Review of Schiffman & VanderKam, eds., <i>Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of the Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, according to its editors, is “to encompass all scholarship on the scrolls to date, making use of the research of many scholars of international reputation” (x). The word “scrolls” is used here in its broad meaning to refer to all the collections of ancient manuscripts found in the region of the Dead Sea and the Judaean wilderness in the twentieth century. These collections include the Qumran Scrolls, the Samaria Papyri, the Bar Kokhba texts, Masada and Khirbet Mird. Thus, although the Encyclopedia is more limited in geographical and chronological scope than, say, a biblical encyclopedia, a wider variety of topics is covered than would be the case if the editors had chosen to limit the Encyclopedia to the Qumran Scrolls. To produce the entries on this wider range of topics, the editors have assembled a group of contributors who are, as they state, of international repute, coming not only from the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom (as would be expected in an English-language encyclopedia), but also Germany, Israel, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Russia, Spain and Switzerland. Although many of these contributors are known as specialists in Qumran studies, others are from unrelated fields such as the morphological sciences or ethnobotany. The resulting collection of articles is truly “encyclopedic” in scope, ranging from expected topics such as “Essenes,” to the unexpected “Flora of Judea.”
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.012 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".