Have Your Remote Control Handy

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The Enigma of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Biblical Productions U.S.A.

P.O. Box 1256, Longmont CO 80502

60 min., $29.95 + $2.90 shipping

Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Zola Levitt Ministries

Box 12268, Dallas, TX 75225

30 min., $19 + $3 shipping

Enigmas, secrets—an aura of mystery still surrounds the Dead Sea Scrolls, as the titles of these videos attest. And the mere fact that videos are being produced for a mass-market on this once-obscure subject indicates that interest in the scrolls is as high now as when they were first discovered in the late 1940s and early 1950s near the site of Qumran, on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea.

Both videos under review are well done yet take different approaches to their subject. The Enigma of the Dead Sea Scrolls is concerned with the scholarship and the scholars of the scrolls. Credit no doubt goes to Eric Meyers of Duke University, who served as scientific adviser to the project. Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls has a more pronounced interest in the religious implications of the scrolls.

The Enigma of the Dead Sea Scrolls begins with a view inside an elevator as it descends to the basement of the Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem’s repository for thousands of unpublished Dead Sea Scroll fragments. This first shot reminds us how difficult it was to bring all the scrolls into the light of day: After their initial burial 2,000 years ago, the scrolls suffered a second burial—into the control of a woefully undermanned team of editors who saw the texts as their personal property, to be used for their own and their students’ academic advancement.

The Enigma of the Dead Sea Scrolls next shows quick snippets of interviews with BAR editor Hershel Shanks, former scrolls chief editor John Strugnell and scholars Philip Davies and David Noel Freedman discussing the controversy over access to the scrolls. Alas, this points up this otherwise fine video’s greatest drawback: It is a year and a half out of date. There is no mention of the three events in the fall of 1991 that broke open the scroll cartel: Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg’s computerized reconstruction of Dead Sea Scroll texts (published by BAS; see review of the recently published second volume), nor the Huntington Library’s announcement that it would make available to scholars microfiche copies of scroll photographs nor—the real backbreaker—BAS’ publication of A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a two-volume book of photos that put the scrolls into the hands of anyone who wanted them. It is of course impossible to keep continuously updating a video, but it would seem that the producers of The Enigma of the Dead Sea Scrolls could have added at least a postscript mentioning these important developments.

On the positive side, the video features many rare photos and fascinating old newsreel footage. We are shown clips of Eliezer Sukenik and his son Yigael Yadin as the video describes their sometimes heroic (in the case of Sukenik) and sometimes cloak-and-dagger (in the case of Yadin) efforts to obtain scrolls for Israel—Sukenik ventured into Bethlehem to obtain scrolls on the very day that rioting erupted in the wake of the U.N. vote to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, and Yadin used intermediaries with fake names in purchasing four scrolls for the State of Israel.^a Also featured are William F. Albright, the dean of American Biblical archaeologists, describing to a press conference the significance of the Manual of Discipline, one of the first scrolls to be found.

The video then shifts to the early days of scroll research under the leadership of Father Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique. We are shown pictures of the “Scrollery” at the Rockefeller Museum, in then Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem: Direct sunlight streams in directly on the fragile old documents, and open windows allow for changes in temperature and humidity to work further damage on the scroll fragments. The sheer size of the finds and the tattered nature of the remains proved overwhelming to the official editorial team. “It was a small group,” John Strugnell, one of the early members of the team and one-time chief editor, is shown as saying. “It would have been nice to have more people, but no one would come and so we were undermanned.” Strugnell does not mention that no Jewish scholars were allowed on the team in those days, in deference to the anti-Israel politics of the Jordanian government. Nor did the team publish photos of the scrolls so all scholars could help decipher them.

In addition to the question of who would have access to the scrolls, The Enigma of the Dead Sea Scrolls raises the issue of just who wrote the Scrolls and what kind of religious outlook they may have had. Magen Broshi, of Israel’s Shrine of the Book, where many 064of the longer scrolls are housed, describes the people of Qumran as “The first monastic group in the western world.” In this he agrees with de Vaux, who excavated Qumran in the 1950s, and the early consensus view that the authors of the scrolls were pacifist Essenes waiting for the millennium in the Judean desert wilderness. In contrast, Jonas Greenfield, of the Hebrew University, warns of the danger of imposing a monkish structure on Qumran. He notes that de Vaux and the first students of Qumran came from monastic backgrounds and therefore somewhat naturally saw the people of Qumran as monks studying and copying ancient manuscripts all day. Greenfield suggests Qumran may well have been a geniza, a storehouse for religiously important Jewish texts that had become frayed or otherwise damaged but which could not have been simply discarded.

Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The video notes that the answer to that question revolves very much around a document known as MMT, believed to be a letter from the Teacher of Righteousness outlining the Qumran sect’s beliefs. The most widely held theory, especially soon after the discovery of the scrolls, was that the documents had been the work of the Essenes. MMT is now the subject of a lawsuit between Israeli scholar Elisha Qimron (who is editing it and preparing a lengthy commentary on it with John Strugnell) and the Biblical Archaeology Society, the publishers of BAR, concerning copyright over the document. Philip Davies, of the University of Sheffield, in England, points out in the video that the laws outlined in MMT are identical with known strictures of the Sadducees. In a near-comical moment, John Strugnell defends the Essene hypothesis: “I still believe the Qumranites were very close to the Essenes, but they call themselves Sadducees.”

MMT also provides the most dramatic moment in The Enigma of the Dead Sea Scrolls. After describing the strong overlap between known Sadducee laws and the contents of MMT, Philip Davies remarks that he’s not even supposed to be discussing MMT because the document has not yet been officially published. The interviewer asks, “So why are you doing it?” Davies replies with contained anger, “Because these texts belong to me as a scholar, and they belong to anyone who is interested in the history of Judaism, and nobody has any right to withhold them.”

The Enigma of the Dead Sea Scrolls has such poor sound on occasion (especially during the interviews with Magen Broshi) that the viewer can’t make out what’s being said. Those criticisms aside, the video is an enlightening look into the scholarly debate over the scrolls.

The excellently produced Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls is hosted by television minister Zola Levitt, described on the video box as a “Jewish believer.” Levitt apparently accepts that Jesus was the messiah of Jewish expectation. To restrict the concept of “believer” solely to someone who believes in Jesus is profoundly offensive to Jews and to people of other faiths.

The video’s production values are first rate. The photography is often striking and the audio and the picture quality is always excellent. Well-produced maps enhance the program. An especially nice touch—one that should be emulated by other video producers—is the use of clearly legible type in a corner of the screen to show the definition of an uncommon word (wadi, for example) mentioned in the narration.

Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls makes little secret of its theological interest in the scrolls. Early on, it declares that the scrolls “documented, it appears, the actual fulfillment of prophecy in the person of the messiah.” This indicates that the makers of the video agree with that very small band of scholars who see the scrolls as the product of the beginning of the Christian era (most scholars, now supported by carbon-14 dating, assign the bulk of the scrolls to one or two centuries before the Christian era).

Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls briefly recounts the history of the scrolls and does contain material on their release last year; a shot of BAS’s Facsimile Edition is included. But the video quickly cuts to the modern day, with excavator James Tabor, of the University of North Carolina, among others, using ground-scanning radar to help locate other possible caves within the Dead Sea cliffs that might contain scrolls.

Given its theological predilections, it is not surprising that the people featured in Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls are those who argue that the scrolls provide direct evidence about the earliest events of Christian times, and not merely important background to those times. Michael Baigent, co-author of The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception,^b the thesis of which is that a Vatican conspiracy deliberately withheld many of the scrolls from wide circulation, states on the video that Christianity developed out of the same messianic Judaism that produced the scrolls. Few would argue with that, but then Baigent adds, “So you can say the scrolls are really Christian documents.” Baigent has it backwards: The scrolls are thoroughly Jewish documents, and what is emerging from Dead Sea Scroll studies is just how Jewish early Christian writings are. The video does not challenge Baigent’s view.

Also interviewed is Robert Eisenman, of California State University at Long Beach, who sees the scrolls as the literature of what he calls the messianic movement in Palestine. Eisenman views the latter scrolls as describing events in the Jerusalem church of James the Just, known in the New Testament as the brother of Jesus.

Michael Wise, of the University of Chicago, next describes two recently published scroll fragments that will be familiar to BAR readers. The first is the “Pierced Messiah” text,^c which, at least according to one reading, includes the phrase, “And they will put to death the Prince of the Congregation”; the second text, according to Wise and Tabor, asserts that the heavens and earth will praise the messiah and that the messiah will raise the dead.^d Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls mentions—only briefly and then only at the end—that not all scholars agree on these translations. That’s putting it mildly; Wise and Eisenman’s reading of the Pierced Messiah text has been fiercely disputed by other scholars, who point out that the text can just as easily be understood to say that the messiah figure will put to death the enemy of his followers.

The video concludes with James Tabor speaking near the site of Qumran about the religious significance of the scrolls as he sees it. “Jews will have to learn that messianic Judaism is an acceptable form of Jewish faith, because here it is here,” Tabor says while gesturing towards Qumran. Tabor adds, “Jews will come to know a wider view of Judaism than just the rabbinic view. Christians in the West will learn that the real roots of their faith are out here in this desert, with these people who were real serious about their God. Christians will see that this is actually the birthplace of Christianity.”

Both of these videos are well worth viewing. If you want a more in-depth discussion of the scholarly debate in scroll studies (and don’t mind a healthy dose of talking heads), opt for The Enigma of the Dead Sea Scrolls. If you want a well-produced, up-to-the-minute presentation (and don’t mind a subtle theological slant), opt for Secrets of the Scrolls.

A videotape of the NOVA television program on the Scrolls, which first aired in October 1991 and which is also titled Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls, is available for $149 plus $7.45 for shipping from Films for the Humanities, P. O. Box 2053, Princeton, NJ 08543. Mention item 3000.

Enigmas, secrets—an aura of mystery still surrounds the Dead Sea Scrolls, as the titles of these videos attest. And the mere fact that videos are being produced for a mass-market on this once-obscure subject indicates that interest in the scrolls is as high now as when they were first discovered in the late 1940s and early 1950s near the site of Qumran, on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea.