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THE HIDDEN SCROLLS

CHRISTIANITY, JUDAISM, AND THE WAR FOR THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

International intrigue, scholarly arrogance, and eccentric personalities populate this examination of what the Dead Sea Scrolls really tell us. Since their discovery by Bedouins in the 1940s, the scrolls have been variously used as a springboard for academic careers, patriotic propaganda for the modern state of Israel, and material for the spinning of ancient conspiracy theories. Silberman (A Prophet from Amongst You, 1993, etc.) presents both a stunning indictment of the small cadre of scholars who controlled access to the scrolls for decades and a marvelous revisionist reconstruction of the ancient community that produced the scrolls. He argues convincingly that the cloistered, middle-class scholars who transcribed the scrolls and exclusively published their contents at a glacial pace until a series of highly publicized recent actions were blind to what the scrolls revealed. Rather than the quietist religious community living in the desert before the first century ce that has been standard fare since the earliest publications of the scrolls, Silberman provides a commanding defense of the oft-maligned theory that the Qumran community lived and wrote as an underground anti-imperial revolutionary group during the same period that produced Christianity. Silberman's careful laying out of evidence should create a reasonable doubt in most readers' minds that the circumstances described in the scrolls make much more sense in a first century ce context than in the earlier period previously accepted. And his presentation of early Christians as a group from the same milieu, but who abandoned militancy and nationalism in favor of a message of love that was tolerable to the Roman colonizers, equally undermines what he sees as an unwarranted implication of the superiority of Christianity over Judaism in scrolls research. (For more on the Dead Sea Scrolls, see Lawrence H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, p. TK.) Silberman takes sides, but he comes across as fair and judicious. His depiction of the interplay between ancient history and its manipulation by nations, quacks, and petty academics is terrific.

Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1994

ISBN: 0-399-13982-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955

ISBN: 0679733736

Page Count: 228

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955

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THE ART OF SOLITUDE

A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.

A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.

“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.

A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.

Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0

Page Count: 200

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019

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