The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been one of the greatest events in biblical archaeology. No other similar event has helped us to better understand  the Bible against the backdrop of time and history.  Although the subject has been discussed at length by scholars and common folk, the truth is that few people fully understand what are commonly called the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS).  Many visitors to Israel  have had the opportunity to see these scrolls in the Jerusalem Museum’s Shrine of the Book. It is truly awe inspiring  to see fragments of the collection of parchments and replicas of the full scrolls  when considering the archeological treasure exhibited there.   But what are the DSS?  What new truths are revealed in them? Do they contradict or support our basic understanding of the Bible?  Is there an “earth shattering” discovery that hasn’t been made public for fear of creating a doctrinal debacle?  Are Jesus,  John the Baptist, or other disciples  mentioned in these writings? My quest for a better understanding of the meaning of the DSS was revived after my last visit to Jerusalem.  I began to reassess  the value of the scrolls for my understanding of the Bible. I realized that as a theologian I needed to know more on the meaning of the DSS.   In my search for knowledge I found that much has been written on the subject, but  one of the best sources of information is the book edited by Hershel Shanks  UNDERSTANDING THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS.  His credentials as founder and editor of THE BIBLICAL ARCHAELOGICAL REVIEW,  and BIBLICAL REVIEW give him sufficient credibility to edit such a book.  This article is a review of some of the issues in Dr. Shanks’ book with the purpose of shedding some light on the many  enigmas surrounding the DSS. Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by Hershel Shanks, 1993, Random House: New York.

The Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient writings that were found by accident  one winter morning in 1947 when three Bedouin shepherds led their flock on the steep cliffs just south of an old ruin on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, on the Wadi Qumran.   One of them, Jum’a Muhammed, saw two openings on the top of a cliff.  When he threw a stone inside the small, dark opening he heard the sound of breaking pottery. On the following day they returned, and upon entering the cave they made one of history’s greatest discoveries.  The first chapter of UNDERSTANDING THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS  by Harry Thomas Frank bears the title “Discovering the Scrolls”  and reads like a mystery novel. It’s hard to imagine that such a finding should have encountered so many obstacles and skeptics until the real value of these scrolls was understood.  It was during Israel’s war of independence in 1947-48 that the scrolls found their way to trained eyes of John Trever and William Brownlee, of the American School in Jerusalem. Under the dim light of kerosene lamps  they looked at what appeared to be a strange and old form of Hebrew and Aramaic.  What they saw before them convinced them  that this text was older than the Nash Papyrus, the oldest manuscript of a passage of the Bible in Hebrew dating back to the second century AD.  Because of many past attempts at fabrications of ancient texts, there was skepticism and even doubt whether these ancients segments of the book of Isaiah and Habbakuk were genuine or just a well done forgery.  It was only after consulting with Johns Hopkins University’s  W. F. Albright, the most eminent scholar on ancient forms of writings, that the authenticity and value of the ancients scrolls was finally realized.  Albright wrote his opinion to Trevor saying:
“My heartiest congratulations on the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times!  There is no doubt on my mind that the script is more archaic than that of the Nash Papyrus….  I should prefer a date around 100 BC!….  What an absolute incredible find!  And there can happily not be the slightest doubt in the world about the genuineness of the manuscript”
How the first set of scrolls finally reached the Antiquities Department of the Israel Museum read like a thriller!  But finally, it was under the disguise of a Middle East businessman that the State of Israel was able to purchase the main scrolls that are now in their custody in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem.

The Scrolls
The term scrolls hardly defines the material found in the Qumran caves, since most of the documents that remain today are either parchments, pieces of former scrolls or inscriptions on  pieces of pottery.  The first cave discovered by the Bedouin shepherd held seven rather well preserved scrolls and other fragmented material.  Subsequent archeological searches between 1952 to 1956 led to the discovery of ten more caves, consequently numbered 1 to 11. The findings in the other 10 caves revealed hundreds of fragments but only five rather complete scrolls.  The rest are thousands of fragments, some as small as a fingernails, of what were once complete written records.   By far, the largest amount on material—albeit in terrible condition—was found in Qumran cave 4.
The documents found in the Qumran caves can be divided into two groups:  the biblical and  the non-biblical texts.  Of all the writings that emerged from the 11 Qumran caves, only one fourth are biblical texts. Nevertheless, there is reference to every book of the Hebrew Bible, with the exception of the book of Esther—the only book of the Bible that does not mention the name of God. Understandably, it was easier for scholars to analyze the biblical documents, since the Bible served as a mold or template for the fragments found. “But many of the non-biblical texts were entirely unknown to us before they were found in the Qumran caves and it is often difficult to arrange the fragments of these texts in some meaningful order ”  The non-biblical texts include hymns and psalms, biblical commentaries, wisdom literature, legal texts, and some Bible-like text, often ascribed to a well known character from the Bible like Enoch or Noah.  There is also extensive documentation pertaining to the Qumran community itself: its government, leaders, worship, life-style, et cetera.   The discovery of the DSS pushed back the date of the most ancient biblical documents by several centuries, which as I said before, adds credibility to the accuracy and reliability of the Bible. With few exceptions, and none of radical importance since they are spelling, syntax or scribal errors, there is no difference between the biblical texts found in the Qumran caves and the Bible as it has been handed down to us.
The scrolls  were hidden by a community of Jews that lived in the nearby town of Qumran, a settlement destroyed by the Romans in just prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 69-70 AD.  The people that lived in this settlement were of a Jewish sect called Essenes.  Although smaller in number than other Jewish sects of the time, such as the Pharisees or the Saducees,  the Essenes are described  in detail by the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman historian Pliny the Elder (23-70 AD) and Philo of Alexandria (20 BC - 50 AD). The Essenes are discussed  in  chapter 4 by James C. VanderKam and chapter 6 of Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Suffice to say that it seems that the Qumran people that hid the scrolls in the caves were part of the community of the Essenes, who according to Nelson’s Bible  Dictionary (1986) were “ a religious community that existed in Palestine from about the middle of the second century B. C. until the Jewish war with Rome (A. D. 66-70).” The Essenes were noted for their strict discipline and their isolation from others who did not observe their way of life. They were governed by a tight organization whose lives were dedicated to strict observance of the law.
The first cave where the scrolls were found was identified in by Captain Philppe Lippens in 1948, a Belgian officer of the United Nations  Armistice Observer Corps, with the help of the Jordan’s Arab Legion.  The investigation was then continued by G. Lancaster Harding, The English Director of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, and the French Catholic archaeologist and biblical scholar, Father Roland de Vaux.  They retrieved the seven main scrolls and hundreds of leather fragments.  Three of the rolls, preserved inside large size clay jars, (see replica in our cover picture) were found to be an incomplete section of the Book of Isaiah, a scroll of Hymns, and one describing The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness.  These were ultimately purchased  by  the Hebrew University’ Professor of Jewish Archaeology, E. L. Susenik.  Soon thereafter  professor Susenik published the three manuscripts entrusted to him.  The other four manuscripts found in the first cave had been purchased by the Arab metropolitan archbishop Mara Athanasius, head of Syrian Orthodox Monastery of Saint Mark in what was then East Jerusalem.   He entrusted the analysis of these four scrolls to Millar Borrowsn W. H. Brownlee and J. C. Trever, all of them of the American School for Oriental Research in Jerusalem.  They  worked on the complete Isaiah manuscript, the Commentary on Habakkuk and the Manual of Discipline, later known as the Community Rule. The editing of their work was then entrusted to Father Roland de Vaux and to two young biblical scholars at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jordanian Jerusalem.  Together with Dominique Barthelemy and Jozef Tadeusz Milik, they made public and published the main seven scrolls in a rather short period of time.

Lifting the veil of secrecy and mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
While the seven scrolls found in cave 1 were quickly edited and published, the findings in other caves contained many more manuscripts than those found in the first cave.   In the following years a total of 11 caves were found within a short distance from the enclave that was once a settlement in Qumran by the Dead Sea (see map with location of the settlement and the caves).  These other caves revealed as many as eight hundred additional findings, but regrettably, most of the documents were mere fragments of what once had been manuscripts.  A total of 15,000 pieces were collected, some in large sections and others in small fragments.  With the exception of parts of biblical texts that were easier to identify, over 80% of the remaining fragments had no point of reference for identification.  The richest caved proved to be Cave 4.  The task of analyzing the fragments from Cave 4  was given to a group of young scholars by the Jordanian authorities, since then both East Jerusalem and Qumran were under Jordanian control.  The group assembled to work on these documents had no Jews in it and worked under the direction of the Catholic Father de Vaux. The original group was made up of seven scholars, but soon after the German member of the group, Clauss Hunzinger resigned because he felt it was too much controlled by the Catholic church.  The remaining six members were mostly Catholic clerics who were left with the tantalizing task of putting these pieces together.  It wasn’t as if it was a giant puzzle, but rather many giant puzzles each formed with hundreds of fragments.
In order to organize the work this first group of scholars arranged the fragments into documents the best way they could.  They ended up with over five hundred documents that needed to be pieced together.  In the words of Shanks, “They clearly took on more work than they could complete in a  lifetime ” .   The only member of the original team to complete their work was John M. Allegro of England who published his entire assignment.  Although Allegro’s publication of his assignment contained so many errors that he himself made another version to correct the work he had previously written.  Four other scholars were given the job of creating a concordance of the non-biblical texts.  This concordance would  later serve as tool of immense value.  For the next thirty years the team published less than 20% of their assignment.  It is this fact that has led many to believe that there is something hidden that, if revealed, would have an earth-shattering effect on Christian and Jewish beliefs.
 What followed was an act of academic selfishness and greed that has tarnished the work done on the DSS and has brought ill repute to the original team members.   The problem arose because the original team of scholars agreed among themselves, although it is not documented, that a scholar who is assigned to publish a given amount of texts has absolute control over those documents. Nobody else is allowed to see, print, study or publish the text.  Since many of the original members died before their work was published, before their death they “bequeathed” their publication rights to whomever they wanted.  This secrecy concerning the texts that remain to be edited has given room to all type of fantasies on their content.   It was this mystery and control that caused scholars to demand that what remains unpublished be made available at some near date.  Because John Strangle, then editor of the DSS, would not reveal any new information “That marked the beginning of a six years campaign by Herschel Shanks and the Biblical Archaeology Review to free the Dead Sea scrolls.”
In spite of the efforts of the team, much of the secrecy has now been revealed, partly as result of the coming of the computer age.  Professor Ben Zion Wacholder of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati was exasperated by the lack of published material coming from the editorial team.  With the help of one of his students, Martin Abegg, who was a computer expert they made a plan to crack the “code”.  Through an incredible chain of events Wacholder acquired the negatives of pictures taken of some of the unpublished scroll text and recreated the whole document assisted by the computer that developed a program based on the concordance made from the non-biblical documents. Now the contents of  the remaining documents was made accessible to all.  The New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as other major newspapers in the world reported on their front pages the computer generated transcriptions and hailed the work of Wacholder and Abegg as restoring to all mankind something that should have never been withheld in secrecy by a group of scholars.

The Importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for Our Understanding of the Bible.
What makes the DSS so valuable is that they shed light into a period of time of which we have no written historical evidence.  It is a well known archaeological and historical fact that the closer any given document is to the time to which it refers, the more reliable it becomes. Until the discovery of the DSS, the oldest piece of biblical writing was the Nash Papyrus, a  fragment from the second century AD.  Now there were over eight hundred documents found in the Qumran caves dating from 250 BC to 68 AD!   The uniqueness of the DSS is that there was no written Jewish text in either Hebrew or Aramaic, with the exception of the Nash Papyrus mentioned, prior to 895 AD.  This manuscript is the whole Book of Isaiah.  Against this, we now have the complete Isaiah scroll found in Qumran that is one thousand years older!
Dr. Geza Vermes, the renown director of the Forum for Qumran Research at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish studies and author of THE COMPLETE DEAD SEA SCROLLS IN ENGLISH says that
“The Qumran finds have also substantially altered our views concerning the text and cannon of the Bible.....In fact, some of the fragments echo what later became the Masoretic text; others resemble the Hebrew underlying the Greek Septuagint; yet others recall  the Samaritan Torah or Pentateuch,  the only part of the Bible which the Jews of Samaria accepted as Scripture......It should be noted, however, that none of these variations affects the spiritual message itself.  In short, while largely echoing the contents of the biblical books, Qumran has opened an entirely new era in the textual history of the Hebrew Scriptures.”
Although some scholars argue that the scrolls were written or copied by the Essenes themselves, others believe that they were part of a major Jewish library that was removed from Jerusalem and hidden in caves in the event of the destruction of the city by the Roman legions. In either case, Hershel Shanks points to the fact  that the year 70 AD when the Romans destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem, “has functioned as a kind of impenetrable wall to students of rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity:  It has been extremely difficult to get behind it .”  Before the destruction of the Temple there were innumerable sects and religious parties jockeying for influence and power in Jerusalem.  The better known groups were the Pharisees, whose teachings and writings influenced what has become modern day Judaism, and the Sadducees, who usually represented the aristocracy and the Temple priests.  Smaller groups were the Essenes, the Hasidim, the Zealots, the Herodians, the Sicarii, etc.    With the destruction of the Temple, only two forms of Judaism survived: normative Judaism that derived from rabbinical teachings, and Messianic Judaism, that was later transformed into Christianity.   The earliest collective writing of rabbinical Judaism is the Mishnah, that became part of the Talmud, and was compiled about the second century AD.   As for  Messianic Judaism, with the possible exception of the Gospel of Mark, the Pauline Epistles in the New Testament are the only documents written before the destruction of the Temple.  But, the nature of these letters does not reveal much about the social milieu of Messianic Judaism in Jerusalem and Judea.   Hershel Shanks says that
“This is why it has been difficult for scholars to understand how these two major movements—rabbinic Judaism and Christianity—emerged out of the extraordinary varieties of pre-70 Judaism.  How did rabbinical Judaism and Christianity develop from the soil, the same soil, of pre-70 Judaism?  Suddenly, in our time, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide scholars with a vast library of eight hundred volumes that sheds a direct light – undistorted by later editors with their own ideologies and biases—on pre-70 Judaism.  The promise—by no means yet fully realized—is a clear understanding of how these two major religious movements developed in their formative stages.”
The time period covered by the DSS—250 BC to 68 AD—was a time of instability, power struggles and revolt, which ultimately ended with the destruction of the Temple by the Romans.  The destruction of the Temple changed Judaism forever, since Judaism was based on a ritualistic sacrificial system centered on the Temple worship.  In a previous article I wrote for THE HEBREW CHRISTIAN   with the title “When Messianic Judaism and Rabbinical Judaism went on their separate ways” I pointed out that the destruction of the Temple forced Israel to take a different religious approach, it either followed a cultic form of Judaism based on Oral Law and the teachings of the rabbis, or it followed Messianic Judaism, which was based on the fact that Yeshua was the promised Messiah and that in him the former Temple rituals are fulfilled.   In essence the DSS scrolls are the only direct documents from the time when Messianic Judaism and rabbinical Judaism went on their separate ways. While the scrolls have shed light on a time previously undocumented, the question is,  where is the “mystery” and why the secrecy surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls?

The Dead Sea Scroll and Their Relationship to the New Testament
There has been much speculation regarding the relationship between the DSS and early Christianity, or more precisely, the relationship between the Essenes and the early Christians.  Professor James C. VanderKam makes the most comprehensive analysis of the subject in the 14th Chapter of the book Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls.  This article appeared first as an independent work in Bible Review, December, 1991 and February 1992. ”There are indeed many similarities between the members of the community of Qumran and the early Christians.  There is also similar terminology to express religious concepts, terminology notoriously absent from the Old Testament but present both in the writings of the early followers of Jesus and the writings of Essenes”.
The French scholar Andre Dupont-Sommer argued as early as 1950 that the “Teacher of Righteousness” that is mentioned in the DSS as the founder and first leader of the Qumran group, parallels that of Jesus of Nazareth .  Others followed arguing for an even closer relationship between the community of believers that settled in Qumran and the early Messianic Jewish community.  A very popular view was proposed by Edmund Wilson, who wrote a famous article in the New Yorker later printed as a book with the tittle The Scrolls from the Dead Sea.  Wilson goes as far as saying that, “This monastery, this structure of stone that endures, between the bitter waters and precipitous cliffs, with its ovens and inkwells, its mill and its cesspool, its constellation of sacred fonts and the unadorned graves of its dead, is perhaps, more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity”
A more scholarly approach was undertaken by Harvard professor Krister Stendahl, who collected thirteen studies on the subject from eleven different scholars to pinpoint the similarities between the Qumran sect and the early Christians.  This major work was edited under the tittle The Scrolls and the New Testament.  VanderKam quotes Stendahl’s introduction to his essay where he arrives to the following conclusion: “It is true to say that the Scrolls add to the background of Christianity, but they add so much that we arrive at a point where the significance of similarities definitely rescues Christianity from false claims of originality in the popular sense and leads us back to a new grasp of its true foundation in the person and events of its Messiah”  , a conclusion with which VanderKam agrees.  In other words, the DSS help us to focus more on the person of the Messiah than on the religious body that his followers developed in time.  Another Harvard scholar, Frank M. Cross,  produced one of the most widely known and influential books on the subject entitled The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies.  Cross’s analysis reaches the conclusion that there are three areas in which we find similarities between the New Testament and the Qumran community that produced and preserved the scrolls.    The first common theme is in the theological language, especially in John’s writings.  Second, there are similarities in eschatological themes, that is, on events to come at the end-time, and finally, in their liturgy and community institutions.  Cross finds similar forms in baptism, communal meals, leadership roles, et cetera.  One may safely conclude that the discovery of the DSS does  not change the basic principles of the Christian faith, nevertheless, it sheds light on the period, the theological language and the environment in which the followers of Yeshua the Messiah expanded their faith.  Millar Burrows of Yale emphasized this by saying “There is no danger, however, that our understanding of the New Testament will be so revolutionized by the Dead Sea Scrolls as to require a revision of any basic article of the Christian faith.  All the scholars who have worked on the texts will agree that this has not happened and will not happen” .
In his analysis of the similarities between the DSS and the New Testament, professor VanderKam points out to two facts that must be considered. One of them is that, different from Christianity, there is no Hebrew or Aramaic literature from that period that speaks of the Jewish faith.  Rabbinical writings did not begin to take shape until many centuries after the Hebrew Bible was written. With the discovery of the DSS we now have something to compare the early Christian writings with Hebrew and Aramaic literature.  Therefore, the question arises:  are the similarities between Christian writings and the Essene literature from the DSS due to the fact that they both reflect the same period, or is there direct influence of one upon the other?  Are both sets of documents, namely the DSS and the New Testament writings, similar because that was the language and terminology of the day or because they were written by people who had contact with each other?   Something that must be understood is that because the New Testament and the Qumran scrolls share terminology, places and cultural milieu, it does not means that they must have borrowed from each other.  The fact is that we have no other original literature in Hebrew or Aramaic from the time of the New Testament writings.

How has the unveiling of the DSS influenced our understanding of the New Testament?  According to professor VanderKam, one of the major areas of biblical research that has benefited tremendously from the DSS has been in the understanding of the language and textual formulas.  As most Bible students know, the earliest New Testament writings were in Greek, but neither Yeshua nor his disciples spoke Greek.  Most likely, they spoke Aramaic or a similar Galilean dialect (Remember that they could tell that Peter had been with Jesus because of his Galilean accent?).  It is inconceivable that Jesus would have spoken Aramaic or another Hebraic form and that there would have been a simultaneous and literal translation into Greek!  The question then arises, what did Yeshua actually say? What were the original words he used?  This is where the DSS shed light.  Now we have contemporary verbal expressions in the DSS.  Now we can understand more of the language of Yeshua, the Gospels and even the Epistles, because we can see what they mean because we now know how these words and phrases were used.  Just to point to few examples, VanderKam shows a few words whose Hebrew origin we can now understand because of the way in which they are used in the DSS.  Our New Testament uses the Greek word toón pleiónon that is usually translated as “many” or “majority” which eventually came to represent all of Jesus’ followers (2 Cor. 2: 5-6). But we now know from one of the scrolls, the  “Manual of Discipline” what was the name used for a gathering of many.  We are told  what were the rules for group meetings, who could speak, when, and so forth.  The Hebrew word used in the scroll for congregation is hrbym which when vocalized with vowels is harabbim.  The text reads “And in an Assembly of the Congregation no man shall speak without the consent of the congregation, nor indeed of the Guardian of the Congregation” (Manual of Discipline 6:11-12).  This was a Hebrew word for congregation that Jesus and his Hebrew speaking followers used, a word that we did not know until the surfacing of the DSS.  Another example of the DSS shedding light into the original Hebrew words used in the New Testament is the word that we have translated as overseer or bishop.  The Greek word is episkepos, but the Hebrew word used for similar function is “guardian” hmbqr.  Here again, the DSS text illuminates words for which we had no knowledge of their original usage.
According to VanderKam, we can even venture further by asking whether there were actual Qumran texts that found their way into the New Testament literature.  There is strong evidence that in addition to most Epistles, the Gospel of Mark may have been written before the destruction of the Temple.  If this is so, then it is possible that parts of the New Testament may have drawn from Essene sources.  There are strong similarities in several passages of the New Testament with the literature of Qumran.  VanderKam points out to 2 Corinthians 2: 14-15 “Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness? And what accord has Christ with Belial? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever?”  Compare this with Qumran literature that makes reference to the contrast between light and darkness and we see the similarity.   Furthermore, this passage of Paul is the only reference we have in the New Testament of “Belial” while the Qumran texts, mainly the Hymns Scroll, make several references to this name.  We cannot say that Paul borrowed this idea from the Essene literature of the DSS but he certainly had knowledge of their terminology and phraseology.
This leads to the next question.  Were the early believers members of the Essene community?  The theories once held that James the brother of Jesus or the apostle Paul must have been part of the Essene community have all but been disqualified.  There is nevertheless a strong candidate for associating with the Qumran community, that is John the Baptist.  There are more than simple coincidences that would link John the Baptist to the Qumran Essenes. To mention just a few,  the teachings of John and those of the Essenes are strikingly similar.   The tone of John’s preaching echoes that of the Essenes: repentance, baptism, and a sense of urgency.  In addition, the Wilderness of Judea is mentioned in the Synoptic Gospels as the place where John preached and baptized.  It is precisely the same region where the Essene settlement of Qumran was found.  It is also curious that both the message of the Qumran community and that of John the Baptist is supported by the passage of Isaiah 40:3  “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God’.”  The Essene community believed that they were fulfilling the words spoken by the prophet Isaiah when they retreated to the wilderness to “prepare the way of the Lord.”  But as VanderKam states “…if John was a member of the Qumran community, he must have later separated from it to pursue his independent, solitary ministry”.
There are many other similarities, such as the Book of Acts telling that the early believers sold their properties and brought the money from the sale to the apostles, a tradition that was also part of the Essene community.  Although with some differences, the ritual of baptism was practiced by both Christians and Essenes.  The Lord’s Supper has many things in common with the meal that was partaken by all members of the Qumran community.  Indeed there are many similarities between what we find in the Qumran texts and the New Testament literature, but they do not diminish the validity of one or the other, they rather reinforce their credibility by pointing out that Christianity did not develop in a vacuum neither was it a totally strange message.  The validity of the New Testament is reaffirmed by what we have seen in the DSS.  I am a firm believer that both, archaeology and history validate the biblical literature and affirm it as the solid foundation of our faith.
 

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