Dead Sea Scrolls ancient leather and papyrus scrolls first discovered in 1947 in caves on the NW shore of the Dead Sea. Most of the documents were written or copied between the 1st cent. BC and the first half of the 1st cent. AD

Scrolls of the Qumran Caves

Three types of documents have been found in the caves near Qumran: copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, e.g., Isaiah, of which two almost complete scrolls have been found; copies of books now collected in the Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, e.g., Tobit, 1 Enoch, and Jubilees; and documents composed by an ascetic community, e.g., a book of community rules called The Manual of Discipline, an allegorical account of the community called The War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness, a group of devotional poems called The Thanksgiving Psalms, a commentary on the Book of Habakkuk, and an extensive work, known as the Temple Scroll, containing ritual law.

Documents from the third group have been identified by some scholars with the Essenes , a Jewish religious sect living an ascetic communal agricultural life in the region between the 2d cent. BC and 2d cent. AD It has also been hypothesized that the Qumran scrolls are the secreted library of a community, perhaps Essene, that lived at Qumran , and thus survived the destruction of the settlement in c.AD 68. Startling parallels in expression and thought between the Qumran materials and the New Testament have led to speculation as to their influence on early Christianity. The Temple Scroll, for instance, revealed a list of rules of conduct resembling standard Christian ethics. Some scholars have tried to establish that Jesus and John the Baptist were influenced by, or members of, a Qumran Essene community, but such interpretations are widely disputed. More recent work by other archaeologists and biblical scholars has questioned the association of the scrolls with the Qumran ruins and the Essenes.

Other Texts

Other texts, not related to the Qumran scrolls, have been found in the area around the Dead Sea. At Masada other scrolls were found, including manuscripts of Sirach and the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. In the caves at Wadi Murabbaat, c.11 mi (18 km) S of Qumran, many documents were found concerning Bar Kokba 's army, as well as more biblical manuscripts. Other documents from the Bar Kokba era were discovered in caves S of En Gedi. These findings, written in Greek, Aramaic, and Nabataean, included biblical fragments, psalms, various legal documents, and a lost Greek translation of the minor prophets. The oldest documents, found at a site 8 mi (13 km) N of Jericho , were left by Samarians massacred by Alexander the Great in 331 BC

Control and Publication of the Scrolls

Most of the originals of the scrolls are at the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem; the rest are at the Israel Museum's Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. The intact scrolls and other materials were published in the decades following their discovery, but many fragments remained unpublished and under the control of a small group of scholars, originally appointed by Jordanian officials, and their intellectual heirs. As a result of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, control of all the scrolls passed to the Israeli Antiquities Authority. International dissatisfaction with the limited access allowed to, and the slow rate of publication of, the scrolls that remained unpublished led the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., to allow (1991) scholars access to its set of master negatives of the scrolls despite the objections of the Israeli Antiquities Authority. Subsequently the authority removed its restrictions on the use of the unpublished scrolls, and expedited the publication of them.

Bibliography

See texts published in the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (39 vol., 1955–2002); T. H. Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures (1976); M. A. Knibb, The Qumran Community (1987); G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (3d ed. 1987). L. H. Schiffman, The Eschatological Community of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1989); J. A. Fitzmyer, The Dead Sea Scrolls (rev. ed. 1990); H. Shanks et al., The Dead Sea Scrolls after 40 Years (1991); H. Shanks, ed., Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls (1992); L. H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls (1994); N. A. Silberman, The Hidden Scrolls (1994); N. Golb, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls (1995); G. Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (1997); H. Shanks, The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1998).

Dead Sea scrolls Documents first discovered accidentally in 1947 on the west side of the Dead Sea, in what was the country of Jordan and which has been the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where a Jewish monastic community was established near Qumran in the 1st cents. BCE and CE. The members were probably Essenes or an Essene sect separate from the main body (though it has also been suggested that they were Zealots), and there was a strict discipline of celibacy and asceticism, with frequent rites of purification by water. The leader of the community was known as the Teacher of Righteousness who wrote to the priests at Jerusalem outlining points of disagreement. During the Jewish War of 66–70 CE the sect perished, but not before its library was concealed in neighbouring caves. (A minority of scholars doubt this connection between the community and the scrolls and believe they were stored in the caves by a group from Jerusalem.) The Damascus Document, which is related to the Qumran scrolls, was discovered in Cairo in 1896, but only since 1949 have the caves been systematically searched. Large quantities of the scrolls have been taken to safety and assembled by a team of experts. Many have been published and photostat copies of much material still to be officially published has found its way abroad, for example to the Huntington library in California, USA.

The monastic site has been excavated and features in it correspond to what had already been noticed of the teaching of the sect in the scrolls. The Hebrew scrolls (mostly of leather, some of papyrus, parchment, or wood, one of copper) are 1,000 years older than the oldest of any previously extant MSS and are of great value not only for comparison with the Hebrew Masoretic text, but also because they illuminate some of the history of the Jews and Jewish thought of the first centuries. There are numerous linguistic and doctrinal parallels with the NT (e.g. the notion of the temple as a community of people), especially with the gospel of John (e.g. the contrast between light and darkness). It has also been suggested by a few scholars that John the Baptist the Baptist spent his early years with the Qumran community (on the basis partly of Luke 1: 80), but the differences between Qumran beliefs and those of the primitive Church (e.g. Qumran has a belief in two Messiahs) are equally significant.

Controversy is likely to continue in the world of scholarship as to the precise connection between Qumran and Christianity; but it is certain that NT ideas once regarded as Hellenistic can now be shown to have a Jewish origin.

A system of identifying scrolls in bibliographies has been established by numbering them in the first place according to the order of caves plundered. Thus, 1Q indicates manuscripts found in the first cave, and then this code is followed by the first Hebrew letter of each particular text: 1QS is the Rule of the Community. Pesher means commentary, so 1QpHab refers to the community's commentary on the OT book Habakkuk and 4QpPs37 to a commentary on Psalm 37. The copper scroll (which some believe to be unrelated to Qumran) is given the siglum 3Q15. The leader's letter to Jerusalem which will for a long time be a prominent subject of discussion, is denoted 4QMMT. One surprising discovery, made in the sixth cave to be opened up, was of a MS which contained the same text as that of a medieval MS found in Cairo in 1896, and published in 1910, written in Damascus and called a Zadokite work; it is accorded the symbol CD and describes the laws of the community (Damascus Document). For the most part the scrolls consist of texts of the Bible and of interpretations of OT books, but non-canonical writings (the book of Jubilees and much of Enoch among them) are also included, together with miscellaneous Messianic texts, prophetic pseudepigrapha, calendars, testaments, legal documents, hymns, and magical texts. The largest scroll, the Temple Scroll, rewrites in a revised form the laws of the Pentateuch.

DEAD SEA SCROLLS

Discovery

In 1947 a Bedouin youth discovered some manuscripts in a cave at Qumran in the Dead Sea area of British-occupied Palestine. The developing tension in Palestine, the creation of the new Jewish state of Israel, and the resulting Arab-Israeli War all diverted attention from the quiet announcement in April 1948 by Millar Burrows of Yale University that the earliest known manuscript of the Book of Isaiah had been found in the Syrian monastery of Saint Mark in Jerusalem. (The Arab-Israeli War that followed the declaration of Israel's independence caused scholars interested in the manuscript fragments to disguise their source.)

Edmund Wilson

While academics in religious circles grew excited about the potential light the Dead Sea Scrolls would shed on Jewish culture and religion at the time of Jesus, the general public paid little heed until May 1955, when Edmund Wilson published a lengthy article in the New Yorker about the manuscripts and their implications. Later that year Wilson published The Dead

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Sea Scrolls, an expanded version of his article, and interest increased.

Clues of Historical Jesus

Early the following year a new excitement swept religious circles when John Allegro, one of the scholars working with the Dead Sea Scrolls, made a series of broadcasts in northern Great Britain in which he noted that one of the scrolls contained the assertion by the community at Qumran that their leader, called the Teacher of Righteousness, would be crucified, a seeming parallel to the crucifixion of Jesus. Allegro and others raised the question of the relation between the group at Qumran and the early Christians.

Public Interest

The issues of the Dead Sea Scrolls moved from the staid world of the academic and religious press into the popular press. Time, Life, Newsweek, and even Readers Digest informed their readers of the controversy between Allegro and others who were willing to see the Gospels in a radical new light and the Christian scholars working on the manuscripts themselves in Jordan and Israel.

Exclusive Control

Questions were already being raised by concerned intellectuals such as Wilson about the exclusive control these scholars had over the fragments called the Dead Sea Scrolls. The refusal of those scholars to allow others to examine the fragments remained a source of controversy until the 1990s, when photocopies of the manuscripts themselves were finally released for general scholarly use.

Hopes and Fears

The Dead Sea Scrolls raised scholarly interest in biblical history to a fever pitch. The inabilty of scholars and intellectuals to examine the scrolls led to widespread speculation about their content. The lack of knowledge led many to theorize that the scrolls would radically revise biblical and Christian history and reverse what many considered theological mistakes.

Sources:

John Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of Christianity (New York: Criterion Books, 1957);

Michael Baignet and Richard Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (New York: Summit Books, 1991);

Millar Burrows, The Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Viking, 1955);

"The Scrolls From The Dead Sea," New Yorker (14 May 1955): 45-133;

Edmund Wilson, The Dead Sea Scrolls, 1947-1969 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

Dead Sea Scrolls. The term denotes scrolls and fragments discovered at seven sites on the NW and W. shores of the Dead Sea, mainly between 1947 and 1960; it is commonly used only of those writings from caves near Qumran. They are referred to by cave number, site, and abbreviated title: 1QH = cave 1, Qumran, Hodayot.

From the Qumran caves there are remains of over 750 documents. Some may come from the 3rd cent. BC; most date from c.130 BC to AD 50. They probably once belonged to the library of a Jewish community based on a building at Qumran; many scholars identify this community with the Essenes.

Almost all the Books of the canonical OT are represented among the scrolls, which are important for reconstructing the history of the OT text. The non-biblical MSS include several apocryphal and pseudepigraphal books already known (e.g. Enoch, Jubilees) and many previously unknown. Some MSS seem to relate specifically to the Qumran community, e.g. the Manual of Discipline and various liturgical texts. Others may have been composed elsewhere and copied and edited at Qumran. The scrolls provide evidence for Jewish life and thought at the time when Christianity was born.

Dead Sea Scrolls. Collection of manuscripts found in caves near the Dead Sea. The scrolls, discovered between 1947 and 1956, date mainly between c.150 BCE and 68 CE. They seem to have belonged to a succession of communities based at Qumran, the last of which was destroyed by the Romans in the first Jewish revolt. They include manuscripts which seem to relate to a community or communities based in Qumran: the Manual of Discipline, the Damascus Document, the Thanksgiving Psalms, and the War Scroll.

The identification of those who produced the sectarian documents has been much disputed. Scholarly consensus favours a group closely related to the Essenes. However, it is at least equally likely that Qumran, because of its remoteness, was a haven of refuge for conservative groups in more than one period, who disapproved of (or were persecuted by) those who were running the Temple in Jerusalem.

Dead Sea Scrolls A collection of Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts, the first of which were found in 1947 by shepherds in a cave near the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. They belonged to the library of the Jewish (perhaps Essene) community at nearby Qumran, and were probably hidden shortly before the Roman destruction of 68 AD. The scrolls include fragments of nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible.

Dead Sea Scrolls Ancient manuscripts discovered from 1947 in caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea. Written in Hebrew or Aramaic, they date from between the 1st century bc and the 1st century ad. They include versions of much of the Old Testament and other types of religious literature. Some are a thousand years older than any other biblical manuscript.

http://rutgers.edu/iho/dss.html