Faculty Lecture: The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography

on April 12th 1948 the following announcement appeared in the Yale Daily News of all places it also appeared in the New York Times The Times of London and a few lesser places like that but there was a reason why it appeared in the Yale Daily News from the shelves of an almost forgotten monastery library the earliest known manuscript of the entire Biblical Book of Isaiah from the Old Testament has been discovered in Palestine it was announced yesterday by Yale professor Miller burrows the director of the American School of Oriental research at Jerusalem now I know that some of you at least remember Miller burrows he tossed here up until about 1956 or there abouts 57 and he happened to be the director of the American school in Jerusalem that year he actually wasn't there by accident he was just gone somewhere for the weekend with these folks showed up on the doorstep with these scrolls but fortunately he had there as one of his assistants a recently L PhD named John Trevor who had a hobby of photography and Trevor took the first photographs of Dead Sea Scrolls the announcements that appeared in the Yale Daily News which was identical with the one in the New York Times and other places actually was quite inaccurate it said that these manuscripts had been found in a library and Burroughs afterwards denied the fact was what he have said or written in his press release and apparently had gotten changed somewhere and the reason it got changed was that some people didn't want it known that these scale scrolls were out there in caves where anybody could go look but of course it wasn't in a library this had been found famously by a few Shepherd boys allegedly allegedly chasing their goats and through its toad into the cave that heard the sound of pottery breaking and that's the story at least it is known though that the Bedouins did like to poke around in caves to see what they might find and all the more so of course after this the first batch of Scrolls than the three brought in created a stir largely because as mentioned here of ven the complete text of the Book of Isaiah and that's one of the things I want to talk about this morning is you know what have we learned about the Bible from these goals another aspect that was highlighted by burrows was that one of these takes one that was very well preserved contained what he called a manual of discipline for some kind of secular religious order and he said probably the Essenes that was the first time anybody mentions the Essenes in public at least they thought there's a Jewish scholar named sukenik who had gotten a different batch of the schools had gotten originally seven and some of them were shown to sukenik through a wire fence originally and then passed to him and he was carrying them around in a briefcase for a while but and he claimed afterwards that he was the first to identify there to suggest that these came from the Essenes but in fact it seems to have occurred to several people independently I will come back to that a little bit later to the place Oh something happened here step is here yeah sachin still back there i went no I got locked into my head Oh everybody wanted to get you yeah there we go sort of it's a little small sorry but just to give you a rough idea indeed you can see where Jerusalem is commanders make there at the top of the Dead Sea how many of you have ever been there okay well then you know the scene pretty much I would think that's the scene oh very barren landscape with these caves up and down the shore there it was well known but there you can see the the where Qumran is they're sticking out even though it's not so clear I think in the photo it was well known that there were ruins there and they were known to be ruins from the biblical period nobody had paid that much attention to them and even when the scrolls were first found they were found about a mile away and it was a while before anybody put two and two together and figured that they might have something to do with that site and then eventually they started an excavation of the sect and when that excavation was going on you know in one of the the pauses in the excavation the Bedouin got back to work and found k4 which was right there k4 is the one out on the lion's paw so to speak but it was right they herbicide the site and it was in that that they found this truth of the world's biggest jigsaw puzzle all these banner scripts decayed into little fragments and this would keep people busy ever since trying to put them together and decipher them know like all great archaeological discoveries it wasn't found by the excavation it was out by people who are going around on the side and a few more were found up to the last discovery was about 1955 now what was in this trove total about 930 manuscripts I say about because Counting the manuscripts is not an exact science it's not sure you know further this little scrap and that little scrap prepared to pass a manuscript in some cases but it's in that ballpark at least of these again numbers with the little caveats 750 of these in Hebrew 150 in Aramaic and 27 in Greek on the basis of the writing you can say that they were written anywhere from the 3rd century BC to the late first century of the Common Era we have a firm cutoff point because the site of command was destroyed by the Romans is 68 the bulk of them actually come from the 1st century BC and with that you can perhaps get an indication of why there was some excitement about this because prior to the discovery of the scrolls we had no literature in Hebrew or Aramaic between the book of Ben Sira which is dated to the first quarter of the second century BC and the Mishnah which was the sages about 200 AD in other words we had no primary sources in Hebrew or Aramaic from the time of Jesus or a hundred years on either side of us all and here you suddenly got almost a thousand manuscripts so a huge trove of literature from a very crucial point in time now one caveat about them was these were the scrolls of else Perrault said of a sect or religious community worthy is all to be taken as oddball well you know at times people have looked at them that way but it's not a realistic way to look at them because even nobody is secretary at all the time let's say and these people whatever however sectarian their views might be had an awful lot of literature that was shared in common with the other Jews of the time beginning of course with the Bible also you know the idea took hold and you will still find it in a lot of books that but this was an isolated community and if I can go back again here well that's the the site and you can see there is a fairly substantial settlement right down by the Dead Sea if we're going into that in more detail we talked a lot about the reservoirs because keeping water is a major concern in that part in that kind of a geographical location but now it's a fairly isolated site if you like but it's not that far from Jerusalem nowadays you can drive it in half an hour it's not that far from Jericho it's not that far from several Hasmonean fortresses and we know they didn't get along with the Hasmoneans but I think it was a mistake ever to think but the whole sect lived at Qumran hey this actually is clear and again if we were doing this in a bit more detail we could go through the evidence for us but it's clear that they had communities of at least 10 according to Philo and Josephus assuming now that these are the Essenes that we're talking about there were about 4,000 of them at any given time the most that would have lived at Qumran maybe 200 some people would put the estimate a whole lot less so they had a lot of communities scattered around the country now you will also see the scrolls often refer to as the ancient library of Qumran and I do believe there was a library at Qumran I do not believe that it was a library this would have included a thousand honest the libraries were very rare in the ancient world the wonders Alexandria sure was a huge collection but come gran ain't no Alexandria in any manner of speaking and the idea you know that you would have that many manuscripts in such an isolated location is a bit hard to believe so my own theory and what this collection was is that at the time of the Jewish revolt against Rome and actually it may have happened in two stages because there were disturbances around the time of the birth of Jesus - around pertaining to the death of Herod at least and there may have been Scrolls taken there more than once but my idea is that the the Essene communities around the country when they saw that the Romans were coming picked up their Scrolls and headed for the desert and this was a big Essene settlement in an isolated location some people think it was a mother house that isn't necessarily the case but it was a good place to go hide your Scrolls where you had friendly locals to help you do it and I think that is how this collection got it made but it contains a fair number of sectarian works but also a considerable number of works that are in sectarian at all in the case of the Bible is included every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther you know Esther in fact was kind of dodgy at the edges of the Khadem until well into the Christian era and it's in some lists and not in others some of the biblical books are barely represented Frank Ross who is one of the the editors used to say that if there had been one more hungry worm we wouldn't have Chronicles now on the other hand there were books like in the Book of Enoch the book of Jubilees where you had 10 or 11 copies now if you were to guess on the basis of that which would you say was canonical which was regarded as Scripture but now you know you don't have clear statements we do not get a list of canonical books at Qumran but we can tell that they certainly had the Torah the Pentateuch they certainly had the prophets and we know that these were authoritative because they were commentaries on them and they had the sounds now beyond that they had a huge collection of literature that claimed to be inspired a lot of a pseudo prophetic or apocalyptic kind of literature but then there were paraphrases of the biblical texts and all sorts of things interestingly enough what we do not find in the collection laundry lists it almost every other discovery you will get receipts for sales you'll get marriage documents that kind of thing none of that in the Dead Sea Scrolls it's a literary collection of religious texts so so you know as far as the Canon of the Bible goes we know that they had what we would regard as a kind of core Canon and we know they had a lot of literature the claim to be inspired and whether they even drew a line is not at all clear even in Ben Sira at the beginning of the second century and still in the New Testament you'll get references to the law the prophets and sometimes the Psalms but that is as far as they go then the writings which Ben Sira also mentioned seems to have been an open-ended category and it was only later that that would be pinned down now what we learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls about and about the Bible about the canon was probably less unsettling to a lot of people that was we've learned about the text now okay when you open your Bible you probably take us on faith that's what you see in front of you it's the Bible right I mean it's you don't worry too much how did they know that this is what it said actually what you will guess if you open a Hebrew Bible now it is is a transcription of medieval manuscripts now the earliest of these was a little before 1000 you know that's what 2,000 years after the time of David a long long time after any of it was written there are other witnesses to the text that we're all ready before the scrolls you also have the Bible as translated into Greek this was done probably in the 3rd 2nd centuries BCE the oldest Greek manuscripts from maybe the 3rd 4th centuries of the Common Era so considerably older but the Hebrew manuscripts are the identical well no actually they are in some cases but in some cases the Greek is a much shorter text and then in addition to this there was also a Samaritan Pentateuch which correspondant largely with the Jewish Pentateuch but had a tendency to harmonize things you know where there were differences between one book and another now that is what we learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls is that all these forms of the Hebrew text were current and in circulation down to the turn of the era there are Hebrew texts that correspond to the shorter form of the books that you get in the Greek there are Hebrew takes that correspond to what the Samaritans had without the distinctively Samaritan touches the most distinctive Samaritan touch was that they say that the place where the Lord had said his name the one place where you should worship was Mount Gerizim but at Qumran they had Hebrew texts the corresponded quite well to the Samaritan texts without that and what that means is that the the text was still in flux down to the turn of the era now it should be said also that what we have in the Hebrew Bible the so called Massa rezzak text was also well attested that was also in play so that you had different texts nowadays you may have different translations and actually if you look into them they don't always correspond exactly if you compare say the NIV or the Living Bible with the NRSV the differences can be significant but not nearly as substantial as the differences between these texts that you had circulating in Hebrew now a former colleague of both of us Gino Rick who has worked a lot at on the scroll and the biblical text of the scrolls says that you know what people regard a scripture is the book rather than anyone for another yeah what you regardless the Bible is not the NRSV it's you know the Bible in any of its forms and people have a surprising tolerance of variation beyond so you know even people who will tell you that the Bible is literally inspired they like to have different literally inspired takes depending at the point they want to make and a given occasion and so it was also in antiquity to add to the confusion on that one of the genres of texts that you get in the the scrolls is what we call rewritten Bible now the rewritten Bible is a paraphrase of the biblical text a number of these were very well known one of them the book of Jubilees was canonical in Ethiopia and has survived in full only in Ethiopia but was they found in Hebrew in the Dead Sea Scrolls if retells the story of Genesis basically and a little bit into Exodus and it does so to make Adam and Abraham shape up and observe the Jewish law as it was known in the time when Jew police was written in other words it had them already worrying about purity for example in the Garden of Eden now that's a case but Jubilees at least is upfront about us and it will refer to the fee the former torah telling you that this isn't the first formulation of it one of the biggest texts found in the Dead Sea Scrolls was the temple scroll it's a huge take 66 columns and the several copies are but and this was an expensive thing to copy it was not something people would just have copied for fun even apart from the content of it now this was like Jubilees a retelling mostly of the laws of the Pentateuch but in this case it doesn't refer to any former torah or first torah and it is presented as God speaking to Moses now how are you supposed to take that my assumption would be that whoever put this out was claiming that this is what God said to Moses and this should be your Bible it doesn't mean that they wanted you to throw out Deuteronomy and Exodus because it doesn't repeat the Ten Commandments for example so it's obviously assuming a certain amount but it is nonetheless putting forward a text as a rival version of the Torah a lot of it actually is just smoothing out the differences between Deuteronomy and Leviticus but nonetheless it has its own particular ax to grind the interesting thing is though this was a book that was put in play either in the 2nd or 1st century BCE and you know some people bought some people evidently accepted us but at the same time it didn't catch on sufficiently that we would now have it in our Bibles and that I think tells you a lot about the way in which the Bible came to be you know Scripture is always the result of human decisions as to what scene and what isn't and in the Dead Sea Scrolls you see that process in action even more confusing there were texts that were originally identified as rewritten Exodus rewritten Pentateuch and then as the discussion went on people concluded actually the people who put this out probably just meant it as a different edition of the Pentateuch in other words people were messing with the text of the Bible if you have two passages in scripture that seem to contradict each other surely this is not what the Lord intended and so if you're a good and insightful scribe you make a few little changes here and there and this process was still going on and had not been finalized by the turn of the era now what you make of that you know depends I suppose on your theology of inspiration but it certainly complicates any of literal inspiration because it leaves you with the question of which letters are inspired anyway that's one of the areas where you have a major contribution of the scrolls now say a little bit then about what do they tell us about Judaism of the time and what did they tell us about Christian origins in the case of Judaism there was a debate already well underway before the scrolls were concerned if it were discovered and you know traditionally what we knew about ancient Judaism came from the Mishnah and the Talmud the rabbinic writings which were no earlier than 200 AD now the question was should we assume that that is what use lived by then in the time of Jesus and then in the 19th century people began to poke around in libraries and actually in libraries this time and found books like the Book of Enoch the book of Jubilees and a whole bunch of texts that we call the pseudepigrapha books that were attributed to famous ancient people there's an apocalypse of Abraham apocalypse of Ezra and so forth and these gave a quite different view of Judaism because there weren't so much concerned with the law and the observance of the law and they were much more concerned with what we may call apocalyptic ideas that is to say you know ideas of some additional revelation people who had gone up to heaven and had seen the tablets of Destiny and then much of it would have to do about the end of the world the judgment of the Dead and that sort of thing and there was a fairly sharp debate about a hundred years ago as to whether that material could be taken as typical of the judaism around the turn of the era now in a way the Dead Sea Scrolls support both sides of the debate the first thing what the scrolls were first discovered you see there were in Jordan I mean they think they were discovered right about the time of the division of Palestine when a team of scholars was appointed to work on them no Jewish scholars were included in time this would become enormous ly controversial and even bitter but this was the way it was now the Christian scholars in question were fine scholars for the most part but naturally the things that caught their eye were the things that related to early Christianity and so in the 1950s there was an enormous literature on messianic expectation in the Dead Sea Scrolls and also on the form of the community and people try to ask you know did they have baptism did they have a Eucharist there's some kind of a cabin deal well you know that but that's where the focus of attention was Frank cross one of my teachers at Harvard and really a very very fine scholar wrote one of the best books written on the Dead Sea Scrolls which he called the edge of library of Quran and you know he depicted the Essenes at Qumran as a movement very much like early Christianity and he described it as an apocalyptic community a community living in the end of days and with very strong similarity to the early church now at one time in the 1950s as they were sorting through these fragments they also found a text that had a lot about peculiar interpretations of the law and they marked it for Q mistake and put it in a drawer somewhere and it sat there for about 25 years then in the 1980s this now was after the 1967 war which was a turning point in many ways the Israel Antiquities Authority was exerting more influence over the scrolls and some Jewish scholars had been brought into the process and in 1984 John struck Bell who was another of my teachers at Harvard and a young Israeli scholar named Elisha Kim Rome presented this takes at a conference in Jerusalem and it caused a sensation because it said among other things it is because of these things that we have separated ourselves from the rest of the people well you know if you have a text that tells you why this movement separated itself from the rest of the people this is not something to put in a drawer this was something that might perhaps have been disclosed to the public a little bit earlier but what was in it well there is a calendar if you're interested in reading calendars I would say good luck to you you're at a very elite group people in the world who enjoy reading those things of course enormously important because if you celebrate your Kippur at a different day from everybody else if this is going to create a certain social division and it is generally recognized that this was one of the reasons why they had to separate from the rest of the Jews of the time because they had a different calendar but then there's a list of about 22 things on which they go they say but we say what they say in the cases where we can verify it turns out to be the position of the Pharisees what we say often corresponds to the position of the Sadducees although I think it was a mistake to conclude from that that the people who wrote this were Sadducees they just happened to agree with them or have the same interpretation of the law but what kind of issues were these but my favorite illustration of it is the purity of liquid streams if you pour if you have a cup that's and you pour water into it from another cup does the impurity travel upstream and affect the first cup I had gone through life without ever worrying about my red 4qm MT on the other hand one of my son's is a scientist and he heard me say this in the lecture one time and he came up to me afterwards and said you know I worry about that everyday maybe they were up to something but my point is this is the kind of thing that led them to separate from the rest of use now when they formulated their differences they built a whole theology around in one of the famous takes in the community rule they talked about how when God created the world to create the two spirits a spirit of light and a spirit of darkness why is it that the Pharisees don't see the light and the purity of liquid streams it's because they were created with the spirit of darkness now but you see that's called theology I would say is a superstructure about the to defend really or to explain the difference over the interpretation of the law and then it's not enough that you explain why they're different you also have to have an assurance that God will eventually do something about it and when the appointed time comes he will appoint an end to wickedness and wipe out all of those people and that's a strong element too so you see the people who saw the the the people at Qumran as an apocalyptic community were right it was and this was quite different from what you would get in the rabbinic writings but the people who said that Jews were really concerned about the interpretation of the law were right - now why were they suddenly so concerned about the interpretation of the law well you know I think this will get us in again to another much bigger topic that had working out at the moment but I think a lot of us was a reaction to what happened in the time of the Maccabees with the syrian king antiochus epiphanes bend the jewish law and i think there is no way to get people interested in something as effective as banning it and it's after that that you certainly gets this rise of people who say well you know if this is really what we're about this is our identity we should be concerned with every jot and tittle and so it's beginning in the late second century on into the first century BCE that you begin to get these sectarian disputes and the Pharisees and the Essenes and the Sadducees were the major parties involved in it now they had other theological ideas beyond this but this was the heart of matter now let me say something about the origin of being Christian origins and what light they shed on the scrolls when the scrolls you know were first discovered in the 1950s this was the focus really of an awful lot of the scholarship and then there was an awful lot of wild stuff productor first there was a well-respected famous french scholar ante du Pont's Amer who gave a lecture in 1950 already in which he claimed that the teacher of righteousness the teacher of the command group you was just just like Jesus and that he was crucified and was thought to raise again most people didn't agree an English scholar named John Allegro who was on the official publication team took this and ran with us in a radio broadcast in England in the 50s and there was a huge fury over that and the rest of the team published a letter expressing their disagreement and disapproval and then in the nineteen nine tee's when the scrolls became generally available again there was another wave of this some of you may have read a book by - English journalist Baigent and Leigh the Dead Sea Scrolls deception which was arguing that the Vatican was trying to keep this stuff under wraps because it would unravel Christianity if the truth were known now then do on a less sensational vein but a little bit sensational there were two books published about the year 2001 by an Israeli scholar Israel Canole and one by an American scholar Michael wise both of them again developing analogies between what if it was called the Messiah before Jesus and the other was called the first Messiah and this was like Jesus before Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the heart of the matter especially in old book was the idea that the that you had already the idea of a messianic figure who died and was thought to rise again now none of that has really gotten any traction I should say though even Wilder theories put forward an Australian scholar argued that Jesus was the figure called the wicked priest but at that point you know just becomes funny but you know chloral and why is for more serious scholars but still I think all of that was really sensationalism and you know gone way off the track that said there is an awful lot of stuff in the scrolls that bears some remarkable similarity to things you have in the New Testament and I just show you it's of two texts here 4 2 4 6 and 5 21 you know you can play Qumran bingo their numbers this one son of God he shall be called and they will name him said of the Messiah okay off the top of your head does it remind you of anything you know it's almost verbatim what you have in the Gospel of Luke now if that were in a biblical text nobody would doubt that Luke was quoting it but since it isn't it a biblical text people you know or a bit nervous about making a claim like that you know I think there is a debate about the interpretation of the text because you see there's a turning point there's a little indentation before until the people of God arises and milik the man who first brought this scroll to attention gave a lecture at Harvard in December 1972 in which he said the figure is because son of God here was a Syrian King and negative figure and there were still people who hold to that point of view the reaction to binax lecture was so negative that he put it back in his drawer and never published it and it was another 20 years before the thing saw the light of day properly more to my mind it's just quite clear who the son of God is son of God is a messianic title you get it in Sam - you get it in other texts at Qumran and that's what they mean when they say son of God he will be called in the Gospel of Luke it says and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father when you couldn't make it much clearer than that now as they say a lot of people have been skittish about accepting that and they say oh people are reading Christianity into the scrolls but no in fact you know the scrolls draw drew from the same pool from the same reservoir you might say as the early Christians they all at the same scriptures they were interpreting them in more or less in ways and guess it here the other text up there heaven and earth will obey his Messiah well there's the left corner yeah to the right right there so play back to that click right there click on them go down one this one right there yeah no below the little mark this one yeah click on that look look don't worry about it it's easier if a reader they think yeah let's we're running short of China it's begins heaven and earth will obey his Messiah and then as it goes on it says the glorious things that have not taken place the Lord will do as he said for he will heal the wounded give life to the dead and preach good news to the poor now in the Gospel of Matthew when John hurt in prison what the Messiah was doing he said are you the one who is to come or should we wait for another and and jesus answered go and tell John what you hear and see the blind receive their sight the lame walk the lepers are cleansed the Deaf hear the dead are raised and the poor have the good news brought them now what's really interesting about the parallelism there is that a lot of it is taken from Isaiah chapter 61 or one of us and one of the sounds there is one element in it that is not in any of the Old Testament takes and that is the raising of the Dead now the interesting question about it that is what kind of Messiah is this because this is not something you get otherwise in descriptions of a messiah there is in fact a fairly standard Job Description for the Messiah in the Dead Sea Scrolls he had to be a big strong man who can smash heads and drive out the Romans which is basically what he was expected to do and restore the Kingdom of Israel and this text actually many people would say it wasn't it wasn't actually a sectarian text but it gives you a rather different picture and if you look for a biblical precip and for us it's Elijah or Elijah and actually you know that all the miracle stories in the Gospels have their closest parallel probably in the stories of Elijah and Elijah and so to my mind what this one gives you is a prophetic Messiah it's a different model of Messiah and it's interesting for the New Testament because it's a whole lot easier to see why people would have thought Jesus was this kind of a messiah rather than why they would have thought that he would smash the heads of the wicked and so I think you know there are many other examples I could give you that there's a scroll a the talks about a figure called Melchizedek again of whom there was very little said known might not be the right word before the skulls were discovered and there was a whole range of other issues for example you know rulings on divorce or on Sabbath observance that are very interesting in the light that they shed on what goes on in the Gospels but it's all kind of incidental background information like that if you take the community of the Scrolls the community of Qumran and compare it with the early Christian community well there are obvious similarities both of them thought through living at the end of days the early Christians for a while tried having all things in common and this was one of the distinctive things of the people at Qumran is that they had common sessions you know whether they were celibate is maybe debatable but it seems like some of them were so there's a lot of and a lot of their ideas of what would happen in the final judgement were similar but when you get down to the nitty-gritty others when you asked you know what would be the criterion for judgment in a final judgment the two of them are really going in opposite directions and I think you know the purity of liquid streams is as good an illustration of it as any other in the Gospels you're told that it isn't what goes into a man mm of what comes out of his mouth and you see that that's just a whole different way of looking at it in the scrolls this was a group that was obsessed with purity and who thought that the way to live was to put up your barricades or get out in the wilderness put as much distance as you can between yourself and the rest of humanity now in the Gospels you get the other approach which is downplay that stuff go out make friends with people so I think you know fundamentally these were two very different options in Judaism at the turn of the era the scrolls shed light on both but you know they don't give you kind of magic bullets whereby you can identify something you didn't previously know about Christianity but they do show you my certain things were significant in their time

Channel: Yale Divinity School

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Keywords: Yale Divnity School, Dead Sea Scrolls, John Collins

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Length: 45min 7sec (2707 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2013