The Qumran Community: Ancient Texts and Sacred Spaces

David deSilva is Trustees’ Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Greek at Ashland Theological Seminary in Ashland, Ohio. He has written more than 30 books, including Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture, Discovering Revelation, Introducing the Apocrypha: Message, Context, and Significance, An Introduction to the New Testament, The Jewish Teachers of Jesus, James, and Jude: What Earliest Christianity Learned from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Day of Atonement: A Novel of the Maccabean Revolt, and commentaries on Galatians, Ephesians, Hebrews, and 4 Maccabees. He also contributes frequently to journals, reference books, church curricula, and study Bibles. He holds ordination in the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church and has also served congregations as an organist and choir director since 1985. He is married to Donna Jean deSilva, and they have three adult sons.

William Schniedewind is professor of biblical studies at UCLA, and the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. He received his PhD in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University, has been a visiting scholar at the Hebrew University and a Research Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, and is the associate director of the excavations at Tel Shaddud. He served for many years as the Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He is the author of numerous articles and seven books, including How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge University Press, 2004), A Social History of Hebrew (Yale University Press, 2013), The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes (Princeton University Press, 2024).