accurate in copying biblical manuscripts yet tolerated diverse textual traditions of the same writings in a single community. Falk says the scrolls "give witness to a very rich culture of writing and intellectual development that we otherwise don't have good access to."

Falk has been primarily interested in the prayer texts that are part of the scrolls. On the basis of his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, Falk published Daily, Sabbath, & Festival Prayers in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Brill, 1998), in which he argues that ordinary Jewish people prayed at specific times and in specific ways even during the Second Temple period. Scholars typically have held that liturgical and obligatory prayers developed in Judaism only after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70 -- as a replacement for it. While the Hebrew Bible contains no laws on prayer, the practice was highly regulated and ritualized by the second century A.D. When and how did liturgical and obligatory prayer develop in Judaism? Falk says with the Dead Sea Scrolls "we find the missing link."

After completing his Ph.D. at Cambridge, Falk did post-doctorate research at the University of Oxford and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies before joining the UO's religious studies faculty. As a member of the editorial team publishing a thirty-seven volume edition and translation of the scrolls, he was involved with reconstructing segments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, piecing together fragments based on damage patterns and other clues.

Falk also has had articles in the Journal of Jewish Studies and the Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls. His current research looks into how the Essenes and other communities organized themselves, and how group identity related to biblical interpretations.

Falk says he became interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls through his studies of biblical Hebrew and early Judaism. Specifically, he wanted to learn about the link between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible. "There is quite a considerable gap between the Old Testament and the New Testament," Falk says. "If you don't have the stuff that fits in between, it's a bit jarring."