Dead Sea Scrolls

a number of leather, papyrus, and copper scrolls dating from c100 B.C. to A.D. 135, containing partial texts of some of the books of the Old Testament and some non-Biblical scrolls, in Hebrew and Aramaic, and including apocryphal writings, commentaries, hymns, and psalms: found in caves near the NW coast of the Dead Sea beginning in 1947.

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Caches of ancient, mostly Hebrew, manuscripts found at several sites on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea (1947–56).

The writings date from between the 3rd century BC and the 2nd century AD and total 800–900 manuscripts in 15,000 fragments. Many scholars believe that those deposited in 11 caves near the ruins of Qumrān belonged to a sectarian community whom most scholars believe were Essenes, though other scholars suggest Sadducees or Zealots. The community rejected the rest of the Jewish people and saw the world as sharply divided between good and evil. They cultivated a communal life of ritual purity, called the "Union," led by a messianic "Teacher of Righteousness." The Dead Sea Scrolls as a whole represent a wider spectrum of Jewish belief and may have been the contents of libraries from Jerusalem hidden during the war of AD 66–73. They also cast new light on the emergence of Christianity and the relationship of early Christian and Jewish religious traditions. See also Damascus Document.

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Introduction

 ancient, mostly Hebrew, manuscripts (of leather, papyrus, and copper) first found in 1947 on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is among the more important finds in the history of modern archaeology. Study of the scrolls has enabled scholars to push back the date of a stabilized Hebrew Bible (biblical literature) to no later than AD 70, to help reconstruct the history of Palestine from the 4th century BC to AD 135, and to cast new light on the emergence of Christianity and of rabbinic Judaism and on the relationship between early Christian and Jewish religious traditions.

Discovery and description

      The Dead Sea Scrolls come from various sites and date from the 3rd century BC to the 2nd century AD. The term usually refers more specifically to manuscripts found in 11 caves near the ruins of Qumrān, which most scholars think was the home of the community that owned the scrolls. The relevant period of occupation of this site runs from c. 100 BC to c. AD 68, and the scrolls themselves nearly all date from the 3rd to the 1st century BC. The 15,000 fragments (most of which are tiny) represent the remains of 800 to 900 original manuscripts. They are conventionally labeled by cave number and the first letter (or letters) of the Hebrew title—e.g., 1QM = Cave 1, Qumrān, Milḥamah (the Hebrew word for “war”); or 4QTest = Cave 4, Qumrān, Testimonia (i.e., a collection of proof-texts). Each manuscript has also been given an individual number.

      The documents were recovered in the Judaean wilderness from five principal sites: Khirbat Qumrān, Wadi Al-Murabbaʿāt, Naḥal Ḥever (Wadi Khabrah) and Naḥal Ẓeʾelim (Wadi Seiyal), Wadi Daliyeh, and Masada. The first manuscripts, accidentally discovered in 1947 by a shepherd boy in a cave at Khirbat Qumrān on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, were almost immediately labeled Dead Sea Scrolls. Later (especially from the 1950s to the mid-1960s) finds in neighbouring areas were similarly designated.

      A great number and variety of manuscripts were discovered at Qumrān. The best-preserved documents at that site are those found in Cave 1, including an Isaiah Scroll; the Rule of the Community (Manual of Discipline) (also called the Manual of Discipline); The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, or War Scroll; a scroll of thanksgiving hymns; and a commentary on Habakkuk (Habakkuk, The Book of). Cave 2 contained only fragments, but Cave 3 yielded the Copper Scroll, a list of Temple treasures and their hiding places. Cave 4 sheltered the main deposit of what some believe to have been an Essene library, which contained approximately 400 manuscripts, generally in poor condition. Most of the manuscripts are sectarian writings, and about 100 of them are biblical texts, covering the entire Hebrew Bible except Esther (Esther, Book of). Several well-preserved documents were recovered from Cave 11, including a large scroll with canonical, apocryphal, and unknown psalms. There was also a copy of Leviticus (dated to the 3rd century BC) as well as the very important Temple Scroll. Its 66 preserved columns give details for the construction of the ideal Temple of Jerusalem.

      Wadi Al-Murabbaʿāt, a second site 11 miles (18 km) south of Qumrān, contained documents left by fugitives from the armies of Bar Kokhba, the leader of the Second Jewish Revolt (Jewish Revolt, Second) against Rome in AD 132–135. Archaeologists recovered two letters of Bar Kokhba, legal documents in Hebrew, Aramaic (Aramaic language), and Greek, and fragmentary biblical works of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. They also found a remarkably well-preserved scroll of the 12 Minor Prophets (Twelve, The) that is virtually identical with the traditional biblical text.

      A third site was discovered by shepherds in 1952 south of ʿEn Gedi. The discoveries at this site include a lost Greek translation (1st century AD) of the Minor Prophets, a letter of Bar Kokhba, biblical fragments, and legal documents of the Bar Kokhba era in Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean. Excavations at Naḥal Ẓeʾelim, in the “Cave of Scrolls,” uncovered clear evidence of the Bar Kokhba era and, in the “Cave of Letters,” 15 papyri of Bar Kokhba with a psalms fragment. Later diggings produced additional letters of Bar Kokhba and a large body of Nabataean, Aramaic, and Greek documents. At Naḥal Ḥever, in the “Cave of Horrors” (containing skeletal remains), there were bits of a Greek recension of the Minor Prophets.

      A fourth site, 8.5 miles (13.6 km) north of ancient Jericho, yielded about 40 badly damaged documents deposited in a cave by Samarians, who were massacred there by soldiers of Alexander the Great in 331 BC. These legal documents are all in Aramaic except for seals in Paleo-Hebrew. As the earliest (375–335 BC) extensive group of papyri ever found in Palestine, they are of immense value to historians.

      A fifth site, at Masada, produced a Hebrew manuscript of Ecclesiasticus (c. 75 BC) and fragments of Psalms, Leviticus, and Genesis. Found also was a Scroll of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, possibly of Essene authorship. A similar manuscript was found in Cave 4 at Qumrān.

      The discoveries at the various sites include a wide variety of texts, but the greatest interest remains with the sectarian writings, which can be classified as follows: (1) rules, or manuals, like the Rule of the Community, describing the dualistic doctrine, constitution, and regulations of the “Union,” as the community owning the scrolls at Qumrān called itself; and the War Scroll, which tells how the “children of light” finally conquer the “children of darkness”; (2) interpretations of biblical texts, such as commentaries on Isaiah (Isaiah, Book of), Habakkuk, Nahum, or Psalms; or groupings of texts by topic, such as the Florilegium or the Melchizedek Fragments—all of these typically relate scriptural passages to the sect and its times; (3) liturgical texts, including the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, which focus on angelic worship in the heavenly Temple (anticipating later Jewish mystical traditions), and the Thanksgiving Hymns, which express a powerful anthropology of human depravity redeemed through divine grace; (4) collections of laws, frequently dealing with cultic purity, such as the Halakhic Letter, the Damascus Document, and the Temple Scroll; and (5) ethical tracts (e.g., several sapient works, and the Song of the Sage).

 Although heralded as one of the great events in modern archaeology, the discovery of the scrolls is not without controversy. All the manuscripts were placed originally under the control of a small committee of scholars appointed by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities (a responsibility assumed after 1967 by what is now the Israel Antiquities Authority), who, some claim, monopolized access to the scrolls. Most of the longer, more complete scrolls were published soon after their discovery. The majority of the scrolls, however, consists of tiny, brittle fragments, which were published at a pace considered by many to be excessively slow. Even more unsettling for some was the fact that access to the unpublished documents was severely limited to the editorial committee. In September 1991 researchers at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, announced that they had created a computer program that used a previously published concordance to the scrolls to reconstruct one of the unpublished texts. Later that month officials at the Huntington Library (Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens) in San Marino, California, announced that they would allow researchers unrestricted access to the library's complete set of photographs of the scrolls. With their monopoly broken, the official scholars of the Israel Antiquities Authority agreed to lift their long-standing restrictions on the use of the scrolls.

The scrolls in context

      The group at Qumrān has been identified with many Jewish sects of the time. Even though some scholars believe the community to have been a branch of the Sadducees (Sadducee) or Zealots (Zealot), most believe that they were Essenes. The group is believed to have fled, or been driven out, to the Judaean wilderness as a result of a dispute with the priestly leaders in Jerusalem over the sacred calendar and matters of legal interpretation. At Qumrān this group not only preserved their beliefs but developed a worldview that rejected the rest of the Jewish people, espoused a highly dualistic view of the world (i.e., a world sharply divided between good and evil, light and darkness), and looked for an imminent divine judgment of the wicked. They also cultivated a communal life of extreme ritual purity, necessitated by their rejection of the Temple cult.

      The history of the Qumrān community can be glimpsed, though darkly, through the scrolls. The “Union” was apparently founded by a messianic (messiah) figure called the “Teacher of Righteousness.” The group may have split off from a wider movement that lived in its own settlements and urban quarters throughout Palestine. Whatever its origins may have been, the community offers a fascinating example of a Jewish messianic movement, and thus a sociological parallel to the early Christians. Other parallels between the two groups, such as the belief that Scripture foretold the history of their own times, have sometimes been thought to indicate a direct connection, but such parallels can just as easily be explained by the Jewish background common to both groups.

      The Dead Sea Scrolls are important not only because they offer insight into the community at Qumrān but because they provide a window to the wider spectrum of ancient Jewish belief and practice. A quarter of the texts are biblical manuscripts—to which can be added copies of works such as the books of Enoch (Enoch, First Book of), Jubilees (Jubilees, Book of), and Tobit, previously known and not thought to be sectarian. Thus, the scrolls shed light on more than merely the sect that possessed them. Indeed, it has been argued that the Qumrān scrolls actually represent the contents of libraries in Jerusalem, hurriedly hidden shortly before the Roman siege of the city during the First Jewish Revolt (Jewish Revolt, First) (AD 66–73), and thus reflect quite varied Jewish origins. This is not an improbable explanation for the concealment of the scrolls, but the diversity of these scrolls is not as wide as this account would suggest. Clearly, many scrolls originate from outside the sect, and this realization makes the importance of the scrolls to ancient Judaism even greater than if they were entirely sectarian.

      Indeed, because the scrolls reflect the beliefs and practices of Jewish groups during a highly volatile period of Judaean history, this unique collection of sectarian and nonsectarian writings is the most important archive for understanding late Second Temple Judaism. By contrast, the New Testament was written by and for both Diaspora Jews and non-Jews; and rabbinic literature was composed at a later period and under quite different circumstances.

      Above all else, the contents of the scrolls show the remarkable flexibility and variety of Jewish thought and practice and demolish any notion of a uniform “Judaism” at that time. They show that the notion of cultic holiness and sacrifice could be contemplated without the Temple, that different liturgical calendars (implying different times for festivals and different priestly rituals at the Temple) existed at the same time, that the distinction between Israel and the Gentiles could be displaced by a notion of two predestined groups of saved and damned individuals, that the worship of the celestial Temple could be witnessed and described (foreshadowing a tradition of Jewish mysticism), and that good works could replace sacrifice. They also show a variety of beliefs that may have been shared by some or all of the Judaisms of the period, including the imminent culmination of history, the advent of a messianic figure, and the absolute necessity of complete obedience to the Law of Moses (however interpreted).

      The Dead Sea Scrolls also testify to a period of theological creativity, of social fissure, of intense expectation and passion within the wider perspective of Judaism and Christianity. The scrolls' occasional contradictions betray tensions between the goals of personal holiness and national redemption; between human and heavenly redeemers; between faith and knowledge as the means of salvation; between free will and predestination; and between an anthropology of human holiness and an anthropology of human depravity. They also exhibit typical features of a sectarian mentality: traces of a persecution complex and a corporate identity fortified by official opposition. In this ferment can be seen, with hindsight, the matrix of the two great systems of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, which, though each took centuries to form, drew in different ways on the heritage that the Dead Sea Scrolls dramatically document.

Philip R. Davies Ed.

Additional Reading

Good introductions to the history and importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls are Roland de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1973); Hershel Shanks (ed.), Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls (1992); Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective, 3rd rev. ed. (1994); Hershel Shanks, The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1998); and Philip R. Davies, George J. Brooke, and Phillip R. Callaway, The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2002).

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