The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been news since their discovery in 1947. They were found by a Bedouin who happened to throw a stone into a small cave and heard the resulting crash as it broke a pottery jar. Through a long series of escapades in changing hands, including being advertised for sale in the classifieds of the Wall Street Journal, they have come to rest safely in the hands of Museums and Universities. Work continues to salvage, reassemble, translate, and interpret the Scrolls and their meaning. The actual location of the find is rather unique in its yield of ancient artifacts. The scrolls were found in the desert wilderness just to the northwest of the Dead Sea and just south of Jericho at a place called Quamran. It is one of 5 sites in the area that have yielded documents dating from the time of Jesus. However, it is the only site to have yielded Biblical manuscripts. These scrolls were found wrapped in linen and inserted into large pottery jars which were then covered with leather and subsequently hidden in the caves of the region. The people who copied and kept these manuscripts lived just a little closer to the Dead Sea in a commune. They lived sparsely, even ascetically. They were very strict. They wrote a scroll on the rules and strictures of their lifestyle; scholars refer to it as the “Manual of Discipline”. It is conjectured that John the Baptist may have been involved with the movement, but not necessarily with the Quamran group. Many people have tried to place the figure of Jesus into another of their works that has been dubbed the “War Between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness.” In it, reference is continually made to a “Teacher of Righteousness.” Because some of the ideals presented in the work, such as the dualism of good and evil, are also found in the words of Jesus, some have claimed that Jesus himself was one of these people and that the whole fabric of Christianity was another layer fabricated and placed on top of the real story. Needless to say, these posturings require significant guesswork and supposition. To make such claims, based on these discoveries, that Jesus was married or even – and I have seen it in print – a homosexual is to, as seriously as possible, belittle the intelligence of a literate person who has read the Bible.

The scrolls themselves reliably date from 200 B.C. to 70 A.D. The area of the Quamran community shows archeological evidence of being inhabited for two periods: 150-37 B.C. and 4 B.C. to 68 A.D. when the place was finally sacked and burned by Roman soldiers on their way to the siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. An interesting footnote is that a partial scroll of their writings appeared in the remains at Masada, the last outpost of Jewish rebels. It appears that some of the Essenes made their way their to take their last stand. The significance of the scrolls cannot be overstated. Previously, the earliest Old Testament text available to scholars was dated 895 A.D. The Isaiah Scroll, found complete and intact at the Quamran site, is datable to 100 B.C., thus pushing back the date of a reliable manuscript an entire millennium! Other books were also found, but the Isaiah scroll is by far the best example of the lot. The implication of the find is evidence by comparing these two earliest copies of Isaiah. Their differences can be summed up in the following table.

• 20:1 The proper name Tartan should be read as commander-in-chief
• 21:8 “A lion” can be better translated as “he who saw,” making the passage more clear: “And he who saw cried out…”
• 49:12 Sinim (a name for China) should read Yeb, a name for Upper Egypt.
• 53:11 The scroll here follows the reading of the Septuagint, showing that, although it is at variance with the Masoritic (standard) Jewish OT, it is nonetheless faithful to the text from which it was copied.
• There is no break in the scroll between chapters 39 & 40, destroying a modern view that the book of Isaiah is a collection of 3 smaller works with different authors.

Again and again it is said that the Essenes (if that’s who really lived at Quamran) had an impact on the thought and presentation of early church doctrine. I rather think that was the common ancestry of Judaism that made their rhetoric similar. Nothing referred to in the Essene writings that finds expression in the NT is uncommon to their mutual parent faith. Concepts such as the dualism of light and darkness, righteousness and perversity, “mysteries” (Romans 16:25), “lot” (Colossians 1:12,13), angels (1st Corinthians 11:10), and uprightness as a gift to God are common to all of these religions. For modern critics to assume that because the Quamran group appeared on the scene before Jesus that they must have had some great impact on his teaching is mere conjecture, given that only a few of His sayings are echoed in the DSS.

[ BACK ] [ UP ] [ NEXT ]