The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Hasmonean State is the first book dedicated solely to the question of how we can learn political history from the Qumran scrolls. Hanan Eshel unpacks and summarizes the historical information contained in the scrolls and goes on to demonstrate that Josephus’s description of the political history of the Hasmonean period is basically reliable.

This version of Eshel’s 2004 Hebrew publication has been expertly translated for an English-speaking audience. It has also been updated to reflect more recent scholarship and includes an entirely new bibliography of English-language resources.