Reviews
The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls
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The Dead Sea Scrolls—as esoteric and daunting a collection of ancient documents as we are ever likely to find—have become a fixture of popular culture. TV personality David Letterman, known for his nightly Top Ten lists, once featured the Top Ten Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls. (My favorite was number 4: “Without going into details, Episcopalians are in a lot of trouble.”)
Though well known, the Scrolls are also deeply misunderstood. A Scrolls scholar told me that on a recent trip to Israel he accompanied a tour group as its bus approached Qumran, the settlement along the Dead Sea near where the Scrolls were found; the tour guide announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, here is the birthplace of Christianity.” Afterward, the scholar asked the guide why he had made that announcement—the Scrolls have no direct connection to Christianity, the scholar pointed out. “I know,” the tour guide responded, “but it’s more dramatic this way.”
It is that clutter of mystery larded with misinformation that The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls seeks to dispel. It succeeds admirably. The authors, well-known Bible scholars, have produced a volume that might be confused with a coffee-table book, thanks to its heft and numerous illustrations, were it not for all the information it contains. The book is as multi-media as a printed work can be: Photos, lists, illustrations, maps, charts and sidebars on particular subjects intersperse the running text.
Davies, Brooke and Callaway begin, as all Scrolls histories do, with an account of the dramatic discovery of the first Scrolls. But they are aware that even at the very beginning of the Scrolls’ story, we are on ever-shifting ground. Sometime in 1947 (or was it 1946?) three young Bedouin were herding a flock of goats (or was it sheep?) near the Dead Sea. When one of the animals wandered into a small cave along the hillside, Muhammad ed-Dib (“the Wolf”)—or was it his cousin?—threw a stone inside to scare the animal back out. To his surprise, Muhammad heard something break; returning later with a companion, he discovered ten ancient jars. Inside one of the jars, wrapped in linen, were four leather scrolls bearing strange writing.
Some weeks later, the Bedouin arrived in Bethlehem and showed their finds (four scrolls) to an antiquities dealer nicknamed Kando. (Kando was also a cobbler, so he may have been interested in the scrolls simply for their leather.) Kando took the scrolls to the Syrian Metropolitan in Jerusalem, Mar Samuel, who purchased the scrolls for about $100 in today’s money. Not long after, three additional scrolls surfaced. These were shown to Eleazar Sukenik, of Hebrew University, who understood the scrolls’ antiquity and importance and immediately purchased all three of them.
Mar Samuel, in the meantime, sought help in deciphering the four scrolls in his possession. He took them to the American Schools of Oriental Research, but the director was not in, so the Metropolitan showed the scrolls to a young scholar named John Trever. To Trever’s amazement, the scrolls in front of him seemed remarkably similar to the Nash Papyrus, one of the oldest Biblical 059fragments then known. Trever copied a passage from a well-preserved section of one of the scrolls. That night, he and a colleague, William Brownlee, examined the transcription. Suspecting that it was a biblical passage, Trever and Brownlee soon identified text: It was from the oldest scroll of Isaiah ever discovered. The world learned the news on April 12, 1948.
As convoluted as the story of the Scrolls was at the start, their subsequent history is even more complex. The director of the Jordanian antiquities department, G. Lankester Harding, appointed Father Roland de Vaux, head of the Dominican École Biblique in East Jerusalem, to lead the search for more scrolls and to excavate the remains of the settlement at Qumran. Between 1949 and 1956, 11 caves were found to contain scrolls. The mother lode was cave 4, which contained the most documents, though most of them were badly decayed fragments.
In all, about 800 ancient manuscripts—found in 15,000 pieces—would eventually be identified. Of these, about 200 are biblical texts; 400 are “semi-biblical” (they claim, for example, to tell the story of a biblical figure or to have been written by a biblical figure). The remaining 200 Scroll manuscripts are sectarian, containing rules for conduct of a particular Jewish sect and jeremiads against the sect’s opponents. The identity of the Qumran sect is still a matter of debate, though most scholars believe it was the Essenes, an ascetic group that withdrew into the Judean desert to await an anticipated 061apocalyptic deliverance. The Scrolls date from about 250 B.C. to 68 A.D., the year Roman troops destroyed Qumran while quelling the First Jewish Revolt.
De Vaux gathered a team of eight scholars to decipher and publish the Scrolls. None of them was Jewish, despite the Scrolls’ obvious importance to the history of Judaism and the Hebrew Bible. Jordan, under whose auspices de Vaux was working, was officially at war with Israel, the newly formed Jewish state. The small editorial team, despite its unquestioned erudition, proved much too inadequate to their enormous task. The editors published only five volumes between 1955 and 1968, then another in 1977 and another in 1982. Then nothing for the rest of the 1980s. Editors began retiring or dying; some passed their scrolls to handpicked colleagues or favorite graduate students, as if the documents were a personal inheritance. Even worse, no one outside the small circle of editors could see the unpublished scrolls or even photographs of them. In this the editors were following an accepted scholarly practice, but with the long delay in publication they had stretched the practice far beyond reason.
In 1989 Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review (and now also of Archaeology Odyssey), began a campaign for open access to the Scrolls. He was joined by numerous scholars, such as Oxford don Geza Vermes, who called the Scrolls publication delay “the academic scandal of the 20th century.” The campaign led to all sorts of doings not usually associated with the scholarly world: publication of bootleg photos of the Scrolls, a lawsuit against Shanks by a scholar for copyright infringement, a computerized reconstruction of Scrolls texts from a previously secret concordance. But the effort succeeded: In 1993 the Israel Antiquities Authority, which has controlled the Scrolls since the 1967 Six-Day War left East Jerusalem in Israeli hands, published a microfiche edition of the Scrolls. Perhaps more important, Hebrew University professor Emanuel Tov was appointed chief editor of Dead Sea Scrolls. Tov greatly expanded the number of editors, and by 2002 the 39-volume Dead Sea Scroll publication series was officially complete (though one volume still remains to be published!).
Davies, Brooke and Callaway tell this story engagingly and accessibly, but they do much more. They place the Scrolls in their historical context, covering the turbulent years around the turn of the era, Jewish life in late Second Temple period times, the deciphering of the scrolls, and on and on. They devote entire chapters to scrolls found in individual caves, to the Qumran settlement and to the importance of the Scrolls to Judaism and Christianity. The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls is an excellent introduction to the history and significance of the Scrolls. About the only thing missing is David Letterman’s Top Ten Scrolls Secrets list.
Steven Feldman is managing editor of Biblical Archaeology Review.
The Dead Sea Scrolls—as esoteric and daunting a collection of ancient documents as we are ever likely to find—have become a fixture of popular culture. TV personality David Letterman, known for his nightly Top Ten lists, once featured the Top Ten Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls. (My favorite was number 4: “Without going into details, Episcopalians are in a lot of trouble.”) Though well known, the Scrolls are also deeply misunderstood. A Scrolls scholar told me that on a recent trip to Israel he accompanied a tour group as its bus approached Qumran, the settlement along the Dead […]
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