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THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS: HOW A LOST GOAT CHANGED THE WORLD

Do not sow seeds in the sand.

—LATIN PROVERB

It’s almost as if the most expansive and impressive library of texts from the Bible’s cutting room floor wanted to stay hidden, trying time after time to thwart modern efforts to bring them to light. Though once widely read, a massive collection of scrolls hid in desert caves some two thousand years ago. When they finally revealed themselves, it was not to archaeologists or historians but to children who could not read the writing. Then some of the scrolls changed hands under false pretenses, and many more made their way to a group of scholars so secretive as to earn the nickname “the cartel.”

But they have all been exposed and published, and they give us a uniquely clear window into the Jerusalem of two thousand years ago, the forces that created rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, and the texts that both groups of people held holy: They do more to authenticate the text of the Bible than any other source, though they also highlight at least one clear scribal error in the Hebrew text of the Five Books of Moses. They shed light on what life was like two thousand years ago, though they also raise new, challenging questions. They fill in gaps in the Bible and explore the questions that the Old and New Testaments set out to answer. Reading the Bible without taking them into consideration is like reading a book report instead of the whole book.

These are the famous Dead Sea Scrolls from the region just outside Jerusalem known as Qumran. The full story of their discovery starts in 1947 with a lost goat and the bedouin children who couldn’t find it. Then the tale incorporates corrupt clergy in Jerusalem and malicious merchants in Bethlehem, with starring roles for a general and for a photographer who shared a love of archaeology, and guest appearances by a Christian preacher from Virginia and the Chase Manhattan Bank, of all things.

As a novel or summer movie, this story would be so patently ridiculous and so obviously full of contrivances that no one would take it seriously. It has unlikely coincidences, like the scrolls from Qumran being translated by a Mr. Qimron. It has enigmatic sensationalistic elements, like a treasure map that otherwise has no place in the main story. It has unbelievable plot twists, like animals that lead people to hidden wonders. And it has cliché villains (like the researcher who told the world that Judaism was a horrible religion) who battle cliché heroes (like the archaeologist who took time off work to literally save his nation from destruction). In fact, the only thing saving the otherwise absurd tale is the bizarre fact that it happens to be true and well documented.

The key figures involve some combination of an unscrupulous antiquities dealer, an archaeologist with military training, a graduate student with a camera, a televangelist, three young bedouin shepherds, a partridge, and a lost goat.

The goat belonged to the three young bedouins, who were members of the Ta’amireh tribe and who lived not far from Jerusalem. One day in 1947, they found themselves in the hot Judean Desert looking for the lost member of their herd. The unique terrain, with its pockmarked chalky hills, dry riverbeds, and uneven, constantly shifting landscape gave the goat the advantage. Hiding was easy.

As they were looking for the lost animal, the boys found themselves doing what boys do: throwing stones, perhaps as a show of prowess, perhaps out of boredom, maybe out of frustration. After some time, one of the boys tossed a stone toward the top of one of the many small mounds typical of the area. But rather than the expected “thump” that a stone normally makes when hitting the desert floor, the boys heard a surprising “ping.”

But the sound a rock makes in the desert wasn’t their first priority. They had to find their goat.

And eventually they did. Still, the “ping” had made the boys curious, and a few days later they returned to the site of the odd-sounding stone.

The small mound turned out to be hollow, with an opening at the top that formed a natural skylight, and potential entrance. But while the hole atop the cave might let the boys in, there was no guarantee they’d be able to get out if they dropped through from above. They wisely resisted the temptation to enter. They did, however, continue exploring and they eventually found what looked like a ground-level entrance that had long ago been blocked by stones. They cleared the fallen rocks out of the way and entered the cave.

Inside, they found ten jars made of pottery. Eight of them were completely empty. A ninth contained only dust. Inside the final jar were three leather scrolls, two of which were wrapped in cloth and a third exposed to the elements. The boys took the jars and the scrolls back to their tent.

Not long after, a few other members of the Ta’amireh tribe returned to the cave and found four more scrolls. These, too, were brought back to the bedouin camp, where along with the first find, they were kept as a curiosity. But it was only a mild curiosity, because the bedouins couldn’t read what was written.

Someone got the idea that the pots and scrolls might have some value on the open market, so they set out for nearby Bethlehem to find a buyer. The task proved more difficult than they had thought, but eventually they found a shady character named Jalil “Kando” Iskandar Shalim. A cobbler by trade and a self-declared “dealer in antiquities,” Kando purchased the scrolls from the bedouins.

Kando wasn’t a collector but rather a merchant, and his plan was to sell the scrolls, at a markup. His first success combined clergy and duplicity. He approached Metropolitan Athanasius Yeshue “Mar” Samuel, the archimandrite (like an abbot) of the Syrian-Orthodox monastery of Saint Mark in Jerusalem. Mar Samuel paid 24 liras (about $110 at the time, or roughly $1,000 in 2014 dollars) for four of Kando’s seven scrolls. But like Kando, Samuel’s interest in the scrolls was financial.

As a prominent leader of a Jerusalem monastery, Samuel was in a position to pretend that the scrolls, instead of coming from the desert outside Jerusalem, had actually been found in the holy city itself. While Kando was still trying to sell his other three scrolls, Samuel set out to sell what he called the Jerusalem Scrolls from the holy ancient city of Jerusalem.

Kando found a buyer for the remaining scrolls in one Eliezer Sukenik, a professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University and director of the University Museum of Jewish Antiquities. Sukenik secured the purchase of Kando’s last three scrolls, along with two of the jars in which they had been stored.

So at this point a lost goat had led three bedouins to a hidden cave. Seven scrolls from that cave had been sold and resold. Four were still on the market under false pretenses, and three were in the custody of the Hebrew University.

Then the war for the independence of the State of Israel broke out.

As with so many parts of the Dead Sea Scroll saga, we have two versions of what happened next. Everyone agrees that a man by the name of John Trever at the American School of Oriental Research (ASOR) was involved. Everyone agrees that he was approached by Mar Samuel. Everyone agrees that Trever photographed three of the “Jerusalem scrolls,” as Samuel was calling them. And everyone agrees that Trever helped the scrolls make their way to the United States, though he didn’t buy them. But while some insist that Samuel and Trever were working to ensure the safety of the ancient writings, others claim that the scrolls were illegally smuggled out of the country amid the hostilities.

Either way, the scrolls had been discovered by bedouins in the Judean Desert that had been Palestine and that was now part of the fledgling state of Jordan. They had been sold to a man of dubious repute in Bethlehem, then deceitfully passed off as having been found in Jerusalem, before being removed from a war zone on the continent of their discovery and brought to the United States. Their legal status was, at best, unclear, and Samuel was unable to find a buyer for his scrolls.

Trever made more progress with his photos than Samuel did selling his scrolls, because even though Trever’s hobby was photography, his profession was antiquities and the Bible. The scroll Trever had seen was huge, almost a foot high and twenty-four feet long. And it was beautifully preserved. The ink was clear, and the leather still flexible. With the help of the scholar William Albright, Trevor recognized the writing on the scroll.

At the start of the first millennium B.C., Hebrew was written in a script called paleo-Hebrew. Then, gradually, the older script was replaced by a version of what’s still in use today, the “square” script.

Trever and Albright saw that the writing on the scroll was an early version of the newer square script. The forms of the letters themselves, which hung from a top guideline instead of rising from a baseline, tentatively suggested that the scroll was about two thousand years old. And the words were the text of the biblical Book of Isaiah!

At the time, the oldest known physical copy of any book of the Bible dated back only about a thousand years. Trever was in awe. It was possible that he had just seen the world’s oldest known copy of part of the Bible, predating anything anyone else had seen by a full millennium. It was even possible that he alone knew the significance of the scroll.

So on April 11, 1948, Trever sent out a press release and then published his photographs. This, combined with a press release that Sukenik (at the Hebrew University) issued fifteen days later regarding his own scrolls, set the worlds of archaeology and biblical studies on fire: How old were these scrolls? Who wrote them? What were they doing in Jerusalem (according to Mar Samuel and Trever) and in the desert? What was in the scroll Trever hadn’t identified? Were there more scrolls to be found?

Though they didn’t know it at the time, the scroll Trever recognized as the Isaiah scroll was only part of the reason these scrolls would change the way we view the Bible.

Even more important was a scroll that Trever described as “a manual of discipline of some comparatively little-known sect or monastic order” and that is now variously called the Manual of Discipline or the Community Rule. As we’ll see below, this describes a previously unknown religious community. Its members lived through the tumultuous downfall of Jerusalem, the birth of Jesus, and the early stages of Christianity, but its customs, religious documents, and general outlook remained in obscurity until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls last century.

Like the early Christians and rabbinic Jews, the people described in the Community Rule revered the Old Testament, and, also like both groups, they felt the need for changes. The Community Rule describes a third response to Jerusalem’s waning days, similar to Christianity and Judaism yet different from both.

Other scrolls found along with Isaiah would turn out to be the War Scroll, about the end of days; a book of biblical commentary; a collection of religious hymns; and fragments of an expanded book of Genesis that includes the mysterious Watchers (discussed in our chapter 7), Noah’s great-grandfather Enoch (also in chapter 7), and Enoch’s grandson (and, therefore, Noah’s father) Lamech.

None of this was the focus of attention when the scrolls were first unearthed, though. Rather, one question above all occupied researchers: Were the scrolls authentic? After all, at the time it was difficult to date antiquities even under the best of circumstances, because carbon dating was still in its infancy and its more accurate and less destructive relative, accelerator mass spectrometry, wouldn’t be invented until the 1980s.

Back in 1883, Moses Shapira, another “dealer in antiquities,” this time not from Bethlehem but actually from Jerusalem, had announced that he possessed an ancient copy of the Book of Deuteronomy. Scholars had similarly been enthralled by the possibility of a book of the Bible that significantly predated the thousand-year-old copies that they had. But after expansive publicity, Shapira’s discovery had proved to be forged. Archaeologists in the 1940s were reluctant to embrace another unauthenticated ancient find.

Without any reliable way to connect the chemical makeup of the ink or the parchment to any particular date, scholars had only two methods of determining the age of the scrolls. They could examine the physical environment in which the scrolls had been found. And they could compare the handwriting in the scrolls to other ancient handwriting.

The first option was unavailable to the researchers for two reasons. The Ta’amireh bedouins had become aware of the hoopla surrounding their discovery, so they refused to tell anyone where they had found the scrolls. Additionally, the hostilities resulting from the 1948 war made excavations for Jewish scrolls in Jordan difficult.

And for that matter, in removing the scrolls from the cave, the bedouins had upset what archaeologists call the “strata,” that is, the layering of the ground that helps determine the age of a find. Even if they knew where the cave was and even had they been granted access, archaeologists at the time might not have been able to date the scrolls accurately.

So that left the handwriting analysis, more technically known as paleography. Though this was an inexact and still-unproven combination of science and guesswork, an analysis suggested that the scrolls were probably approximately two thousand years old, making them potentially the most important biblical find of the millennium.

But even as the legal status and authenticity of the scrolls were being questioned, scholars were at work studying Trever’s photographs. The scrolls looked real. They seemed to be very old. And no one knew for sure what they were. In addition to the Book of Isaiah, they had a scroll that looked like a previously unknown commentary on the biblical Book of Habakkuk, and a third scroll that described life in an unknown community. The contents of Samuel’s fourth scroll, which Trever had not photographed, were still a mystery.

Archaeologists and other researchers devoted considerable energy and resources to trying to find more scrolls in this magic area of the Judean Desert. But the desert is not an easy place to look for things. The climate is hostile and unforgiving, and even to the trained eye, many places look remarkably similar. Without local guides (and without modern GPS equipment, obviously), even basic navigation was a challenge. And, equally, the tense political climate remained a daunting obstacle.

In 1923, under British rule, the Department of Palestinian Antiquities was established to see to the safekeeping of any local artifacts of historical significance. In 1936, a man by the name of G. Lankester Harding assumed leadership of that department. So in 1949, just after the war, Harding was well positioned to look for more scrolls.

In consultation with the Jordanian military (technically the Arab Legion of Jordan), Harding managed to locate the bedouins’ cave. He formed an archaeological expedition with Father Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française (the French Biblical and Archaeological School) and set out for the desert to explore the cave. When they arrived, they discovered that the cave had already been excavated (“raided,” as the archaeologists phrased it), not only by the bedouins but also by monks from the nearby Syrian monastery of St. Mark.

But the team was able to find more pottery and pieces of more scrolls, including, most important, fragments that had once been part of the seven original scrolls. This was enough for the team to declare conclusively that the scrolls were authentic and very old.

Because scholars now knew that all seven scrolls had, in fact, been found in the area of the Judean Desert around the Dead Sea known as Qumran, they started calling the scrolls either the Qumran Scrolls or the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It seemed as though the world of scholarship had gained an invaluable window into history, in the form of these seven scrolls that were the only known significant physical writing to date back to the days of Jesus. Before the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars had only fragments and copies.

Then in 1952, the bedouins again surprised the world by finding more scrolls. These new scrolls came from an area known as the Wadi Murabba’at, south of the original cave, and once they surfaced, archaeologists rushed to the Wadi Murabba’at, hoping to excavate the area before the bedouins were able to take anything. So excavations were hastily set up, and a few hundred documents, mostly from the Bar Kokhba revolt (the rebellion led by Bar Kokhba against the Romans in the early second century A.D.), were found, cataloged, and analyzed. But these proved a disappointment compared with the original seven scrolls because they had little to do with the Bible or with the Jerusalem of Jesus’ day.

In the meantime, though, the bedouins were embarking on their own searches back in Qumran. Armed with local knowledge, they found it much easier to navigate and explore the area, and before long they had discovered another cave, just south of the first one. With more than one Qumran cave, scholars now needed a way to distinguish one from the other, and they cleverly called the first one Cave 1; the second was Cave 2. The bedouins found more than thirty scrolls in Cave 2.

As word leaked of the new cave, archaeologists from the École Biblique et Archéologique Française, with the American School of Oriental Research and the Palestine Archaeological Museum, decided to explore the entire Qumran region, starting with the bedouins’ Cave 2, where they found a few remaining fragments, the bedouins having taken most of the scrolls.

Northeast of Cave 1, the archaeologists found a third cave (“Cave 3”). Overjoyed that they had beaten the local bedouins, the scholars rushed to explore the cave, carefully cataloging what they found. They had the usual plethora of fragments that, in this case, seemed to come from at least a dozen different scrolls.

They also unearthed something completely unlike anything that had been discovered in the area, or, for that matter, any other area. They discovered a scroll of thin copper onto which writing had been beaten. This copper scroll, still open to a middle passage, as though it had been buried before its reader had a chance to roll it back to the beginning, was at once fascinating and frustrating. It was a find of a completely new sort, but the copper was too brittle to unroll, and the archaeologists had no way of reading the scroll.

It wasn’t until four years later, in Manchester, England, that researchers got their first glimpse of the contents of the Copper Scroll (as scholars cleverly dubbed it). Using a fine-toothed saw of the sort usually reserved for brain surgery, technicians managed to cut the scroll into tiny strips, which they then reassembled.

Any good adventure story needs buried treasure, and to the astonishment of the researchers, this is exactly what they found as they read the copper strips. The Copper Scroll was a verbal treasure map, pointing the reader to the location of hundreds of thousands of pounds of gold and silver, stashed in and around Jerusalem. The scroll has the flavor of a code, with Greek letters and other oddities mixed in with Hebrew directions like, “under the steps leading east, sixty feet,” you will find “a chest of silver.”

Though the quarter-million pounds of booty described in the scroll exceeds even the most generous estimate of how much precious metal even existed in the ancient world, the fascinating combination of intrigue and riches embodied in a copper scroll has prodded more than a few diviners to look for the buried treasure. But none has been found (to date). And the caves’ best archaeological finds were still to come.

If the mascot of Cave 1 is the lost goat, the mascot of Cave 4 has to be the partridge. De Vaux, the French archaeologist who, with Harding, led the first organized exploration of Qumran, tells the story of sitting with the Ta’amireh bedouins one evening around a campfire. They were talking about all manner of things, including, obviously, the Dead Sea Scrolls. When one of the older men heard about the financial value of the scrolls, he told de Vaux about his life growing up in the desert and about hunting for food in the Qumran region.

In addition to climate, the geology of Qumran works against the local hunter. The sedimentary rock of the area forms cliffs technically known as marl terraces. These cliffs, like much of the region, are bone dry for most of the year. Then, usually about once or twice a year during the rainy season, they are exposed to sudden, massive quantities of water. (This meteorological pattern prods the sudden blossoming of the otherwise barren desert, a striking phenomenon that is immortalized in Psalm 126, also numbered 125, which compares the restoration of Israel to the streams of the Negev desert.) This copious rainfall on otherwise dry ground also creates the famous wadis (dry riverbeds) of the area, as well as numerous cavities and clefts in the rocks.

In particular, there are hundreds of small holes in the marl terraces. Since they are largely inaccessible, de Vaux and his team had made the reasonable decision not to search these pockmarks. But as they were sitting around the campfire, this old bedouin man told de Vaux that, in his youth, he had chased a wounded partridge into a hole in a wadi wall. Inside, the old man recalled, he had found a passage that led to a room full of old pieces of pottery and even a lamp. The man had left the pottery behind but kept the lamp.

De Vaux decided to search the holes immediately. But, of course, the bedouins had the home-team advantage again, and a few bedouin youths used the old man’s description to find the exact spot he had in mind. The kids rushed in to find the pottery and whatever else might be there.

De Vaux didn’t want yet another trove of scrolls to be destroyed by amateurs, so in this case he sent the police to keep the bedouins out. But he was too late. By the time he and Harding arrived at what was now known as Cave 4, only about a thousand fragments of the astonishing fifteen thousand that had been inside remained.

It took six years—until 1958—for all of the pieces to be sold by the bedouins and collected and cataloged by scholars. One reason for the delay was the sheer number of fragments, which essentially demanded fifteen thousand transactions.

The second reason was financial. The Jordanian government was the most likely purchaser of the scrolls, but it couldn’t afford to buy everything that had been found. In a move that would eventually end up thrusting the Dead Sea Scrolls into major media outlets, Jordan turned to the Vatican Library and major universities for financial assistance. These institutions helped purchase the contents of Cave 4, but only in return for the exclusive right to publish the results of what they found.

Even with graduate students, it is a daunting task to piece together fifteen thousand fragments of ancient parchment, some of them so small that they can only be manipulated with tweezers. So for a while, de Vaux oversaw a huge project in Jerusalem that bore remarkable resemblance to a massive jigsaw-puzzle party. By the time they were done assembling the pieces, they had parts of over five hundred manuscripts.

What had started as seven scrolls only a decade earlier was now an impressive and substantial collection of ancient documents.

While the bedouins were negotiating prices and terms with Jordan, the Vatican Library, and the other institutions, Samuel—the religious leader of the Syrian-Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem—was still trying to sell his original “Jerusalem scrolls.” They were in the United States, but, both because of their dubious legal status and because photographs of three of them had already been published, Samuel couldn’t find a buyer.

Finally, in 1954, Samuel got the idea to advertise his scrolls in The Wall Street Journal, next to an offer for a time share, as it would turn out. His copy read, “Biblical manuscripts dating back to at least 200 B.C. are for sale. This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group.” Interested parties were directed to reply to “Box F 206” at The Journal.

As it happens, Professor Sukenik, the archaeologist who had purchased three of the original scrolls for the Hebrew University, had a son in the United States who had planned to go into the family business. The son’s name was Yigael Yadin.

Yadin’s career in archaeology had been interrupted when he joined the Hagganah, the pre-Israel paramilitary organization that eventually became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). (As part of his service, he took a nom de guerre, which is why he doesn’t share his father’s surname.) Yadin rose through the ranks first of the Hagganah and then the IDF, eventually serving as the IDF’s chief of staff before retiring in 1954. With his retirement, Yadin wanted, finally, to return to archaeology. He saw Samuel’s advertisement, raised $250,000 (over two million dollars in the economy of 2014) to buy the four scrolls, purchased them, and immediately sent them to Jerusalem.

So in less than a decade, the original seven scrolls that had sat patiently in the desert for almost two thousand years had been discovered by bedouins, sold to a shady dealer in antiquities in Bethlehem, resold to an archaeologist and an unscrupulous religious leader, photographed, separated as some were smuggled abroad, advertised in a mainstream newspaper, and finally reunited after being purchased by father and son.

Back in Jerusalem, the scrolls were deemed so important that the Israel Museum had a new hall built to house them, the Shrine of the Book, where they still sit to this day.

While none of the gold or silver from the Copper Scroll has ever been found, both the bedouins and the archaeologists realized that the scrolls themselves were like treasure, and even as they negotiated the sale of the contents of Cave 4, both sides continued the battle to be the first to find new caves with scrolls.

In September of 1952 the archaeologists found Cave 5 and, in it, a handful of scrolls with primarily biblical texts.

Then the bedouins found Cave 6, also with a handful of scrolls.

A few years later, de Vaux found some stairs in the area. It turned out that they led to three collapsed caves: Cave 7 yielded scrolls written in Greek, rather than the Hebrew more commonly found in the Dead Sea Scrolls; Cave 8 offered scrolls and some religious artifacts; and Cave 9 produced some miscellaneous fragments.

Cave 4 had a mat of sorts. Under it was Cave 10, which didn’t house any scrolls but did have a decorated lamp and a bit of pottery inscribed with letters that might or might not spell “Jesus” in Hebrew.

In 1956, the bedouins discovered Cave 11, the last of the Dead Sea Scroll caves (to date). In addition to the usual variety of scrolls and fragments, Cave 11 had a huge scroll, dubbed the Temple Scroll, that appeared to be a replacement for Deuteronomy or perhaps an additional book of the Bible. Like Deuteronomy, which retells stories from the previous three books of the Bible, the Temple Scroll similarly summarizes material from those books, and it also includes summaries of otherwise unknown biblical material.

At twenty-five feet in length, the Temple Scroll was (and is) the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, longer even than the scroll of Isaiah found in Cave 1. It was also beautifully preserved. Kando, the Bethlehem merchant who was still helping the bedouins market their finds, figured that these qualities would help the Temple Scroll fetch a higher price than usual. So rather than approach Jordan, Kando tried, unsuccessfully at first, to find deeper pockets.

At this point we turn, surprisingly, to one of the first and most successful television evangelists, a man from Virginia named Rev. Joseph Uhrig, who introduced Jerry Falwell to television, paving the way for his Old Time Gospel Hour.

The year was 1960. Uhrig had been to Israel and Jordan five years earlier and, while there, had met a wonderfully helpful guide who called himself Marcos Hazou. When Hazou decided to leave Israel and move to America, he enlisted the help of the reverend. Uhrig agreed, sponsoring Hazou and his family as they made their way to the New World. Uhrig even housed and employed Hazou, further cementing their friendship. Then in 1960, the grateful Hazou told the reverend about a brother, Aboud, who still lived in Bethlehem. Aboud knew someone who had some ancient manuscripts, and Hazou wanted to know if Uhrig was interested in them.

Uhrig decided to return to Bethlehem to see the manuscripts. When he got there, he met Hazou’s brother, Aboud, who in turn introduced him to the man with the manuscripts. The man’s name was Kando.

Uhrig returned to the United States and set about trying to broker a sale. The obvious place to start was with the prominent Dr. William Albright, who had helped Trever authenticate the first Isaiah scroll. After a few conversations about the material, and especially the considerable possibility that it might be fake, Albright put Uhrig in contact with Yigael Yadin, who just a few years earlier had raised $250,000 to buy Samuel’s scrolls.

Uhrig wrote to Yadin, now living in Jerusalem, and also started making more trips to Bethlehem.

Kando was hoping that his huge scroll would fetch at least one million U.S. dollars (with the buying power of nearly eight million in 2014). He also had a handful of fragments available for lesser sums. But executing a purchase, even for some of Kando’s smaller items, was tricky, in part because of the culture clash between a Virginia clergyman and a Middle Eastern merchant, and in part because Bethlehem at the time was part of ferociously anti-Israel Jordan, while Yadin had convinced Uhrig that the scrolls belonged in Israel’s Shrine of the Book. The unstable and contested Israel-Jordan border was a significant obstacle to commerce.

While Yadin wanted Kando’s scroll, he flatly refused to pay the huge price that Kando was demanding. But Uhrig stayed in touch with Kando, who by this time had been nicknamed “crazy Kando” by the reverend.

At one point, partly to demonstrate his bona fides as a legitimate buyer, Uhrig bought one of Kando’s fragments for $2,500. Back in the United States, Uhrig wondered what to do with his new purchase. After a few months, he got the idea of sending it to Yadin in Jerusalem. So he simply wrapped the thing in a paper napkin, put it in an ordinary paper envelope, and mailed it off, without even an asking price.

It turned out that the fragment Uhrig had purchased from Kando was part of the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11. The rest of that scroll had been purchased by the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, and Yadin had access to it. So Yadin now knew that this man in America who was brokering for the man in Bethlehem who was brokering for the bedouins in the desert had access to authentic Dead Sea Scrolls. Yadin mailed back a letter and a check for $7,000. We don’t know what Yadin thought of the fact that a fragment from only a few miles away had traveled more than eleven thousand miles to reach him.

We do know that Yadin decided to try to buy the Temple Scroll.

We know that Yadin gave Uhrig $10,000 in cash, which the reverend carried in a sock to Bethlehem. And we also know that the scroll was never purchased and remained with Kando. But beyond that we have conflicting information, depending on who tells the story.

Yadin seems to have believed that a firm price had been agreed to for the scroll: $130,000. In addition to the $10,000 in cash he gave Uhrig, Yadin put $120,000 into an account in the Chase Manhattan Bank. He gave the deposit slip to Uhrig, who in turn could show the slip to Kando as proof that sufficient funds were available to purchase the scroll.

Kando seems to have had no idea what a deposit slip was. He wanted cash.

Uhrig in the meantime was having personal financial woes, and he seems to have hoped that he might earn enough of a profit as a broker to help him stay solvent. He recalls throwing the $10,000 at Kando in Bethlehem and begging the merchant to sell the scroll. Kando refused. Frustrated at being so close to completing such an important sale—the scroll was actually right in front of his eyes at this point—Uhrig tore off a scrap of the scroll to show Yadin. And then he left, without his $10,000 and without the rest of the scroll.

Somehow Yadin got Uhrig’s scrap, though the two men differ on how. Yadin, now out $10,000, seems to have played down the significance of Uhrig’s scrap, perhaps as a negotiating tactic. Uhrig—who insisted that his motivation was helping Israel recover the scroll—gave up on ever retrieving the precious artifact; he even began to doubt its worth.

Because of Uhrig, Yadin knew exactly where the scroll was and, because of the scrap, knew it was authentic. But he had no way to get it, so, like Uhrig, he gave up.

And the scroll might have remained in Kando’s hands forever were it not for the 1967 Six-Day War.

The months leading up to the start of the war on June 5, 1967, saw an increasing cycle of violence between Israel and her neighbors. Egypt had closed the Straits of Tiran to all Israeli shipping, which had the result of cutting off Israel from her only supply route with Asia and her main supplier of oil. (In a sign of how much has changed, that supplier was Israel’s friend Iran.) Egyptian troops were preparing for battle in the Sinai desert to Israel’s south, and Syrian troops were doing the same in the Golan Heights, to Israel’s northeast. Russia was sending arms and support to the Arabs. Two months earlier, Syria had attacked Israeli kibbutzim, and, in a retaliatory attack, Israel had shot down six Syrian MiGs.

On June 4, 1967, Yigael Yadin, who had mostly left archaeology for politics, was recalled to military service and asked to serve as military adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol. This is how it happened that three days later, on June 7, when the IDF captured Bethlehem from Jordan, Yadin was able to secure the services of a lieutenant colonel in the IDF. Yadin gave this soldier an order, “Go get my scroll from Kando!”

The lieutenant colonel complied, forming an expedition to Bethlehem.

By June 8, 1967, over a decade after the discovery of Cave 11, Yadin finally had the scroll. To his huge dismay, though, fully one third of it had rotted away as it sat in a shoebox under a flooring tile in Kando’s home.

Though Kando had no legitimate claim to the scroll, which, after all, he was keeping in violation of both Israeli and Jordanian law, the State of Israel nonetheless agreed to pay Kando over $100,000. And the scroll joined the other Dead Sea Scrolls in the Shrine of the Book.

But while the Temple Scroll was now publicly available, the fifteen thousand fragments from Cave 4 were still in the hands of the multiorganizational consortium that had purchased them almost ten years earlier in 1958. And the consortium seemed to be in no hurry to make anything public.

The first Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, and they were published eight years later in 1955. By contrast, the finds from Cave 4 were still unpublished in 1967. It would take a media campaign and a graduate student who dabbled in computer programming to make these scrolls public.

The political tensions in the area had crept into the academy. In 1965, the official Oxford University journal devoted to publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls had been renamed from Discoveries in the Judaean Desert to Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan, a title which, after the Six-Day War, was no longer accurate, at least according to some, but, either way, there is only one “Judaean” Desert, and everyone knows where it is. The addition of “of Jordan” to the title was purely a political gesture. And we have already seen that the archaeologists and the bedouins were in constant competition, too. These controversies would be augmented by a bitter debate about publishing the finds from Cave 4.

The problem, according to most people, was that the original purchasers of the material were taking too long to publish it. How was it possible, they wanted to know, that the consortium had had the material for nearly a decade and nonetheless published nothing?

In 1968, the consortium published their first results, but they still refused to grant access to the scrolls to anyone but a limited group of thirty scholars, dubbed “the clique.” This not only antagonized non-clique scholars who couldn’t see the scrolls, but raised suspicions in the minds of the broader public. Only Christians were part of the clique. This led some people to believe that parts of the scrolls were purposely being concealed because they would undermine Christianity.

These tensions simmered and grew for nearly twenty years. In 1985, a man named Hershel Shanks took up the cause of freeing the Dead Sea Scrolls from their academic captors. As editor of the popular Biblical Archaeology Review, he had a ready-made platform, and it wasn’t long until his pleas made their way to more mainstream American media. Soon after that, the consortium of scholars earned the title of “cartel,” a moniker usually reserved for groups of violent outlaws.

In an attempt to pacify the increasingly vocal protesters, in 1988 the cartel agreed to a compromise. They wouldn’t release the scrolls or grant anyone else access to them, but they would release something called a concordance, which lists each word in the scrolls and the context in which it appears.

A concordance is a useful linguistic tool, because knowing the contexts in which a word appears is one of the best ways of determining what a word means. And even though the Dead Sea Scrolls were mostly written in Hebrew, they were not written in the same dialect of Hebrew as the Bible or as later rabbinic writings. So just figuring out what the words meant was an exciting challenge, and one of the first things the cartel had done was to compile a concordance to facilitate their own work. As part of the compromise with the rest of the academic world, one copy of this compilation was sent to Professor Ben Zion Wacholder at Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati.

As Wacholder was looking at the concordance, the cartel and people associated with it were inadvertently fanning the fire of controversy. A man named John Strugnell had taken over as chief editor of the cartel’s Dead Sea Scrolls in 1987. In 1991 he called outside scholars who wanted access to his scrolls “a bunch of fleas who are in the business of annoying us.” This wasn’t nearly so bad as when he said later that year that Judaism was a “horrible religion,” a misstep he might have survived had he not been talking to Avi Katzman, an Israeli journalist.

The previous year, a man named Emanuel Tov had joined Strugnell as coeditor. Strugnell was forced to leave after his media gaffe, and he was, in fact, replaced by two people, with the result that three people were now in charge. But it was Tov who took the next step toward facilitating the publication of the scrolls.

Tov had a graduate student named Martin Abegg. Tov didn’t hide his displeasure at the pace of publication from his student, and, in fact, Tov had even sometimes given Abegg and his other students unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls material to work on. As Abegg was getting ready to leave Tov, his mentor cautioned the young student not to tell anyone about the contents of the scrolls.

Abegg happened to decide on Cincinnati as his next destination, because he wanted to work with Professor Wacholder. From Tov, Abegg had learned that the Dead Sea Scrolls’ slow pace of publication was decidedly unacademic and secretive. And Wacholder just happened to have a concordance.

Most important, Abegg, a generation younger than Wacholder, knew something that his teacher did not. He knew how to program a computer. And he also knew that it wasn’t hard to write a computer program that would analyze a concordance such as the one Wacholder possessed and that would use the analysis to re-create the original text from which the concordance was produced.

Abegg did just this, and while the cartel was still keeping most of the material from Cave 4 secret, Abegg and Wacholder published the material in September 1991.

Finally, with the proverbial cat out of the bag, the Dead Sea Scrolls were scientifically dated, using a procedure known as accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). Normal carbon dating, which had been available almost since the first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, suffers from the unfortunate technical drawback that in order for something to be dated, it has to be burned. Archaeologists were quite reasonably unwilling to burn a scroll just to determine its age.

AMS, on the other hand, involves the destruction of much less original material. In 1992, a team in Zurich applied the new AMS technique to fourteen of the Dead Sea Scrolls. With only one exception, the results from Zurich agreed very closely with dates that had previously been established, mostly from handwriting analysis, but also from a tiny handful of scrolls that were independently datable based on their contents. These results were widely considered the final verification of both the authenticity and antiquity of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It took almost half a century, a cobbler from Bethlehem who fancied himself a dealer in antiquities, a dishonest cleric in Jerusalem, thousands of hours of painstaking labor, clandestine excavations, scrolls smuggled to America and a scroll hidden under a floor tile, a preacher from Virginia, a team of IDF soldiers, and an unauthorized computer reconstruction—to say nothing of the goat and the partridge—but finally the Dead Sea Scrolls are available to anyone with access to a library, bookstore, or computer.

The scrolls describe a communal, devout, ascetic society. The group, most commonly known as the Dead Sea Sect or the Qumran Sect, probably numbered in the hundreds, certainly not more than the low thousands, and lasted from approximately the Maccabean revolt in the second century B.C. to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

Who wrote the scrolls? What do the scrolls contain? And what do we learn from them?

The answers to these questions shed new light on the Old Testament and the New Testament, on the early rabbinic Jews and on the early Christians. They show what it was like to serve God in the context of holy scrolls before there was a Bible and demonstrate that the simplistic division of the ancient world into Jews, Christians, and others glosses over internal conflicts and more widespread similarities. And they exemplify how the turbulent times that we saw in the last chapter influenced the way people thought.

The scrolls also take us on a meandering and sometimes uncertain path, offering answers that pose a whole new set of questions. Almost every aspect of life at Qumran and of the sect that lived there is like a riddle, and while some clues are clear, others are vague or even contradictory. In the end, we will be left knowing more about antiquity, but also will be aware of newly found ignorance on our part.

We start with the people who lived there, as they describe themselves in one of the original scrolls found in 1947. First known as the Manual of Discipline, then later as the Community Rule or Rule of the Community, the scroll describes life at Qumran for the Dead Sea Sect.

A word about nomenclature is in order before we start reading the Community Rule, because, as with all the scrolls from the Dead Sea, the document also enjoys a more technical name: 1QS. The 1 indicates that the scroll was found in the first Qumran cave. The Q is for “Qumran.” And the S is from the Hebrew serech, which means “rule.” Similarly, 1QM is a scroll from Cave 1 at Qumran. The M stands for the Hebrew milchama, which means “war.” That scroll is nicknamed the War Scroll.

Once scholars realized how many scrolls there were in Qumran, they started numbering them instead of using final letters. So, for instance, there’s a 1Q28, which is the twenty-eighth scroll (according to an arbitrary enumeration) from the first Qumran cave. As it happens, 1Q28 is a second copy of 1QS. 4Q491 is the 491st scroll from Cave 4 and just happens to be another edition of the War Scroll.

The word “rule” in the English title Community Rule, is a technical term that usually refers to a description of life in a monastic society, for example, the Rule of St. Benedict from about fifteen hundred years ago that, to this day, forms much of the basis of Benedictine life. Similarly, the Community Rule from Qumran describes various aspects of life at Qumran, including the theology, worldview, political stance, and daily routine of the society’s members.

The general flavor of Qumran is established at the outset in what might be considered a preamble of the Community Rule. The community is for “seeking God” with “all one’s heart and all one’s soul,” language reminiscent of the famous text from Deuteronomy 6:5 (“love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul”), which Christians recognize as, according to Jesus, the “most important commandment” (Matthew 22:37–38 and elsewhere) and which Jews to this day keep written on entranceways in religious markers known as m’zuzot.

Right from the start, then, the community places itself firmly in the biblical Old Testament tradition, but it also focuses on an aspect of the Old Testament that would remain central in the New Testament and rabbinic Judaism.

The Community Rule could have begun with a reference to “serving God in accordance with the laws of levitical sacrifice,” for example, which also would have been in keeping with the Old Testament, but which would have been in opposition to the New Testament and to the rabbis that would re-create Judaism after A.D. 70. Or the Rule could have begun, as the Gospel of Matthew does, with genealogy, an option that would connect the document to the Old Testament in yet a different way.

The choice to quote Deuteronomy 6:5 is typical of the community, which seems, like early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism, to have been grappling with how to reinterpret the Old Testament. Christianity ended up creating the New Testament and assigning at least as much value to that new work as to the older parts of the Bible. Rabbinic Judaism kept the primacy of the Old Testament, supplementing it with the Midrash and the Talmud. Though different than both of those groups, the Dead Sea Sect seems also to have been reevaluating the Old Testament in a world marked by upheaval.

The goal of the community, according to 1QS, is “to do what is just and right according to God,” which is to say, that which God commanded “Moses and his servants the prophets.” Equally, the goal is to eschew everything evil, which is to say, that which God rejects. The world according to the Community Rule is thus divided into two opposing camps, which in typical Dead Sea Scroll language are the “children of light,” representing God, and the “children of darkness,” representing God’s Qumranic foe, called Belial in the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Belial also appears as God’s foe in the Old and New Testaments.)

This focus not only on good but more specifically on good versus evil is, of course, known from the Bible. The tree in the Garden of Eden that provides the fruit for Adam and Eve’s downfall is, after all, the “tree of knowing good and evil.” Similarly, prophets such as Amos exhort the people to “hate what is evil and love what is good,” while Micah condemns unjust rulers who “hate what is good and love what is evil.” And the psalmist enjoins the people to “turn from what is evil and do what is good.” But the primary emphasis in the Bible is God’s commandments and what is good, not on the battle between good and evil.

The Community Rule, by contrast, focuses intensely on a cosmic duality of good and evil. (And as we’ll see below, the War Scroll details a war between the two sides.) The leader of the community is supposed to teach the “children of light” about the nature of the “children of humanity.” In particular, God “created humans to rule the world” and “put within them two spirits” so that God could walk among humans until something called God’s “appointed time.”

The matter is so important that it warrants a detailed discourse in the scroll about these two spirits and what they represent: good versus evil; light versus darkness; honesty versus deceit; justice, patience, generosity, and understanding versus injustice, impatience, greed, and foolishness. The world as described by the Community Rule is one in which good and evil play equal and complementary roles. For example, not only are “acts of injustice” anathema to truth, but “paths of truth” are similarly anathema to injustice. Good and evil exist side by side, battling things out, as part of God’s plan for humankind and the universe.

But even as the Community Rule puts good and evil side by side, the document makes it clear that the coexistence of good and evil is a temporary state, to be remedied when God helps good conquer evil. (One particularly interesting detail notes that the “spirit of truth” will be “sprinkled like water” to cleanse people of evil, a concept reminiscent of the baptism that would help define Christianity.) This world of good and evil waiting for God’s intervention is the context in which the members of Qumran gathered to bolster the forces of good through their own lives, freely “returning from evil,” as they enigmatically put it.

In deference to its biblical allegiance, the society is specifically ordered with priests first, then levites (another privileged biblical class), and finally everyone else. That general population is organized by “thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens,” a description that mirrors the organizational scheme in Exodus 18 by which Moses is to arrange the fledgling Israelite society: “Moses chose capable men from among all of Israel and appointed them as heads over the people, as officers of thousands, officers of hundreds, officers of fifties, and officers of tens.” This nod to the traditional text seems more symbolic than practical, though, because two thousand is near the upper limit of how many people were likely to have lived at Qumran, so there were probably no “thousands” at all.

One intriguing and still unanswered question is who exactly these people living in Qumran were. They were obviously living according to some Jewish tradition, and equally obviously concerned about which parts of that tradition should be continued and which parts should be revised. Though they ultimately came to different answers, these are the same issues that occupied the early Christians and rabbinic Jews.

These people living according to Jewish tradition were, apparently, involved in internal Jewish debate.

According to the Community Rule, those who have returned from evil are supposed to follow in the path of the “sons of Zadok” and separate themselves from the “people of injustice.” The Rule explains that the “sons of Zadok” are the “priests who keep the covenant.” This matches what is described in the Bible (e.g., 2 Samuel 8:17), where Zadok is the high priest, so it is tempting to equate the “sons of Zadok” with “the descendants of the high priest.”

Similarly, the Dead Sea Scrolls use the Hebrew word for “nations” (goyim) to mean non-Jews. So we potentially have three groups: the “sons of Zadok,” the “people of injustice,” and the “nations.” If the “people of injustice” are different from the “nations,” they would have to be Jews, but not the group of Jews who follow the tradition of Zadok.

If so, the Community Rule would have pitted legitimate high priests against other interpreters of Judaism, a worldview that would dovetail nicely with what was happening in Jerusalem during the second century B.C. The Syrian Greek Antiochus IV (“the Mad”) had begun meddling in the high priesthood, and then the Maccabees, who were priests but not descended from Zadok, had taken power as they overthrew Antiochus’s government.

So one way of understanding the people of Qumran as described in the Community Rule (and elsewhere) is that they were Jews who rejected the new power structure in Jerusalem.

Unfortunately, the name Zadok comes from the Hebrew root for “righteous,” and the “sons of Zadok” could also be more generally “the righteous people.” Or the attribution of the community to “Zadok” could be, like its division into “thousands,” no more than a metaphorical incorporation of tradition. Or, also reflecting tradition, the “sons of Zadok” may refer to Ezekiel 40:46, where the “sons of Zadok” will be the ones who approach God in the rebuilt Temple.

In short, it’s not clear if the Community Rule is meant to describe a general position of piety in contrast to people who have strayed, or more specific religious and political tensions. One problem in particular arises because the “sons of Zadok” in the Community Rule, in contrast to the new Jewish leaders, would be priests insistent on keeping the old traditions alive, most prominently sacrifice. But the Community Rule seems to have given up sacrifice in favor of prayer. The Rule itself looks forward to a day without the flesh of burnt offerings, when the offering of the lips will be like the “aroma of justice” and when walking the “perfect path” will be like the “freewill offering.” Equally, the Community Rule stresses “praying” or “blessing” (the Hebrew might mean either) as a group, in particular after a communal meal. So this seems to be a community that has if not already moved away from sacrifice toward prayer, then at least taken most of the important steps. This position seems at odds with the cult’s insistence that they are the keepers of tradition.

We have other clues about this group’s theology.

We have already seen phrases like “all your heart and all your soul.” The Rule also directly introduces quotations from the Bible with phrases like “as is written” or “in accord with what is written” (ka’asher katuv in Hebrew). An alternative form of this phrase (kakatuv) was commonly used by the Rabbis who reinvented Judaism with the Talmud and the Midrash. The Rabbis use the phrase to make a connection—often tenuous—to a biblical passage. The New Testament uses the Greek word pliro-o for the same purpose (though it’s harder to see, because many English translations get this word wrong, incorrectly rendering it as “fulfill” in English). So we learn that the Dead Sea Sect was quoting the Bible in the same way that early Christians and rabbinic Jews did: as part of an agenda to incorporate Scripture into a new form of religious practice.

For example, the community is supposed to “walk to the desert” and there walk God’s path, in accord with what is written (in Isaiah 40:3): “In the desert clear a path for the Lord.” Like the New Testament and the Midrash and Talmud, the Community Rule cites Scripture as the rationale for religious behavior.

There’s something else striking about this reference to Isaiah. The full quotation is, without punctuation, “The voice of one crying in the desert clear a path for the Lord.” Two possible interpretations of this line present themselves. The voice might be crying in the desert, “clear a path for the Lord.” Or the voice might be crying, “in the desert clear a path for the Lord.” The Community Rule assumes the latter. There is a voice. And the voice is crying about what should happen in the desert. But the voice could be anywhere.

What’s striking is that Matthew also interprets Isaiah 40:3, and his interpretation of the passage differs from the way the Community Rule understands it. Matthew (3:3) assumes the voice is in the desert, and he equates that desert voice to Jesus. John does the same.

There are well over twenty thousand verses in the Old Testament. While many of them do not readily lend themselves to deep theological interpretation, there are still thousands of verses that do. Just for example, Obadiah 1:1 refers to “rising up to do battle” in favor of the Lord. One might imagine that that line would figure prominently in the literature of the Dead Sea Sect or some other religious cult focused on good versus evil. But it does not.

When we see the same passage—Isaiah 40:3, in this case—used centrally in two different traditions, we have reason to believe that the traditions were culturally connected. And the line ended up in the Jewish liturgy, too. Once again, it seems as though the Dead Sea Sect, the early Jews, and the early Christians were all asking the same questions in the same context, even focusing on the same texts, though they didn’t always arrive at the same answers.

In addition to such lofty issues as theology and the battle between good and evil, the Community Rule addresses more practical matters, including, for meetings, an early parallel to Robert’s Rules of Order (which are designed to facilitate equitable and efficient meetings) and some legal codes.

Communal meetings, called “the sessions of the Many” in Hebrew, were to be strictly hierarchical, with people sitting according to their rank: priests first, then elders, then ordinary people. Similarly, they were to speak in that hierarchy. No one was to talk when someone else was talking or, enforcing the notion of hierarchy, before someone of higher rank. There appears to have been a meeting chair, often translated as “inspector” (maskil), who was the only one who could say things that the Many “didn’t like,” though this “liking” could have been a technical notion, more limited than mere general dissatisfaction. To raise a new point, someone had to “stand on his feet and say, ‘I have something to say to the Many.’” And so forth.

Punishments generally took the form of exclusion from the community. Among the most severe crimes was breaking even a single word of “Moses’s Torah” (which probably means any part of Jewish law, even though the word Torah also refers more narrowly to the Five Books of Moses) through haughtiness or carelessness, the punishment for which was outright expulsion so that the offender could never return.

Interestingly, the Rule differentiates between haughty or careless breaking of Moses’s law and accidental violations. The second category was punished with a two-year probation of sorts, during which the offender was cut off from the congregation and the food and drink it provided. This distinction between willing and accidental violations suggests that the Rule was supposed to be practical in addition to symbolic.

Other crimes that resulted in expulsion were uttering the “honored name,” that is, the name of God; defaming the Many; and complaining against the foundation of the Many. There are presumably details and nuances we don’t understand anymore: What exactly was defaming? How was defaming different than complaining? What was the foundation? But the point seems clear. The statutes seem designed to protect God’s law, God’s name, and the integrity of the Qumranic society, often in ways that may seem particularly harsh to modern readers.

Lesser sentences were prescribed for other crimes. The punishment for defaming a member of the society was a one-year probation; for deception, six months; baseless animosity, either six months or one year (the text has “six months” corrected to “one year”); causing a loss to the community’s property, sixty days; interrupting someone else, ten days; sleeping during the session of the Many, either ten or thirty days; public nakedness, six months (though a curious provision exempts people who have a valid reason to go naked, raising the obvious if unanswered question of what that valid reason might be); and so forth.

The Rule also contains provisions for initiation into the society, along the lines of modern immigration and naturalization law. In fact, much of what we find in the Community Rule has modern parallels. We have already seen rules for communal debate, akin to Robert’s Rules of Order. Now we see initiation qualifications. Similarly, the Rule’s prohibition against defaming a member of the community is similar to modern slander laws. Like the Dead Sea Sect, we still grapple in modernity with what to do with accidental acts of violence. And so on.

One difficult question is whether there were any women or children around Qumran. Complicated grammatical aspects of Hebrew make it difficult to distinguish between “men” and “people,” between “children” (in the metaphoric sense) and “sons,” and so forth. So for example, while we’ve used the phrase “children of light” here, the point may have been more narrowly “sons of light.” The Rule provides that a priest be present at any gathering of ten or more, but the text may refer to ten people or ten men.

In the entire Rule, we find only one reference to a woman, and there she simply serves the poetic role of giving birth to a man (or a person). So even though the Hebrew is ambiguous, there don’t seem to have been any women or children. (By contrast, both the Old and New Testaments contain women.)

All told, the Rule paints a picture of a group (probably of men) living together in the desert, sharing their meals and their resources, living in strict hierarchy and strictly according to some version of Jewish law.

Unfortunately, this picture contradicts another detailed source of information about Qumran, the Damascus Document.

Jewish custom demands that texts that bear God’s name be treated with reverence and, instead of simply being discarded, be kept in a room, buried, or otherwise cared for in ways generally reserved for corpses. The storage location for these holy documents is called a genizah.

Toward the end of the ninth century A.D., a synagogue was built in Fustat, which in 641 had become the first Arab capital of Egypt. In keeping with Jewish custom, anything God’s name was written on was not discarded but instead put into a genizah in Fustat.

For reasons that remain unclear, the practice in this particular synagogue in Egypt was to extend that care to any text written in Hebrew letters, a fact that would come to light only in 1896, when the Romanian-born Cambridge scholar Dr. Solomon Schechter traveled there and found the huge trove of documents: prayer books, property deeds, Talmudic collections, personal correspondence, Bibles, legal codes, and more. Many of these were in Hebrew, others in Arabic and written in Hebrew letters (a common practice), others yet in various other languages, sometimes tossed in apparently by accident, sometimes included because they had been reused to write Hebrew.

The collection, dubbed the Cairo Genizah, was the first modern window into ancient documents, the first time modern scholars could look at actual documents from antiquity. For example, among the finds there was a Hebrew copy of the Wisdom of Ben Sira, a book from the early second century B.C. that, until then, had been preserved in Greek and, therefore, not considered part of the Jewish canon.

Also among the documents discovered in the Cairo Genizah was the Damascus Document. Because it was discovered in Cairo and not at Qumran, its technical abbreviation is CD (“Cairo Damascus”). But it turns out that the Damascus Document is probably a copy of a Dead Sea Scroll. The language and contents are similar to other Dead Sea Scrolls, and, more importantly, fragments of another copy of the Damascus Document were found in Qumran, primarily in Cave 4. So in addition to CD, we have, for example, 4Q266 (the 266th fragment found in the fourth Qumran cave), which is also called 4QDa, because its text matches CD. (The a means that it is the first Damascus Document fragment; 4Q267, for example, is called 4QDb.) The document gets its more colloquial name, Damascus Document, from the repeated, probably metaphorical, references to Damascus in it.

The Damascus Document, like the Community Rule, describes life at Qumran. It refers to the “children of Zadok,” the priests, Belial, a division into “thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens,” etcetera, all similar to the Community Rule. Unfortunately, though, the two documents are at times incompatible.

One huge difference is that the Damascus Document specifically includes women, while, as we saw, the Community Rule seems to have excluded them. For example, the Damascus Document has specific provisions for the introduction of a woman into the society (she must be sexually pure, according to a variety of criteria) and specifically extends the laws of incest to apply to women, even though in the Torah they are “written from the point of view of the males.” The Damascus Document also contains laws about childbirth, specifically including children and, obviously, women.

Secondly, the Damascus Document has provisions for private property, including what to do with objects whose owners are unknown (the priests keep them) and how many witnesses are required to demonstrate theft (two).

Thirdly, the Damascus Document seems to accept at least a limited role for the Temple, while the Community Rule seems to reject the Temple completely.

Fourthly, the Damascus Document makes reference to what one can and cannot do inside and outside the city, which seems inconsistent with the Qumran desert environment, in which there were no cities.

In fact, this fourth inconsistency suggests the most common way of reconciling the Damascus Document with the Community Rule. There may have been two kinds of people living under the auspices of the Dead Sea Sect: some in cities (to which the Damascus Document would apply) and others who removed themselves completely and left for the desert (to whom the Community Rule would apply). The Damascus Document seems to be compatible with this division, referring to some people who live in “holy perfection” and apparently contrasting them with those who live “in camps, according to the rule of the land, and who take wives and become parents.”

Even so, the discrepancies are widespread and troubling, leaving us—as is so often the case with the Dead Sea Scrolls—suspicious that we have missed something fundamental about the nature of the Dead Sea Sect, and urging us to seek clues elsewhere.

One thing we see clearly from the content of the Dead Sea Scrolls, not just the Community Rule and Damascus Document, is a representation of the major themes of the day. We have already observed how the Dead Sea Scrolls quote some of the same texts as, for example, the New Testament and Jewish liturgy.

They also address some of the same debates.

It appears, for instance, that one important question back then concerned how to celebrate the Sabbath. The Bible forbids any work but doesn’t spell out exactly what counts as working (though many people don’t appreciate the Bible’s silence in this regard, because Jewish tradition, primarily as codified in the Talmud much later, offers much more detail). It seems that all the Jews in the final centuries of the first millennium B.C. were grappling with this question, and they came to different answers.

A passage in the New Testament from Matthew 12 pits Jesus against the Pharisees. (The Pharisees were one mainstream group of Jews at the time. The other was the Sadducees. Though it’s obviously a gross simplification, the Pharisees are often credited as the precursors to rabbinic Judaism, while the Sadducees are known for trying to preserve the priestly caste and its ways.) As part of the dispute, according to Matthew, Jesus rhetorically asks a group of people in a synagogue if they would rescue a sheep that had fallen into a pit on the Sabbath. The assumption is that of course it’s the right thing to do, and that even on the Sabbath, one should rescue an animal from a pit.

The Damascus Document offers a contrary opinion, warning that it is specifically forbidden to raise an animal out of a pit on the Sabbath.

The Talmud, recording the legacy of the rabbinic tradition of Judaism, also weighs in on this issue, in Shabbat 128b. There the claim is that the goal of preventing pain to animals supersedes prohibitions against work on the Sabbath, because the prohibitions come from the Rabbis, while the commandment to care for animals dates back further, to the Torah. Despite the rhetoric, though, the Rabbis actually invented both prohibitions, and the reasoning seems to have been created to justify the result they wanted.

While animals and pits were more common in antiquity than they are now (at least, in and around modern cities), it can hardly be a coincidence that the Damascus Document, New Testament, and Talmud all offer a specific answer regarding what to do when an animal falls into a pit on the Sabbath. Rather, as with the quotation from Isaiah about the voice and the desert, these three—the Dead Sea Sect and its authors, the New Testament and early Christians, and the Talmud and the Rabbis—all seem to have been doing the same thing. They were adapting the Old Testament to what they saw as changing times. As part of their task, they were asking the same questions, though they often didn’t come to the same answer.

In this particular case, the Rabbis and authors of the New Testament agree that it’s permitted to rescue an animal on the Sabbath, while the Dead Sea Sect dissents. In the case of the Isaiah quotation (“the voice of one crying in the desert clear a path for the Lord”), the Dead Sea Sect agrees with the Rabbis that “in the desert” describes the path but not necessarily the voice, and the New Testament is the dissenting voice. Other cases exhibit other combinations of agreements and disagreements.

These persistent common themes are one reason that the Dead Sea Scrolls are so useful for understanding early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.

Perhaps the biggest issue from the days of the Dead Sea Sect can be generalized to, What happens next? After we die, is there an afterlife? And if so, is it the same for everyone? Is it good (“heaven”)? It is bad (“hell”)? Do people continue to inhabit the earth roughly the way we do now, or will there be a dramatic change? And again, if so, will it be for the better or for the worse? These questions fall under the category of eschatology, and discussion of them is generally called eschatological literature.

The Old Testament is largely silent on all of these questions. It doesn’t mention heaven or hell, the closest to the former being an idiom that equates death to meeting up with relatives, and the closest to the latter being a representation of death as a “pit,” the Hebrew word for which is sh’ol, which gives us the English Sheol (the abode of the dead). Equally, the Old Testament doesn’t directly refer to the Messiah, though Isaiah and some other prophets allude to the idea.

But these ideas—heaven, hell, the Messiah, and other eschatological matters—weighed heavily on the minds of people living in Jerusalem toward the end of the first millennium.

So the Dead Sea Scrolls flesh out these issues, most clearly in the War Scroll, a detailed description of the final cosmic war between good and evil.

The War Scroll describes two evenly matched opponents. On one side are the “sons of darkness,” led by Belial, on the other, the “sons of light,” led by God. This division mirrors the general mind-set at Qumran that we saw above in the Community Rule. Good and evil are equal, complementary forces in the world. One focus of the Community Rule was directing the inhabitants of Qumran toward the good. Here in the War Scroll, we find the two forces pitted directly against each other.

The entire ordeal is predestined, with the opening lines laying out a three-stage battle, complete with place-names, as if the sons of light and the sons of darkness are engaged in a real-world battle for real estate.

In the first stage, the sons of light conquer Judea (“Edom”) with neighboring Moab and Syria (“Ashur”). Then, in the second stage, they conquer Egypt. Finally, they conquer the north. This division of the world into Syria, Egypt, and “north” mirrors the power structure of the day. The sons of light conquer the major world powers one by one.

The War Scroll describes the details of the battles in great, earthly detail. We read about the different kinds of trumpets used to sound the battle cry, including even the slogans that are written on them: “the people God calls,” “God’s secrets for destroying evil,” “God’s princes” among others. We also read about the banners carried into battle and what is written on them: “God’s truth,” “God’s justice,” “God’s glory,” as well as things like “God’s families” and “God’s tribes,” in addition to much more.

The text is equally specific regarding the battle formations, including how the troops are to be deployed. (Scholars use these details to learn about the military culture in which the scroll was composed, on the assumption that the strategy was taken from real military doctrine. The descriptions in the scroll seem most consistent with Roman warfare.)

And we learn about the weapons, such as the shiny bronze shields, 10-foot spears (assuming a Roman cubit of about 1.5 American feet), and 2.5-foot pure iron swords. One battalion will carry a shield and spear, the next a shield and sword. Then there’s the cavalry, composed of seven hundred on each flank, riding stallions that are quick-footed, soft-spoken (presumably they don’t bite), long-winded (so as not to tire), and trained for war.

With so much of the text seemingly based on real places, real tactics, and real weaponry, some scholars wonder if the War Scroll was meant to describe a real war, either planned for some future date, or at least hoped for.

Of particular interest in this regard is the word kittim, a plural noun in Hebrew apparently used to represent a group of people, perhaps a nationality. The first round of the war involves the “kittim of Ashur,” and the second, the “kittim in Egypt.” Who were the Kittim? Were they a real people, or were they used symbolically to represent evil in general?

The word kittim appears a handful of times in the Bible. And though it doesn’t seem to have been used consistently for one people, it often looks like it refers to Cyprus. Because Rome ruled Cyprus for some time and even used Cyprus as a major administrative center, “Cyprus” could in fact mean “Rome” (the way, for example, “Washington” often means “the U.S. in general”). In fact, in Daniel (11:30), the Hebrew word kittim becomes “Rome” in the Greek translation called the Septuagint.

Furthermore, the obvious candidate for a real enemy of the Dead Sea Sect is Rome. So some people think that kittim in the War Scroll are the Romans and that the War Scroll is really about defeating the evil Romans. And perhaps kittim was used instead of a more readily obvious word so that Romans reading the War Scroll wouldn’t know that they were the intended object of God’s wrath.

More likely, though, kittim is a general word for “enemy.” Even though the phrasing “kittim in Egypt” suggests a particular occupying power, no candidate—not even Rome—is completely consistent with all the details in the War Scroll. And this would not be the only time that the word for a specific nation was generalized to refer to any enemy.

Either way, it’s clear that the Kittim represent all that is wrong with the world, much like “sons of darkness.” This battle between good and evil is not merely a matter of mundane politics or borders, which is why the battle for “God’s might” will occur amid the sound of a great multitude and involve “gods and people.”

In keeping with the general approach that we saw in the Community Rule, the War Scroll cites the Bible, connecting military details with religious doctrine and providing quotations for the purpose of putting the War Scroll into the biblical tradition. So the priests who sound the trumpets must do so at a distance once the enemy starts to fall, because priests, according to the Old Testament, are not allowed near corpses. Similarly, regarding God’s certain victory, the text quotes passages ranging from Numbers 24:17–19 (“a star will depart from Jacob.… It will smash the temples of Moab”) to Isaiah (“Ashur will fall by a non-mortal sword, a non-human sword destroying it”).

Much of the scroll deals with the final battle of this war, which has seven engagements. After the first six, the sides of light and dark emerge equally ranked, with three wins apiece. Finally, God’s own hand intervenes, effecting a decisive victory over Belial. Though the details (including a final prayer that addresses God as “God of gods”) are interesting, more important is the way God’s intervention reflects the central theme of the book: God will make things better.

This hope for God to improve life has at least two crucial parts to it. The first and more obvious element is the existence of God, and that had always been part of Judaism. The second element is dismay or even despair with the current situation. The end of the first millennium B.C. was a profoundly unhappy time in many ways, not just for the Jews in Jerusalem—who suffered a series of blows, starting, ironically, with the Maccabees’ victory—but, it would seem, also for the Jews at Qumran. Similarly, we’ll see in chapter 4 that the context of Jesus’ arrival in the New Testament is one of suffering at the hands of an oppressor.

This zeitgeist of dissatisfaction gave us the War Scroll and, some decades later, Revelation in the New Testament. That book, like the War Scroll, combines the cosmic and the quotidian: visions and symbolic sevens mix with horses and trumpeted battle cries. Parallel to God and Belial in the War Scroll are Christ and Satan in Revelation, represented in that book by the lamb and the beast. Where the War Scroll uses the Kittim to represent oppression at the hands of outsiders, Revelation has Babylon, also commonly equated with Rome, though, like the Kittim, Babylon represents outsiderness in general. In this sense, both Revelation and the War Scroll incorporate current events.

Finally, both Revelation and the War Scroll promise victory to a righteous minority amid a more powerful majority. In the War Scroll, it’s the Dead Sea Sect, and in Revelation, those whose names have been written in the “book of life,” judged “according to what they had done.” (Curiously, Revelation doesn’t quote the Old Testament, though theologians are quick to find references and other connections.) Both books, then, are eschatological. They ask, What will happen in the end? And the fundamental answer in both cases is that good will emerge victorious over evil.

But beyond that the War Scroll and Revelation offer very different answers. Primarily, Revelation ends with what is commonly called “the New Jerusalem,” or, more generally, a rebuilding of the world only after it has been completely destroyed. The War Scroll, by contrast, concludes with the same old world made better.

The biblical Book of Daniel, too, is eschatological in nature and was probably written around the same time as the War Scroll. Daniel also refers to current events, evil rulers (Antiochus IV in particular), the plight of the local people, and the promise of better times. And there are other, similar works as well, as we saw in the introduction.

In other words, the Dead Sea Sect was not unique in hoping for better times. With all of these eschatological works floating around, the War Scroll stands out not because of the primary question it asks (what will happen in the end?) or its genre (a cosmic battle) but because of the details of its answer, which set the Qumran community apart: Good and evil are evenly matched in the world, eventually God will help good prevail, and this will happen in this world.

These various eschatological works created more than a little controversy. The Book of Revelation, with its imagery of the New Jerusalem, barely made it into the New Testament (and it’s not in the Old Testament). Even a cursory look at the book reveals how it seems to conflict with the generally pacifistic nature of the rest of the New Testament. For example, regarding the leader of heaven’s army riding on a white horse, the Book of Revelation describes, “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations … he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. He has a name written on his cloak and on his thigh, ‘King of kings and Lord of lords.’” Striking down nations and the fury and wrath of God are a far cry from the Gospels, as, for example, the famous passages from Matthew and Luke about “turning the other cheek,” in which Jesus insists that his followers offer no resistance to evil.

And we’ve already seen that the Book of Daniel has been appropriated differently by Jews and Christians. Christians see messages in the book that are consistent with Christ, resurrection, and the end of times. So in the Christian canon, Daniel is a major prophet, on a par with Isaiah and Jeremiah. Jewish tradition does not see Daniel as a prophet at all, and the book is placed along with Esther (which, in the Jewish version, doesn’t even have God’s name in it) and other more clearly historical books, like Ezra.

The Dead Sea Sect, like the early Christians, saw Daniel as a prophet. And in addition, fragments of a work known as “The New Jerusalem” were found in Caves 4 and 11. These texts mirror the New Jerusalem in Revelation. This broad collection of eschatological works is one more way in which the inhabitants of Qumran demonstrate their unique form of early Judaism that was similar in some ways to what the Rabbis were building but also to what the early Christians had in mind.

The Community Rule and Damascus Document tell us directly about the Dead Sea Sect. The War Scroll gives us information about one issue that was important to them. Other Dead Sea Scrolls expand our knowledge in other ways, such as giving us better insight into the original text of the Bible.

For example, the text of Samuel as we have it in our current versions of the Bible is clearly incomplete. 1 Samuel 11:1 starts with a particularly violent passage:

Nahash the Ammonite went up and besieged a place called Jabesh-Gilead. All the men of Jabesh said to Nahash, “Make a pact with us and we will serve you.” But Nahash the Ammonite said, “This is how I will make a pact with you, by gouging out your every right eye.…”

This eye gouging comes seemingly out of nowhere. This is our first introduction in the text to Nahash, and we read only that he is an Ammonite. Then he’s suddenly gouging out eyes. Why? And why do the men of Jabesh want to make a pact?

It turns out that there’s a whole passage missing from our text in the Bible. Fortunately, we find it in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular in 4QSama, which contains the text of the book of Samuel. There, 1 Samuel 1:11 starts as follows:

Nahash, king of the children of Ammon, was the one who severely oppressed the children of Gad and the children of Reuben, and gouged out their every right eye and visited terror and dread on Israel; not one man among the children of Israel was left beyond the Jordan whose right eye was not gouged out by Nahash, king of the children of Ammon. Only 7,000 men left the children of Ammon and came to Jabesh-Gilead. And it was after roughly a month that Nahash the Ammonite alighted and besieged Jabesh-Gilead. All the men of Jabesh said to Nahash the Ammonite, “Make a pact with us and we will serve you.” But Nahash the Ammonite said, “This is how I will make a pact with you, by gouging out your every right eye.…”

Unlike the biblical account, the Dead Sea Scrolls introduce us to Nahash as an oppressive ruler. Then we read details of his cruelty, so it makes perfect sense that the people of Jabesh feel the need to make a pact with him, and it is similarly in character that he in turn responds by menacing them.

Furthermore, if we look carefully, we can actually see a remnant of the missing text in the Bible. Chapter 10 in the traditional Hebrew ends with the bizarre, “he was like a silent one.” The line is so out of place that some translations simply ignore it.

A complex bit of Hebrew explains what’s going on. By changing one Hebrew letter in “he was like a silent one” to an almost identical one (a resh to a daled) we get “it was after about a month.” (Though these two phrases seem unrelated in English, they are almost the same in Hebrew, because: “he” and “it” are the same in Hebrew; “like” and “about” are the same in Hebrew; and the difference between the roots that form “silent” and “month” is only one letter, a resh versus a daled.) The phrase “it was after about a month” comes from the full version of the story, the one we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In short, the biblical text is missing a few lines and, in addition, has a mistaken substitution of one letter for another similar one. We find the original in the Dead Sea Scrolls. (As it happens, the Septuagint, which we turn to in the next chapter, translates this line from the original, uncorrupted line as “after about a month.”) But for the Dead Sea Scrolls, we might never understand this passage in Samuel.

Like other groups of people—most notably the Jews who would create the collection known as the Old Testament and the Christians who would do the same for the New Testament, the members of the Dead Sea Sect had to decide which documents they wanted to highlight. What did they choose?

Except for Esther, we have found copies of all or part of every book of the Old Testament at Qumran, and we don’t know if the exclusion of Esther is happenstance or if the sect didn’t know about it. But we also have found much more.

Particularly interesting is the Temple Scroll, which IDF soldiers recovered from under Kando’s floor on behalf of the archaeologist/military adviser Yadin. The Temple Scroll reads like an account of God talking directly to someone, presumably Moses. (Hebrew grammar makes it possible to know that it is a single male person, not a woman and not a group, that is being addressed.) And it covers much of the same material as Deuteronomy, summarizing material from Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, as well as offering new information about how the Temple should be built and operated.

Many of the concepts and much of the language in the Temple Scroll are clearly reminiscent of Deuteronomy. For example, Deuteronomy (16:18–19) teaches, “You shall appoint magistrates and officials for your tribes, in all the gates that the Lord your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice. You shall not pervert justice: you shall show no partiality; you shall not take bribes, for bribes blind the eyes of the discerning and upset the plea of the just.” And the Temple Scroll has the similar, “You shall appoint magistrates and officials in all your gates and they shall govern the people with due justice. They shall show no partiality and they shall not take bribes and they shall not pervert justice, for bribes pervert justice.” Both texts follow up with the famous line, “justice, justice shall you pursue” and then move on to the prohibition against a Canaanite religious object called an Ashera. (The reason to pursue “justice, justice” in both books is “so that you live.” But the Temple Scroll, unlike Deuteronomy, expands on this theme, “The one who takes a bribe or perverts due justice shall be put to death. Do not be afraid of killing him. Do not behave in your land in the way that the nations do,” establishing an Ashera and otherwise behaving in pagan ways.)

It is tempting to see this as a book that is “similar to but not part of the Bible.” But while it is certainly that for us, it may have functioned exactly like Deuteronomy, maybe even instead of Deuteronomy, for the Dead Sea Sect, among other possibilities. It could have been no different from Numbers. Scholars still disagree about what the Temple Scroll was in its time.

Other books, too, are similar to what we now have in the Bible, and they raise similar questions. For example, the Old Testament has exactly 150 Psalms, organized into three sets of fifty. But many more psalms were found in Qumran. For instance, 11Q5 contains parts of many of the final fifty psalms from the familiar Book of Psalms but also new psalms that are not in the Bible. This raises the interesting possibility that our current collection is a “best of” compilation chosen from a wider collection. For example, one psalm newly discovered in Qumran, now called the “Hymn to the Creator,” starts off, “Great and holy is the Lord, the Holy of Holies, from generation to generation. Before him walks glory and after him the roar of many waters.… He separates light from darkness. He created the dawn … and when all the angels saw it, they celebrated, because he had showed them something they had not known.…” Another new psalm begins, “It is not the maggot that praises you, and your kindness cannot be extolled by a worm. The living, the living praise you…” (It is perhaps easier to understand why this one didn’t make it into the top 150.)

Some of these “noncanonical” psalms were already known from elsewhere, such as “Psalm 154,” found in the ancient Greek translation of the Bible called the Septuagint. Others, like the two we just saw, are known only from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In general, though, the distinction between “the Psalms” and “noncanonical psalms” reflects modern bias more than ancient reality. They simply had more psalms in Qumran than we do now.

More generally, the Dead Sea Sect seems to have had a lot of holy books, only some of which made their way into what we now call the Bible. Some of these books may have been specific to Qumran, but some may have been read more widely and only through accident left out of the Bible. We already know that some of the material from Qumran (like Psalm 151, which, until Qumran, was only known from its Greek translation) was popular outside the desert community.

This is more confirmation that there was a broad collection of holy writings in the centuries leading up to the creation of the Bible, and only some of those writings made the cut. Sometimes political or theological considerations were at play, but other times it was simply a matter of chance.

Through its writings, we’ve learned a lot about the Dead Sea Sect. Its members were Jews who were devoted to Judaism as they saw it. They lived in the shadow of tyrants and were unhappy with the power structure in Jerusalem.

It is common to equate the Dead Sea Sect with a group of people known as the Essenes (a generally enigmatic group of Jews), among others, but none of the ancient writers describes the Essenes in detail. So the claim that the Dead Sea Sect are the Essenes is mostly just a matter of equating two unknowns with each other.

Despite what we do know, then, we are left with a vexing set of questions: What was the connection between the inhabitants of Qumran and more mainstream schools of thought? Did they compose the scrolls they kept? Why were these people living in the desert? Or did some of them live in cities?

So on one hand the scrolls are both fascinating in their own right and instructive about the state of monotheism in the years leading up to the birth of Jesus and the destruction of the Second Temple. But in solving some mysteries, they have also created new ones. Though who knows? Perhaps at this very moment an animal in the desert is leading a child to a whole new window into the past.

Either way, the Dead Sea Scrolls represent an alternative biblical tradition that was all but unknown for about two thousand years. Next we look at another alternative, which is similar since it reveals debate and internal conflict about what the Bible should be but also different since it has been front and center since it was first composed.