Dead Sea Scrolls Expert to Speak on Millennialism At Yale Tomorrow

John. J. Collins, a leading scholar on the history of Judaism and Jewish thought on the apocalypse, will present a lecture, “Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” on Tuesday, Feb. 17, at 4 p.m. in Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Ave. His talk is part of the series, “Millennium and Millennialism: Motifs and Movements,” funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as a Sawyer Seminar. The talk is free and open to the public.

Collins is professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His books include “The Apocalyptic Vision of the Book of Daniel” (Harvard Semitic Monographs, 1977), “Between Athens and Jerusalem. Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora” (Crossroad, 1983), “The Apocalyptic Imagination” (Crossroad, 1984), “The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literatures” (Doubleday, 1995) and “Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls” (Routledge, 1997). He served as editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature 1989-1994, and as president of the Catholic Biblical Association 1996-97.

The Millennium seminar and lecture series is directed by Abbas Amanat, professor of Middle Eastern history and chair of the Council on Middle East Studies at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. Graduate student Magnus Bernhardsson is program coordinator.

Other public speakers in the series this spring include R. I. Moore (University of Newcastle) on Medieval Christianity, Said Amir Arjomand (SUNY-Stony Brook) on Classical Islam, Mary Carpenter (Queen’s University) on Victorian Britain and Bernard McGinn (University of Chicago) about Europe in the late Medieval and Early Modern Period.

For more information, call the Council on Middle East Studies at 432-6252.