Dead Sea Scrolls Athenaeum March 2013 J. Terry Fuqua 1. Intro 2. Some day in early 1947 15 year old Muhammad adh-Dhib [adh-theeb], "the wolf", was herding goats or sheep and for some reason threw a stone into a little cave above him on the cliffs. He heard the breaking of pottery and crawled up to investigate. The cave contained several clay jars, most of them broken. Protruding from several of these were scrolls of leather wrapped in linen cloth. The ends were badly decomposed. Muhammad took these to Bethlehem and gave them to a Muslim sheikh, Kando, who, unable to read the non-Arabic script, sent them to a merchant of the Syrian Orthodox community there, one Khalil Eskander. Eskander told a fellow merchant and churchman, George Isaiah, who in turn told their Metropolitan-Archbishop, Athanasius Yeshue Samuel. Remember Archbishop Samuel; he will later be made archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church in America and would die late in the twentieth century. Samuel was shown one of the scrolls and realized that the script was Hebrew. He offered to buy them all. But the Bedouins, who apparently still held the rest of their find, came to town only once a week; and Eskander sent them to St. Mark's monastery without going with them. The priest at the door, thinking the old scrolls were worthless and without notifying his archbishop, turned the boys away! Finally, after all sorts of intrigue, Metropolitan-Archbishop Samuel does purchase the 5 scrolls they still had, two were actually parts of the same document. George Isaiah at the behest of Metropolitan Samuel had the shepherds take him to the cave, where he found one intact jar, fragments of manuscripts, and other artifacts. Meanwhile, the merchant Kando had sold the remaining 3 scrolls to Professor Eliezar Sukenik of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. These were a manuscript of Isaiah closely resembling the copies we had from early Middle Ages, The Thanksgiving Hymns (praises of God similar to the Psalms), and the War Scroll (which describes the coming battle between the sons of light and sons of darkness). The Metropolitan Samuel still held his four scrolls: A complete Isaiah that differs from our modern Bible version, the Community Rule handbook, a commentary on the book Habakkuk, and what proved to be the Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon. Now bear in mind: all this was happening as the United Nations was passing the resolution to partition Palestine, so the Arab-Israeli War was underway. No longer could one travel freely between Arab and Israeli regions. The circuitous details of how the manuscripts were uncovered, translated, and dated are well recounted in Millar Burrows' book, The Dead Sea Scrolls. But to summarize, 930 individual documents were found in 11 caves above the northwest shore of the Dead Sea within a mile of an ancient ruin called Khirbet Qumran. Dating by use of carbon-14, analysis of the script, the discovery of Roman coins, and other means showed that the scrolls were written from about 250 B.C. to 68 A.D. Thus, the Isaiah scroll as example is some 1,000 years older than the oldest manuscript from which we compiled our Bible. Using description of Josephus, Pliny, and Philo scholars generally recognize that a very conservative Jewish sect, the Essenes, inhabited Qumran and hid their precious writings in the nearby caves. The archaeology of Qumran is beyond the scope of this paper, but excellent photographs of the site may be found in the Wikipedia article. And Dr. Gary Rendsburg in his Great Courses lectures tells how the community's needs for food and water were met, why he thinks the group slept in the caves and used the buildings just for meals and ritual baths and copying documents, and how they lived day to day. All of this is facinating, but in the limited time we have I want to touch on some of the more intriguing details. 3. Language Some 80% or more of the scrolls were in Hebrew and most of the rest in Aramaic. A handful were in Greek. But the Hebrew used differs from that of the Temple priests at the time; it is archaiac, using word forms and grammar of several centuries earlier. Note how the use of archaiac language often persists in sects outside the mainstream: The Amish use a form of German older than modern day Germans, the King James Bible with thees and thous persisted for centuries, even Burmese priests use a language form otherwise dead for centuries. Scholars view Qumran Hebrew as "antilanguage". And finally, the name of God in the scrolls is often written in paleo-Hebrew characters. 4. Why 2 versions of Isaiah? Two scrolls were found for the book of the prophet Isaiah. One was more fragmentary and is called 1QIsa(b). Let me pause a moment to tell how the writings are classified. The first part is a number, 1 to 11, that tells in which cave the fragment or scroll was found. The "Q" means simply Qumran. The next part is the name or number given to the document after it was translated or the number (in order of discovery) if no name is yet assigned. The superscript, here a "b", means it is the second document of the same name found. Now back to 1QIsa(b), this was a document almost exactly the same as our Book of Isaiah. Whereas the scroll that was almost intact, 1QIsa(a), used linguistic forms peculiar to the Qumran community's dialect. It was a sort of easy-reading version of Isaiah. But all translations necessarily involve a degree of interpretation on the part of the translator, so the "a" version helps us see the viewpoint of the Qumran group. 5. The relationship of the Pharisees to the Sadducees to the Essenes. A document found in 1954, later named The Halakhic Letter, was not published until 1994. Six fragmentary copies were found in cave 4. It speaks about "we", "you", and "they", seemingly referring to the Sadducees, Pharisees, and the Qumran Essenes. There are 20 specific differences in theology pointed out. I will mention two to illustrate: Liquids such as oil or wine had to be ritually pure before being offered in sacrifices. If you poured "pure" liquid into an unclean vessel, the liquid in a sense became contaminated and was impure or unclean. All three sects agreed on that. However, if you pour from a clean vessel into an unclean one, does the upper "clean" vessel thereby become unclean. The Essenes said it did, always showing themselves the strictest or most conservative sect. The Pharisees, whom Christians have always regarded as excessively strict, actually proved to be the most liberal theologically. A second example deals with ritual bathing. Contact with a dead body, nocturnal emissions, menstruation, etc. made one "unclean", and restoration of cleanliness required a miqveh or ritual bath. The Essenes felt this had to occur at sundown, the Sadducees gave a 4-hour grace period. So sectually explicit (not my term) differences appeared even in those times. 6. A Different Calendar? The standard Jewish calendar was lunisolar, that is it had 12 lunar cycle months months totalling 354 days. They corrected this with a leap year containing 383 or 384 days, but nevertheless their year was not divisible by 7. So holidays fell on different days of the week each year. In contrast, the solar calendar had 364 days, a number divisible by 7, but was 1.25 days short every year. How this deficit was made up is unclear, But in the books of Enoch and Jubilees, copies of both being found in the caves, the solar calendar is used. This solar calendar was also used at Qumran. So Holy Days would not occur on the same days at Qumran as they would at the Jerusalem temple. In fact, a document from the caves tells of a Rabbi coming from Jerusalem on Yom Kippur, a thing he would not have dared to do had it been on HIS Day of Atonement. In the Qumran calendar Yom Kippur always fell on a Friday, and in Jerusalem, thanks to calendar manipulation by the rabbis, it never fell on Friday. Indeed this difference in Calendars may explain why the Gospel of John has Jesus crucified on Thursday and not Friday, unlike the other gospel accounts. 7. Women? Pliny describes the Essenes as celibate. Indeed there is no reference to women in the Community Rule. There are women among the several bodies exhumed from the nearby cemetery, but these could be later burials by Bedouin tribes. Religious prohibitions, now that Israel controls this region, limit disinterments or autopsies. 8. The Copper Scroll One scroll is really different. It is not biblical, literary, or doctrinal. The copper scroll, 3Q15 sometimes called 3QTreasure, was found in 1952 when Jordan's Department of Antiquities launched a major survey of caves in cooperation with the Ecole Biblique and the American School of Oriental Research. Although what became Cave 3 contained conventional leather scrolls, in the back of the cave by themselves were two rolls of copper about 1 mm thick, the sheets being riveted together end to end to simulate a parchment scroll. It was evident from the outset that writing had been embossed or engraved into the sheets, because characters were legible enough from the impressions on the back side. They seem to involve some sort of treasure. But the oxidized copper was too brittle to unwind, and that task ultimately fell to the British scholar J. T. Milik at the Manchester College of Technology. He invented a special saw and proceeded to cut the wound-up copper sheets into strips that could be photographed. The images were poor even for that period. But the copper itself was 99% pure and 1% tin. It is the only major document not in Israel, being in the Archaeological Museum of Jordan in Amman. In 1988 Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, directed the taking of very high resolution photographs using both top and bottom lighting for each strip. Color prints and transparencies were made. Compared to the first set of photos these new ones showed loss of up to 1 cm at each saw line. This Hebrew is not in the form the community used for its own documents, prompting theories that priests from the Jerusalem temple might have concealed the Temple treasury from invading Roman armies and then composed and hidden this copper message as a key to its location. This theory holds that the finding of the copper scroll in a Qumran cave was not proof it came from the Qumran community. At any rate, this is a list of 64 locations of hidden gold and silver. There is no introduction; there is no numbering; it simply starts with the first site. The total weight is about 4,630 talents of precious metal. A talent at that time is thought to be equal to somewhere between 25 and 75 pounds. Thus the document is the clue to the whereabouts of 58 to 174 tons of gold and silver, causing some scholars to doubt that the treasure should be taken literally. Now, in order to give you a fair chance at finding some of this loot for yourself and to give an illustration, here is the first location: In the ruin that is in the Valley of Achor beneath the steps that enter to the east, forty cubits west: a chest of silver and its articles. Weight: 17 talents". Another curiosity is the appearance of a few Greek letters here and there among the Hebrew characters, following 7 of the locations. These are not known words or abbreviations but look like a roster of drunken fraternity houses: ΚεΝ, ΧΑΓ, ΗΝ, Θε, ΔΙ, ΤΡ, and ΣΚ. The sixty-fourth and final site is said to contain not treasure but "a duplicate of this document and an explanation and their measurements and a precise reckoning of everything one by one". Has anyone been looking for the 64 spots? You better believe it! But so far no luck. 9. What about the fragments? As we've seen, several large scrolls were found, occasionally almost intact. But hundreds of parchment pieces were found. Can we get anything out of these? Many of the smaller pieces come from Cave 4. Let's look at a few. One is a blessing for King Jonathan. Rarely is a real person referenced in the texts, but some think Jonathan is the Hasmonean king Alexander Janneus who ruled 103-76 BCE. His name appears as "Jonathan" on some coins. Josephus says that this king was hostile to the Pharisees, so the Qumran group may have sought his welfare in a prayer. Another proposal is that this king was Jonathan Maccabee who ruled 161 to 143 BCE. A second fragment adequate for evaluation is called the Florilegium, a word synonymous with anthology. This text takes verses from throughout the Bible, mostly those dealing with the end of days. A third is called Ordinances and is a commentary on certain biblical laws. CONCLUSION The resurrection of this trove of documents from the Dead Sea cliffs changed more than any other find the world of Judaiac and biblical scholarship. It shed new light on the Essenes and indeed on differences in the Pharisee and Sadducee beliefs as well. It gave conservative Christians reassurance that their Bible was indeed an accurate copy of the ancient writings while at the same time proved for more liberal Christians that even manuscripts essentially contemporaneous with Jesus differed in details from the copies used to construct the Authorized Version we call The King James Bible. Who would have thought we today would be hearing voices from so long ago speaking afresh on topics so dear? The Seaside scrolls are hardly dead. **** Notes: 1. Similarities between the Community and Christianity: Teacher of Righteousness, baptism or at least immersion for transgressions and not just ritual impurity, the idea of an eschatological war between forces of light and darkness... 2. Differences between the Community and Christianity: a) outreach vs isolation, b) emphasis on sole messiah, c) strictness of adherence to Jewish Law 3. Dead Sea Stone (Vision of Gabriel) found ink on stone about 2,000 A.D. 87 lines of faded Hebrew describing how the leader (prince of princes) of the "sons of the holy" will defeat their enemy. It dates to the late first century B.C.E.