AMONG THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS ARE THE OLDEST COPIES OF the Hebrew Bible that we have. Before their discovery, the oldest version of the Bible we had was from a thousand years later, found tucked away in the back room of a synagogue in Cairo, Egypt. Other scrolls contain the basic religious documents and other writings of an apocalyptic sect of Jews, who may or may not have been responsible for the biblical texts.
The earliest of these scrolls dates to the third century BCE; the latest dates to the first century CE. They were hidden in caves on the cliffs by the western side of the Dead Sea, in what is now Israel, most likely during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome, between the years 66 and 70 CE.
Although there is much debate about the scrolls, the majority of scholars subscribe to a two-part theory: first, that the scrolls constituted the library of the nearby settlement called Qumran; and second, that the inhabitants of Qumran hid them in the caves, intending to retrieve them after the revolt was over and the Romans had left. The revolt was put down, however; the settlement was abandoned; and the inhabitants never came back for the scrolls.
We’re not certain who lived at Qumran. Most scholars believe that it might have been the Essenes, who were one of the three main groups of Jews at the time (the others were the Sadducees and the Pharisees). We know a little bit about the Essenes from ancient authors, such as Philo, Pliny the Elder, and Josephus. We are told that they were celibate and didn’t have any personal possessions—in other words, almost like monks in a monastery. Since Pliny places them near Ein Gedi, which is right in this area, it has been suggested that Qumran was a monastic settlement and the Essenes wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. Both of those points are debated, though; for instance, it has been suggested that Qumran may have actually been a Roman villa or a fortress, rather than the equivalent of a monastery.
Whoever lived here, they were inhabiting—literally—one of the hottest, driest places imaginable that they could have chosen, with less than fifty millimeters of annual rainfall. At thirteen hundred feet below sea level, the Dead Sea is the lowest place on Earth. The Jordan River flows into it, but there is no exit for the water. The only way out is through evaporation, which leaves the salts and minerals behind. As a result, the Dead Sea is one of the saltiest bodies of water on the planet, even more so than the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and the entire region is among the hottest places that I have ever been.
The first of these scrolls, of which there are now more than nine hundred, were found in 1947 by three young Bedouin boys, usually reported to have been cousins. They were watering their flocks of sheep and goats at nearby Ras Feshka when one of the boys wandered away from the others, perhaps in search of a stray goat.
Bored, he picked up a stone and tried to throw it into a cave that he could see high up in the cliff. After several attempts, one stone flew straight into the cave and he heard a loud crash and a shattering of pottery.
Since it was getting dark, he went back to their temporary camp and told the other two boys what had happened. But when the boys investigated the cave the next day, they were disappointed that there was no gold to be found. Instead, as they said later, there were ten jars in the cave, one of which was now broken. Most of the jars were filled with dirt, but one had several rolled-up scrolls in it, made of leather. They took the scrolls but left the jars in the cave.
Several weeks later, the Bedouin group to which the boys belonged made their way to the outskirts of Bethlehem and brought the scrolls to the leather and shoe shop of a man named Kando. He also sold antiquities and purchased the scrolls thinking that he could turn them into sandals if he couldn’t sell them as ancient artifacts. An alternate version of the story is that Kando bought four scrolls and another Bethlehem antiquities dealer, a man named Salahi, bought three others. In any event, news of the scrolls reached a Jewish scholar in Jerusalem named Eliezer Sukenik. He traveled to Bethlehem by bus and purchased three scrolls—either from Kando or Salahi—and returned to Jerusalem just hours before the 1948 war broke out.
When Sukenik translated the three scrolls, he was startled to find that one of them was a copy of the Book of Isaiah from the Hebrew Bible. He was the first person to have read this scroll in two thousand years. To his astonishment, it was nearly identical to another copy of Isaiah from the synagogue in Cairo that was dated almost a thousand years later, to the tenth century CE. It differed from our version today only by some thirteen or so minor variants, probably all the result of scribal copying errors over the centuries.
One of the other two scrolls, called the Thanksgiving Scroll, contained the previously unknown hymns and prayers of thanks of a community. The third scroll was also unknown. Called the War Scroll, it records the fact that the inhabitants of Qumran, or whomever the scroll belonged to, were waiting for Armageddon—for a final battle between good and evil. They saw themselves as a fighting force, calling themselves the Sons of Light who would be fighting the Sons of Darkness. The scroll outlines how they were to act and live their lives, all the while planning for this battle. Of course, one could say that the battle never happened, but I would argue that, at least for them it did, if one wants to call the Romans the Sons of Darkness.
Soon thereafter, four more scrolls appeared on the antiquities market. Archbishop Samuel, who was with the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, was selling them. He had bought them from Kando, the antiquities dealer in Bethlehem, reportedly for $250. And then he offered them to Sukenik, but they were unable to reach an agreement.
So, what to do? In January 1949, the archbishop smuggled the four scrolls into the United States, where they were secretly kept in a Syrian Orthodox church in New Jersey for several years. Then, on June 1, 1954, he placed an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal that read “‘The Four Dead Sea Scrolls’—Biblical Manuscripts dating back to at least 200 BCE are for sale. This would be an ideal gift for an educational or religious institution by an individual or group. Box F 206, The Wall Street Journal.”
It just so happened that Yigael Yadin, the preeminent Israeli archaeologist, was in the United States at that time, lecturing at Johns Hopkins University. The advertisement was brought to his attention and, with the help of a middleman from New York, Yadin purchased the four scrolls for the State of Israel for a quarter of a million dollars.
Thus, the seven scrolls were reunited. They are now kept at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, in their own quarters known as the Shrine of the Book. But the story gets even better, because Yigael Yadin had changed his original name at some point. His birth name was Yigael Sukenik—he was Eliezer Sukenik’s son. The son was able to buy the scrolls that had eluded his father, which seems very fitting.
Of the four scrolls that Yadin purchased from Archbishop Samuel, one was another copy of the Book of Isaiah, in even better shape than the one that his father had purchased. Another was a copy of what is now called the Manual of Discipline. It contains the rules and regulations for the community to which it belonged, which most people assume is the settlement at Qumran.
The third scroll was a commentary on the Book of Habakkuk from the Hebrew Bible. Habakkuk was one of the minor prophets and the book that is attributed to him is not very long, but this commentary is very important. It presents us with three figures—one called the Teacher of Righteousness and his two opponents, who are called the Wicked Priest and the Man of the Lie. None of these figures has been definitely identified, although this scroll has been the focus of much scholarly debate over the years.
As for the fourth scroll that Yadin acquired, it is known as the Genesis Apocryphon. Written in Aramaic, the colloquial language of the Jews of those centuries, rather than in Hebrew, it is an alternate version of the Book of Genesis, different from the version that we have in our current Bibles. The scroll records a supposed conversation between Noah and his father Lamech—which is a conversation that we don’t find in our Bibles today.
News of these remarkable documents shook the world of biblical scholarship. It also set off a race between the archaeologists and the Bedouin pastoralists who lived near the Dead Sea, searching for more caves during the 1950s and 1960s. And they found them, one after the other—at least eleven caves in all. By the time that they were done, they had found multiple copies of nearly every book from the Hebrew Bible, except for the Book of Esther. They also found numerous other scrolls that were not religious in nature.
Cave 7 had only scrolls that were written in Greek, the language of commerce and of the occupying Roman forces (along with Latin), rather than in Hebrew or in Aramaic, but it is Caves 3 and 4 that have attracted the most interest. Cave 3 contained a scroll that wasn’t written on leather or any other type of parchment, but on sheets of copper. Archaeologists found the scroll in 1952, broken into two parts. In both scholarly and popular literature, it is referred to as the Copper Scroll.
There has been a lot written about this scroll, including a lot of nonsense, because it’s a treasure map. Plain and simple, no bones about it, it’s a treasure map, like the kind a pirate would leave, with “X marks the spot.” Except that it’s not an X in each case; instead it’s a detailed set of instructions to sixty-four different treasures.
When they first found the Copper Scroll, which is now kept in a museum in Amman, Jordan, the archaeologists could not unroll it by themselves. In fact, they couldn’t unroll it using any means that they knew of, and so they simply cut it up. They took it to Manchester, England, where it was cut into twenty-three small sections, using a high-speed saw. The cuts went right through the middle of some of the letters, but on the whole the technique worked, so that the rolled-up scrolls now could be laid flat, albeit looking like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, but all approximately the same size and shape.
Most of the Copper Scroll is written in Hebrew, but there also are some Greek letters and what appear to be numbers as well. But it is the directions that are most bizarre and that explain, at least to me, why none of the sixty-four treasures listed on the scroll has ever been located.
The first set, for example, says, “In the ruin which is in the valley, pass under the steps leading to the East forty cubits [. . .]: [there is] a chest of money and its total: the weight of seventeen talents. In the sepulchral monument, in the third course: one hundred gold ingots. In the great cistern of the courtyard of the peristyle, in a hollow in the floor covered with sediment, in front of the upper opening: nine hundred talents.” But which ruin? Which valley? Which cistern? Which peristyle? It’s not clear at all which valley, monument, or cistern is meant.
The Copper Scroll continues like this for column after column after column of text. No wonder nobody has ever found any of the treasures. It’s also not clear at all where the treasures were from or whether they were even real. If they were real, then they were most likely the annual tithes that people were sending to the Temple in Jerusalem, except that during the First Jewish Revolt it was not safe to send such tithes there, so they were hidden instead. Still, one would think that if such were the case, then something should have been found long ago. That’s why other scholars suggest that they were found long ago—but back in antiquity, soon after they were buried. It remains a mystery that various amateur archaeologists try to solve from time to time, without any luck.
There was another scroll that was found by the Bedouin in Cave 11. It made its way to Kando’s shop in Bethlehem, just like some of the first ones. It was initially offered for sale, apparently via a clergyman in Virginia acting as a middleman, but then it came into Yigael Yadin’s hands after the Six-Day War in 1967. The main part of it had been kept in a shoebox, with other fragments in a smaller cigar box. When it was very carefully unrolled and the various fragments reattached, it turned out to be what is now known as the Temple Scroll. It has explicit details about the construction and appearance of a Jewish temple that was never built, complete with regulations about sacrifices and various temple practices. Yadin eventually published the whole story of its acquisition, and the scroll itself remains an object of intense study today.
It was Cave 4, however, that created a real mess in the world of archaeology and scholarship, for the scrolls found in that cave had all fallen from the shelves where they had originally been and had disintegrated into a mass of fragments on the floor. The original scrolls were now in tens of thousands of fragments, some smaller than a fingernail. The original scholarly committee that was formed to piece the fragments back together and publish them worked on them for more than forty years, with few other scholars even allowed to see them. This created all sorts of ill will, not to mention conspiracy theories about what might be contained in the texts that the scholars were painstakingly putting back together.
In the end, the bottleneck was broken from several different directions, almost all at once, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One involved photographs of the scroll fragments, which were left at one scholar’s front door by someone who still remains anonymous. Another involved a professor and his graduate student who reconstructed what was on the scroll fragments by working from a set of index cards that they had been given, each of which had a single word from a scroll on it, along with the word that appeared before that word and the word that appeared after that word in the original scroll. This is known as a compendium, copies of which were given out by the scroll team to trusted scholars. This professor and his graduate student created a computer program that matched the cards up and reconstructed the original contents of the fragments with about 90 percent accuracy.
The most important revelation was that other photographs of all the fragments had been taken at one point, unbeknownst to most people, and were stored in a vault for safekeeping at the Huntington Museum Library in Los Angeles. Once this fact was revealed and the Huntington declared in 1991 that anyone with proper scholarly credentials could access the microfilm copies of them, the floodgates opened. A new group of scholars was assembled to work on the fragments and volume after volume has since appeared in rapid succession. Some of the most interesting developments came about because women and Jews were among the new scholars working on the texts; the original team had been all male and all Christian. The new scholars brought new backgrounds and new approaches to the study of the scrolls. New techniques also were used on the scroll fragments, such as taking infrared photographs, which allowed for much clearer reading of some of the writing.
Studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, ranging from the whole ones to the completely fragmentary, has become a cottage industry within academia. An immense number of publications have now appeared, from the most scholarly to the most popularizing. And the intense study has yielded some remarkable observations—for example, that the earliest fragment dates to the late third century BCE and is from the Book of Samuel.
There is another fragment from the Book of Samuel that contains a passage that was missing from our copies of the Bible. Here, in 1 Samuel 10–11, two paragraphs in a row begin with the same person’s name—Nahash, king of the Ammonites. Most likely a scribe recopying the manuscript looked up after writing the first paragraph and then, when looking down again, saw the same man’s name at the beginning of the second paragraph and, thinking that he had already copied that paragraph, went on to the next paragraph. In fact, he had only copied the first paragraph, not both. As a result, our modern Bibles were missing that second paragraph. Many versions today have now restored that missing paragraph, on the basis of this discovery in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The archaeologists found other caves in the region of the Dead Sea that had remnants of scrolls and ancient writing, as well as other objects, but they are probably unrelated to the main body of the Dead Sea Scrolls, since the remains found in them are from other periods.
One of the best known is a cave in a wadi, or canyon or valley, called Nahal Mishmar. In what is now known as the Cave of the Treasure, archaeologists found a tremendous hoard of about four hundred copper objects dating to the Chalcolithic period, about 3500 BCE. A number of them were maceheads, more likely ceremonial than functional; others look like crowns and scepters, though it is not clear whether this is how they were actually used.
Two other caves are even more famous. Located in a wadi called Nahal Hever, which is about twenty-five miles south of Qumran, they are called the Cave of Horrors and the Cave of Letters. One is located in the cliff face that makes up the northern side of the wadi, the other is in a similar location on the southern side. Both had a Roman siege camp built on the top of the cliff directly above them and both are on such a steep slope that it is best to reach them now by precarious rope ladders.
Both caves were first discovered in 1953, but were not truly investigated and excavated until 1960 and 1961, as part of an effort by teams led by four distinguished Israeli archaeologists, including Yadin.
The first one, the Cave of Horrors, is called that because of the grisly discoveries that the archaeologists made in there. They found forty skeletons in the cave, all dating to the time of the Second Jewish Revolt against Roman rule, known as the Bar Kokhba Revolt. The rebellion lasted from 132 to 135 CE and was unsuccessful. The bodies found in this cave are thought to have been refugees or rebels who were unable to get out or escape from the cave because of the Romans camped directly above them, no doubt very deliberately. They may well have starved to death, since there was no evidence of trauma, but we may never know the real story of what happened in the Cave of Horrors.
In contrast, we know an amazing amount about the Cave of Letters. Yadin was in charge of exploring this cave in 1960 and 1961, although it had already been fairly thoroughly examined by archaeologists in 1953. It turned out to be extremely rich, with finds from three periods. One period was the Chalcolithic, from about 3500 BCE, contemporary with the Cave of the Treasure in Nahal Mishmar. A second period was the first century CE, perhaps during the time of the First Jewish Revolt when all the scrolls had been hidden in the caves closer to Qumran. The third period was the second century CE—that is, the time of the Second Jewish Revolt.
The cave has two narrow entrances, both leading into what is called Hall A. In the hall, archaeologists found a fragment from a scroll with part of the Book of Psalms, reading “O Lord, who shall sojourn in thy tents?” (Psalms 15:1–2). Using a metal detector, they also found a number of additional objects, including metal vessels and coins. From Hall A, a narrow tunnel leads to Halls B and C. It’s in Hall C that the most important, and grisly, finds were made, including a basket of human skulls found in a crevice along with a skeleton wrapped in a blanket and a child buried in a box lined with leather. In the farthest reaches of the hall, they found correspondence written by Bar Kokhba (in which he is called by his real name, Bar Kosiba). There also were metal keys and a basket made of palm fronds, which was filled with objects such as a mirror, keys, leather sandals, wooden bowls, bronze jugs, and—perhaps most important—an archive of letters wrapped in a bundle of rags belonging to a woman named Babatha, also dating to the time of Bar Kokhba and the Second Jewish Revolt.
It turned out that there were at least three men, eight women, and six children whose skeletons were found in Hall C within the cave. The correspondence written by Bar Kokhba was on wooden slates all wrapped up in papyri; one of them read “Simeon bar Kosiba, President [or prince] over Israel.” There is an unconfirmed story that when Yadin went to the president of Israel to personally tell him of the discovery, he saluted and said, “Message from your predecessor, sir.”
The material in Babatha’s archive included thirty-five papyrus rolls, which were mostly legal documents regarding property that she had inherited from her father and the guardianship of her son. David Harris, a photographer who was there on the day that they were discovered, later wrote, “as Yadin checked to make sure he had missed nothing, his hand touched a bundle of rags. When he brought it out, he could see a hoard of papyrus rolls wrapped together, what we now call the Babatha archive, describing everyday life during the Bar Kosiba period. Thirty-five years later I remember that wonderful and exciting experience as the greatest in my life as a photographer.”
The discoveries in the Cave of the Treasure, the Cave of Horrors, and the Cave of Letters contributed dramatic new material to the field of biblical archaeology. It was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, that absolutely revolutionized the field of biblical studies by shedding light on the Hebrew Bible according to texts that date more than two thousand years ago. From their accidental discovery, to the intrigue of their trade on the antiquities market, right through to the academic controversies they have ignited, all these elements make the Dead Sea Scrolls one of the most enthralling archaeological finds of the twentieth century.