The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea scrolls and how they are related to the Bible, and their connection with Biblical studies, and they are famous. While the Dead Sea scrolls are a collection of scrolls that were discovered beginning in the year 1948, that was the initial discovery but they continued to discover scrolls into the early 1960s, so over 15 years, a number of ancient scrolls were discovered, and they are called the Dead Sea Scrolls, because they were discovered in caves above the shores of the Dead sea, archeologists, have discovered some ruins and this community that lived their in a rather large sophisticated group of people known as the Qumran, many people think that this was a monastic community they were a group of men who lived by the shores of the Dead sea, and devoted their lives to following the law of Moses and what this meant primarily for them was keeping a life of ritual cleanliness according to the Jewish law and it seems that they rejected the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem, these were a 1st century society form the 1st century B.C. to the 1st century A.D. they were also an apocalyptic community they expected the end of the world to come soon, they were also very learned they produced many copies of scrolls, and there are a number of ways we know this, but among the things that were discovered there were ink wells and their very, very rare in archeological sites to find them in a site at all, also because of the number of scrolls they had, about 900 different documents which were discovered in these caves, and that’s an extremely large library, and also their scrolls were in Hebrew, Aramaic, and some even in Greek, so they seemed to be very educated people but we don’t know much about them. Most historians think that there was a threat to the survival of the community because war broke out between the Jews and the Romans around 66 A.D. the Jewish Zealots, the religious extremists who wanted to have their freedom, and all of the Jews wanted freedom but theses Zealots wanted freedom at any cost, including at the price of starting a war against Rome which was destined to be a disaster, once this war broke out it possible that the members of the Qumran community hid their library in the caves in order to protect them because books were extremely valuable and would be taken as plunder, and the Romans might have come through and set the community on fire lest they could save their library, so they hid them in the caves, or some people think that the caves were library annexes, that they were used for storing large numbers of scrolls. But for whatever reason they were in the caves and the members of the community intended to return at some point and rebuild the community, retrieve the scrolls, ect. But it seems that all of them died, because no one know about the existence of the scrolls, no one know that they were their, until they were discovered in 1948. According to the story there was a Bedouin goat herder who was looking for a stray goat and he thought one of the goats went into one of the caves, so he goes to see if the goat went into the cave, and their dark and people generally don’t want to go into them cause of the hidden dangers in them, so rather than go in after the goat he took a rock and threw it into the cave and he heard the sound of pottery breaking so he returned latter with a light and found large clay jars and inside the jars that were about 2 feet high, he found ancient manuscripts, now in those days their were quite a few antiquities that were around, and when people found them they would try to get them and sell them, to dealers in 1948 the nation of Israel was just beginning so their was a lot of political upheaval and no one was exactly in charge but some of the Bedouin came and took these scrolls and they were sold by antiquity dealers, later the Israeli government tried to recover and retrieve them and others were discovered other archeologist went and explored all the caves in the area and they found scrolls in 11 different caves, and the collection we think is about 900 different documents, but that number varies because they haven’t finished putting all the pieces together, because although some scrolls had some pieces that were somewhat large, many of the jars which held the scrolls simply had fragments at the bottom, so lifting the lid off one of these jars you would find scroll fragments of different sizes and in a heap one giant puzzle but no box and pieces are missing, and this is what scholars have been since 1948 to try and take these pieces put them together and figure out what book they are. So far they have been very successful in determining which books were there, but they haven’t been able to put all the pieces together. All of these manuscripts have been numbered and they are numbered with a ‘Q’ you might see this if you are reading a Bible reference book, or serious commentary since Bible manuscripts and codex’s are numbered, so you might see something like 9Q13, and that means that this is the 13th scroll that was discovered in cave number 9, Qumran for the ‘Q’ so they will tell you exactly which document contained this writing. Since the discovery of these ancient scrolls people who work with ancient manuscripts who are experts at this, which we call textual critics have been working to reconstruct these old manuscripts, and its been 60 years since the first discovery and still they haven’t finished, now some were taking their time cause they were the only people who had access, but now the work has been opened up and more people are working on these scrolls, but its painstaking and very slow, but we have learned a lot about them.
And what makes them important; well their important cause prior to the discovery of the Dead sea scrolls the oldest Hebrew copies of the Bible that we had only went back about 1,000 years, to the year 1000 A.D. compare this to the New Testament were we have many copies of the New Testament that are well over 1,000 years some that date to 200 A.D. even 100 A.D. so we have much older books of the New Testament than we do the Old Testament until the discovery of the Dead sea Scrolls now the Oldest prior to the discovery of the Scrolls dated from the year 1000, from the Middle ages obtained by a Jewish collector at St. Petersburg Russia, and they have a very large collection. Then when they found the Dead Sea scrolls they were able to compare copies of the Bible because the Dead Sea scrolls were copies that dated from the first century the time of Christ and even before the time of Christ, as early as 250 B.C. so they could take that writing and compare it to the copies of the Bible that we have from the Middle ages and see how well it matches, and it matched up very well. Many books were exactly the same, but there were some differences and some of the differences indicate that the Septuagint is more reliable in certain places than the Hebrew Bible, which takes people by great surprise, because they assume the Hebrew Bible is more accurate but that’s not the case and the Dead Sea scrolls confirm that. Now what kind of scrolls do they contain? Mostly Biblical books the most copies being the book of Psalms, which shows that these people were very focused on worship and also the book of Deuteronomy, which shows they were interested in following the Law of Moses, but they also had commentaries, and those are just books that explain a book of the Bible telling the meaning. A Jewish commentary at the time gives us insight into what Jewish people thought about their book, in the 1st century because the Christian Church came out of this setting the Church is a product of 1st century Judaism, so the more we can understand about 1st century Judaism the more we understand about early Christianity, the church just didn’t spring forth out of no where it came out of Judaism so the more we can understand early Judaism the more we understand early Christians, it helpful that way. Also we see some commonalties with ideas in the Gospel and that of the Dead Sea Scroll. They also contain prayer books, books that explained the rules of the community since it was like a monastic community, books that talked about their apocalyptic expectation, how they expected the world to end, in a war between the Son’s of light and the Son’s of darkness ect. Now besides being written in Hebrew they were also written in Paleo Hebrew, which is an archaic form of Hebrew some were Aramaic that was the common language that the Lord and the Apostles spoke, it was the everyday dialect of Hebrew at the time, and Greek manuscripts, and among the scrolls that were found were parts of the Septuagint even if they were in Hebrew they were part of the Septuagint and this is important because it indicates that these books were labeled as scripture, it tells us that the state of the Jewish cannon was still influx at the moment at this time. Most of the scrolls were made of papyrus, also parchment a few leather, and one on copper, the copper one being indented, and it talks about were treasure had been buried to avoid detection by the Romans, the Temple treasures which of course have never been found, a very intriguing scroll, and it had to be cut in order to open it. It still is an ongoing task to try and explain the scrolls. Now some people have said that John the Forerunner and Baptist was a member of the Qumran community, but there is no evidence that John the Forerunner was a member of the Qumran community and even though the Qumran community emphasized ritualistic washing like John who was a Baptist, and even though they seemed to live a life of some asceticism and John lived a life of great asceticism its not enough, John was a prophet lived out in the desert, all of the Jews practiced ritual cleanliness so theirs nothing much that ties John the Forerunner himself to this community, but people like to speculate, I thought I would at lest comment on that. I’ll just close with they are the oldest scrolls today in existence and they are the earliest spiritual writings of the time since the early Christians were persecuted.