A 4-part series

In 1883, Jerusalem antiquities dealer Moses Wilhelm Shapira arrived in London with a set of blackened leather fragments said to have been found by Bedouins in a cave near the Dead Sea. The fragments contained a strange and fascinating version of Deuteronomy, and they caused a sensation. Prime Minister William Gladstone came to see them; newspapers followed the story closely; scholars debated what they were. Then the British Museum declared them forgeries. Shapira’s reputation collapsed, and not long afterward, he died by suicide.

Decades later, after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the story began to look different. Could Shapira’s fragments have been ancient documents containing an abridged Deuteronomy? The idea was tantalising, but the manuscripts had disappeared by then. Without the originals, direct analysis was impossible, and the scholarly world remained skeptical.

In 2021, Idan Dorshav Dershowitz published The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book, arguing that the fragments were neither fake nor based on Deuteronomy. Rather, they preserved a predecessor to it: a text strikingly similar to the biblical book in some ways, and dramatically different in others. In this four-week series, Idan will review the remarkable history of the Shapira manuscripts before we turn to studying The Valediction of Moses itself. We’ll explore what this text might mean for how the Torah came together, how biblical religion developed, and how ancient ideas about law, covenant, God, and Israel changed over time.

Come be among the first people to study this extraordinary text!

About the facilitator

Idan Dorshav Dershowitz

Facilitator

Idan Dorshav Dershowitz joined the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University in 2024. He was previously Director of the School of Jewish Theology and Chair of Hebrew Bible at the University of Potsdam. His research interests include the evolution of biblical religion and the methods of ancient biblical editors, as well as the development of AI tools to trace the origins of ancient texts. He is the author of The Dismembered Bible: Cutting and Pasting Scripture in Antiquity and The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book. He is currently working on a children’s book on the origins of the alphabet.