Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 63:1 (Mar 2020)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

JETS 63:1 (March 2020) p. 173

Book Reviews

The Genesis Creation Account in the Dead Sea Scrolls. By Jeremy D. Lyon. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2019, 225 pp., $29.00 paper.

Jeremy D. Lyon (Ph.D., M.Div. Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and B.A. Carson-Newman College) currently serves as Associate Professor of OT and Hebrew at Truett-McConnell University. Lyon is author of Qumran Interpretation of the Genesis Flood (Pickwick, 2015). His literary and scholarly contributions as co-author of articles include: “A Linguistic Argument for God’s Existence” (with John Baumgardner, JETS 58 [2015]), “Flood Tales from the Canyon” (with Bill Hoesch, Answers Magazine [May 1, 2016]), and author of “Dead Sea Scrolls—Timeless Treasures from Qumran,” Answers Magazine (October 1, 2012). Lyon is also a contributor to the video Genesis: Paradise Lost (Creation Today, 2018).

Lyon brings a growing wealth of research and writing to his current volume. With sixteen pages of bibliography and a thirteen-page Ancient Document index, this volume is well researched. The opening acknowledgment that “this book has its genesis in the classroom” (introduction) points to a weakness of the book—its intended audience is vague. However, this volume is well researched and written in an accessible manner, making it appealing to a number of potential audiences. Overall, in my opinion, it is unfortunate that only one chapter is devoted to the author’s conclusions, which tends to limit the volume’s application to an already vague audience. Despite these few weaknesses, the book exhibits a wealth of scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The first chapter briefly touches on the history of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Moving quickly from their discovery to the actual fragments themselves, Lyon notes that “six of these copies contain portions of the text from the creation account” (p. 1), thereby laying the foundation for a major focus of this book—the text of the Genesis creation account in the Dead Sea Scrolls. An additional focus of this book is the interpretation of the Genesis creation account in the Dead Sea Scrolls, pointing to the documents found in the caves that represent Second Temple interpretations. Lyon reviews the significant contributions by researchers and various scholars (pp. 3–6).

Chapter 2 focuses on the text of the Genesis creation account. Lyon notes, “The prominence of Genesis at Qumran is attested by the large number of Genesis manuscripts recovered in the surrounding caves” (p. 7). Lyon lists up to twenty fragmentary manuscripts of Genesis as the oldest known copies of Genesis. Each fragment and its content are described, and helpful parallel column charts and photographs are utilized to aid in the...