(Part two in a three part series is the Dead Sea Scrolls.)

If You read the article on the “Rosetta Stone in History” you know that this [present] article is the second in the series “Rosetta Stone – Dead Sea Scrolls  – ancient Sumer”.   Here we will discover what was hidden and discovered only recently, in 1947, by two shepherd boys playing in the desert near the Dead Sea…  more than 60,000 ancient scrolls and clay tablets hidden in a desert cave.  There is an enormous amount of information about the Dead Sea Scrolls and the various cave the scrolls were discovered in so i will distill this information into a digestible volume but I encourage you to do your own research to learn more.

In my personal research of the Dead Sea Scrolls I have discovered stories telling of as many as 150,000 scrolls and tablets to as few a 972 scrolls and no tablets at all.  The greatest consensus of the total discovery appears to be around 60,000 scrolls and several dozen tablets, found in 13 caves located less then 1 mile from the Dead Sea on the northwestern shore near an old village called Qumran.  

Caves Near Qumran where the Scrolls and Tablets were discovered

*  There is a ongoing controversy about the ownership of the scrolls between Jordan and Israel (why does that not surprise me?)…   The truth is neither of these nations own the scrolls, and they are such that no one should claim ownership, but of course there are monumental egos at work here.  The following is a edited quote from CBC News.   I include this only because it illustrates the nature of the argument of ownership rights:   (02102010 CBC News editorial )

“CBC has neglected some important facts about these documents.  It says Jordanian and Palestinians have “claimed” ownership of the scrolls but fails to provide information about the basis of that claim.   CBC does not mention that the scrolls were discovered in Wadi Qumran, located in the portion of Israel/Palestine that the UN in 1947 had designated to become part of the future Palestinian state and which became known as the West Bank.   CBC also fails to mention that the scrolls were excavated from Qumran and surrounding areas between 1947 and 1956 by the Palestine Archaeological Museum with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and the École Biblique Française.   Prior to 1967, the scrolls were housed in the Palestine Archaeological Museum – known today as the Rockefeller Museum – in East Jerusalem.   After the 1967 War,  following its military occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel seized the scrolls and took over the museum.   Soon afterwards, Israel moved the scrolls to West Jerusalem, into the Israel Museum, an institution of the Israel Antiquities Authority.   CBC fails to acknowledge the work the roles of the principal excavator and research institutions at work on the Scrolls through 1967:  the Palestine Archaeological Museum, the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, and the École Biblique Française.   Nor does CBC mention that the scrolls were displayed in the Palestine Archaeological Museum until 1967.   CBC also fails to mention that the Scrolls were taken during the 1967 war when Israel began its military occupation of the West Bank, and that their removal to West Jerusalem violates international legal norms concerning the theft and transfer of cultural property.   Simply put, Israel stole them.“

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Most of the scrolls were wrapped in linen and carefully placed in rather large urns and earthen jars.   The tablets are mostly clay and were placed in neat rows.   The actual dates of discovery range from winter of 1947 to the late fall 1956.

Two Bedouin shepherd boys were looking for a lost goat from their herd and were searching around the caves in the Judean desert northwest of the Dead Sea, one of them threw a stone through an opening of a cave and heard a sound of it hitting something hollow.   The oldest boy went into the cave to investigate and found several potted jars.   Most of them were empty, one contained contained three scrolls, two of them wrapped in cloth.   The members of the tribe later returned to the cave and found four more scrolls.

Not realizing their true significance, the Bedouin eventually took the jars and the scrolls to market in Bethlehem.   After several unsuccessful attempts, they found a “dealer in antiquities”, Jalil “Kando” Iskandar Shalim, who was willing to purchase them.  But Kando didn’t keep the scrolls for long, he resold four of the seven scrolls to Athanasius Samuel, the archimandrite of a Syrian Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem for about $110 total.  Samuel in turn tried to resell the four scrolls again; to make them sound more valuable to potential buyers, he claimed to have found them in his monastery, in the Jewish quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem but no buyer materialized.  Kando managed to sell them to Professor Eliezer Lipa Sukenik of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who used university money to buy them, and two of the jars in which they had been stored.

Athanasius Samuel, the archimandrite of a Syrian Orthodox monastery still had four scrolls on his hands — In 1948 he smuggled them to the U.S. and tried to sell them.   However, by then three of the four scrolls had been photographed so the scholars could use the photos and had no need for the originals.   At least not for the asking price.   By 1954, Samuel got really desperate and at this point he published an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal, which read:

This advertisement caught the eye of Yigael Yadin, who was actually the son of Professor Sukenik.  Yadin was able to raise $250,000 to buy the four scrolls, which he sent to his father in Israel — thus, the seven original scrolls were finally reunited in Jerusalem.

The scrolls were entrusted to the “Shrine of the Book Foundation” and copies of the scrolls have been on display in the Shrine of the Book at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, since 1965 (the originals are kept in a secured vault in a Jerusalem building constructed specifically to house them; access requires at least three keys, a magnetic card and a secret code).

Home of the Scrolls.

From 1949 to 1956, additional fragments of some 972 different scrolls were discovered in ten nearby caves, both by Bedouins and by a joint archaeological expedition of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française and the Rockefeller Museum, directed by Professor Father Roland de Vaux. The richest yield came from Cave 4, just opposite the site of Qumran, and consisted of some 15,000 fragments. The last cave, Cave 11, was discovered in 1956, and the scrolls found there were in a reasonable state of preservation.

Several Scrolls were discovered laying opened, possibly the work of thieves who saw no value in these things

Apart from the first seven scrolls, which are entrusted to the Israel Museum, the majority of the fragments found by archaeologists and Bedouin are property of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). Others are in the possession of institutions outside of Israel, such as the Jordan Archaeological Museum in Amman and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, or in private hands.

The scrolls discovered in the vicinity of Qumran have all been ascribed to the Hellenistic-Roman Period, from the third century BCE to the first century AD

Most of the scrolls are written on parchment; a smaller number are written on papyrus.  Hebrew is the most common language, though a small number of scrolls are written in Aramaic and a few in Greek. Most of the scrolls are written in the Jewish script, also called the “Assyrian” or “square” script, which was widely used from the sixth century BCE on; however, about 14 biblical scrolls are written in the ancient Hebrew script, and many texts use a cryptographic script, combining mirror writing and a mixture of Jewish, ancient Hebrew and Greek scripts.

What made Dead Sea Scrolls particularly exciting to scholars from various disciplines (including some linguists) is that they contain the oldest extant copy of Biblical texts, such as the Book of Isaiah.

In fact, the Dead Sea Scrolls are 1,000 years older than the previously-known oldest Hebrew Bible copy, the so-called Leningrad Codex.

All in all, approximately two hundred copies of olden biblical books, most of them very fragmentary, were found at Qumran, encompassing almost all the books of the Hebrew Bible, except the books of Nehemiah and Esther.

Not all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are biblical in content.   Some, like the Community Rule Scroll, describe various aspects of life in the Qumranic society.  Other manuscripts contain halakhic writing (“Halakha” is Jewish law); eschatological literature (i.e. texts dealing with death, the end of the world, final judgment and so on); exegetical literature (translations and interpretations of Biblical texts), such as the Commentary on Habakkuk Scroll; non-canonical or para-Biblical texts, such as Tobit, Jubilees, 1 Enoch, the Genesis Apocryphon and the Temple Scroll; poetic texts; liturgical texts; and astronomical texts, calendars and horoscopes.

It is thought The Dead Sea Scrolls were written by an ascetic Jewish sect that fled Jerusalem for the desert more then 2,000 years ago and settled at Qumran, on the banks of the Dead Sea, however there is no proof at all to support this claim.

While we do not know for sure who these people were, they seem to fit with the great 1st-century historian Flavius Josephus’s description of the “Essenes”, one of the three major groups of Jews (the other two major Jewish groups were the Sadduccee’s and the Pharisees,.

The Essenes were a separatist group that seceded from mainstream Judaism when the Maccabees took over the office of the high priest in the middle of the 2nd century BC. Not all scholars agree with this interpretation and debates on this topic are still ongoing. The scrolls have shed new light on the development of the Hebrew Bible and the origins of Christianity.

Today, five of the original seven scrolls, considered by many to be the most significant archaeological find of the 20th century, are available on the Internet People can search high-resolution images of the scrolls for specific passages, zoom in and out and translate verses into English and other languages.   Photography is a work in progress although many wonderful photographs have already been taken and cataloged.  Specific Photographic work has begun with a former NASA scientist using an advanced camera developed by JPL, which allows researchers to discern words and other details not visible to the naked eye.

As to the remaining Dead Sea Scrolls?  The Antiquities Authority project, aimed chiefly at scholars, is tentatively set to be complete by 2016.  It is hoped the Scrolls will also be available on the Internet for public viewing.

The last but certainly one of the most important questions is, “Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?”

This question has been like a stick of dynamite in the world of biblical and academic scholars…  a question for which there is no answer [yet], no evidence of the authors, no indication at all who wrote the scrolls or who placed the scrolls in the caves.  It is speculated that the scrolls were hidden in these caves when the Roman soldiers came through this area during the “First Jewish – Roman War (66 -73 AD).  The village of Qumran and its inhabitants were all but destroyed and obviously the people never returned to recover the scrolls and texts.  

A map of the area where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered (On the northwest corner of the Dead Sea)

The texts are of great religious and historical significance, as they include the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical and extra-biblical documents, and preserve evidence of great diversity in late Second Temple Judaism.   They are written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, mostly on parchment, but with some written on papyrus.   These manuscripts generally date between 150 BCE and 70 CE.   The scrolls are traditionally identified with the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes.   No one knows for certain who created the scrolls.