Prof. Lawrence H. Schiffman

Photo courtesy of Isaac Boyarsky

Lawrence H. Schiffman is Chair of New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and serves as Ethel and Irvin A. Edelman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies.  He is also a member of the University’s Center for Ancient Studies and Center for Near Eastern Studies.  He is a past president of the Association for Jewish Studies.  During the academic year 1989/90 he was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as part of a research group dealing with the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was featured in the PBS Nova series documentary, “Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” as well as in four BBC documentaries on the scrolls, the McNeil-Lehrer program, and a Discovery special. He appears regularly in the popular educational series, “Mysteries of the Bible,” which appears on Arts and Entertainment (A&E), and more recently, in the four-part series “Kingdom of David” on PBS.  In 1992/3 he was a fellow of the Annenberg Research Institute in Philadelphia where he was part of a research team working on the unpublished scrolls. Together with a colleague, he served as editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2000). In 1991, he was appointed to the team publishing the scrolls in the Oxford series, Discoveries in the Judean Desert.  He edited the journal Dead Sea Discoveries for ten years. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Center for Online Judaic Studies in New York.

Read more about Lawrence H. Schiffman.

Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, member Board of Directors
Fellow, American Academy for Jewish Research
Association for Jewish Studies (President)
International Organization for Qumran Studies
Israel Exploration Society

A full list of professional memberships can be found on the About page.

Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls

From Text to Tradition, a History of Judaism in Second Temple and Rabbinic Times: A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism

Texts and Traditions: A Source Reader for the Study of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism

Sectarian Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Courts, Testimony and the Penal Code

Who Was a Jew?: Rabbinic and Halakhic Perspectives on the Jewish Christian Schism

Understanding Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism, Lawrence H. Schiffman, Jon Bloomberg, Samuel Kapustin, Ktav Publishing House, 2003.

For a full list of publications, see the Publications page.