The Mysteries Of The Dead Sea Scrolls | Dead Sea Scrolls | Parable

on the desolate shores of the dead sea two hundred years before the birth of christ a group of men known as the sons of light lived in a biblical community they preserved their beliefs and visions in a great library of scrolls they shall separate from the habitation of unjust men and shall go into the wilderness to prepare their the way of him aligning themselves with heaven over a period of 200 years they prepared for the end of days a last great battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness [Music] [Applause] [Music] when the victorious roman army retreated the voices and visions of qumran were lost for 2000 years dust blew over the graves of the sons of light who remained forgotten scholars at the hebrew university in jerusalem undertake the painstaking work of piecing together bits of ancient biblical scrolls found in a mountain cave near the dead sea this parchment it was a simple bedouin boy who stumbled across what has been called the most important archaeological find of the 20th century from the discovery of the first scroll hope and fear ran high hope that the scrolls would reveal eyewitness accounts from the very days of jesus's life in palestine fear that they would undermine the fundamental beliefs of christianity and judaism the story of the discovery and scholarship of the scrolls has often been shrouded in secrecy hidden documents false accusations and conspiracy theories involving governments and world leaders what else is hidden in the desert [Music] now on the threshold of a new millennium scientists and scholars using the most sophisticated space age technology are adding their voices to the ancient search for meaning buried with the dead sea scrolls they come from all over the world to unlock the truth about the sons of light the academic controversies of the early 90s obscured the real mystery of the scrolls of who wrote them and why they were hidden deep in caves along the dead sea what is clear is that the scrolls were carefully hidden in sealed jars were they hidden in a panic to be recovered after some danger had passed or were they placed there over a period of time for the benefit of future generations clues to this mystery are hidden in fragments of the past that scholars and scientists have labored over for half a century [Music] stephen faun of the center for the study of early christianity in jerusalem is working towards the synthesis of science scholarship and archaeology at qumran what we're doing is we're returning to the scene of the crime to solve a mystery we come back to the place where the events took place here at qumran and study the place and context we study the actual documents these people had in their hands and interrelate them to the site and the events that took place there and we consult the witnesses the eyewitnesses that knew these people and spoke in detail about them in the at the time in which they lived [Music] magen broshi archaeologist and former curator of the shrine of the book in jerusalem has led many teams over the years that have carried out excavations at qumran the dead sea scrolls have been discovered in 11 caves those caves are geologically of two kinds five of the caves are in the cliffs in the very hard limestone in the dolomites and they are of course natural caves the other six caves are artificial caves which have been dug in the soft mall [Music] the artificial caves are the best solution to survive in this very very harsh climate and it is very easy to dig you see this is the mall it crumbs in your hands so it doesn't require very hard labor on the floor we found hundreds of patches which testified that the place was occupied the dead sea scrolls is an expansive collection of over 800 manuscripts 50 years of unparalleled scholarship has opened this ancient library to the modern world but there is still much debate over the origin of this large body of work was it the product of the sons of light themselves living and writing in this secluded desert community or was it authored somewhere else and brought to qumran later by men who fled from the catacombs of jerusalem in the early 1950s a few scholars in jerusalem began the task of reassembling this library from tens of thousands of disintegrated fragments some of the fragments were smaller than the tip of a finger and other fragments were blackened and hardened with the passage of time the task was overwhelming and frustrating to scholars a tedious and groundbreaking work that was fueled by the rising expectations among academics religious leaders and the public at large scholars and the general public alike were hoping to find glimpses or much more than glimpses of jesus and early christianity in the scrolls this great expectation was met with frustration as the process of scholarship was painstaking and initially limited to eight scholars all christians and no jews the foundation was laid for widespread suspicions of a religious cover-up the established churches had much to lose if the scrolls contained information from the days of jesus which undermined age-long beliefs piecing thousands of fragments together early research would soon present evidence of a desert community the 800 manuscripts left by the community comprise three distinct groups of literature the first group contains the entire hebrew bible save the book of esther these are the oldest copies of old testament texts by one thousand years the second part of the library are texts that were part of the literary heritage of the period the last group is the sectarian scrolls that describe the life and teachings of the sons of light as they lived in the desert but scholars still had doubts about the authenticity of the scrolls found a new method of determining the age of artifacts carbon 14 analysis had just been introduced in the 1950s but was dismissed as too clumsy a technique to apply to the precious scrolls the scholars instead focused on another method of dating the scrolls paleography is i guess literally the a study of old writing concretely it's a study of old writing with with the end of the goal of dating the material because scripts change over time like all artifacts whether it's cars or dresses or musical styles or whatever each letter in an alphabet changes steadily and not at the same rate so that you're able to examine where each of the letters is in a given alphabet and that gives you the basis for an absolute thing or at least a relative date in your typological sequence [Music] the early paedographical dating performed by frank cross on the dead sea scrolls has later been confirmed by more sophisticated and less invasive carbon 14 dating the scrolls had indeed been written in the cradle of christianity and rabbinic judaism [Music] the oldest texts are from 250 to 150 bce but the bulk of the material most of it relating to the life of the people at qumran is written between 100 bce and 70 ce no texts have been found that are younger than 70 ce indicating that this is the time when the scrolls were hidden in the caves [Music] the [Music] in jerusalem is a catholic priest and world-class paleographer he has spent 30 years piecing together the broken texts from the dead sea scrolls i try to impregnate myself a little with their mentality their ideas their point of view i can imagine them organizing themselves at the beginning in their habitation in qumran and copying out the biblical texts and then composing other texts to fill the gaps in the manuscript emil relies on a lifetime of studying ancient writing he considers many factors in deciding which of the thousands of fragments belong to the incomplete text the individual writing style of each scribe the time period of the letter style a vast knowledge of different types of ancient texts and a keen intuition sharpened by years of dedicated study i found for example this little fragment and this one and i said can they go with what i had reconstructed yes they found their place artistic gift allows him to almost feel the personality of his ancient brother in scholarship they became for me familiar people friends people with whom i would love to talk i would like them at least to inspire me to comprehend the gaps in the manuscripts it was with the appointment of emanuel tove as editor-in-chief of the scrolls publication project in 1991 that many new scientists have been given a chance to work with the scrolls as many scrolls have deteriorated quickly since their discovery scientists struggled to give scholars alternatives to scrolls research while preserving the material for future generations most of the work is really done on photographs in the 1950s and beginning of the 60s superb photographs infrared were made of the scrolls and they are still our best tools i should add to this that even better ones are being made in these very days in labs off the sleek halls at nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in pasadena greg behrman has worked on digital optics used to capture distinct images of the earth's surface from five miles up greg hypothesized that multi-spectral imaging that had been applied to space and planetary optics would be able to push the scrolls beyond the infrared spectrum to reveal more text invited by the israeli antiquities authority to jerusalem he is going to apply this new technology to fragments that have been selected by scholars from around the world [Music] selected fragments darkened by aging and deteriorating rapidly are put to the test there's three of those images bareman's technology is based on using infrared light to capture the lost images just as the satellite cameras can reveal stories about life on earth he can see beyond the limitations of the naked eye [Music] the situation is tense in the room whatever is on the piece of parchment no one has seen it for almost 2 000 years oh look at that that's what you want look at that in an instant greg behrman washes away 2 000 years of dirt bat dung and animal urine revealing for the first time lines of text that will divulge even more about the sons of light imaging spectroscopy works by taking a lot of different images of the same physical scene at different wavelengths that information allows you to calculate the spectrum for each pixel in the scene and then you use spectroscopy which is a traditional physicist tool to help you figure out what each pixel is made out of the way we apply this to the dead sea scrolls was we did exactly that we took an image every 10 nanometers starting at 404 10 420 worked our other way all the way up to the infrared and looked at the images as we went along and what we found out was that as you move further in the infrared this is 640 and 680 this is the red part 720 this is infrared you see that as you move further out the text begins to emerge from from the background and down here at the bottom is an enhanced version of 970 nanometers along with the images provided by berman and his team today's scholars also have the advantage of replacing the traditional method of scrolls scholarship involving hours of tedious work on fragments or microfiche with a cd-rom version of the entire scrolls library on their desktop what's on the screen now is column 24 from the temple scroll from cave 11. you'll see the transcription on one side and a photograph of that column on the opposite side previously the scholar had to take this photograph and use either a microscope or a magnifying glass to get a close-up of this particular fragment now a scholar can merely open up the database select the transcription that he wants select the area of this fragment crop it and then you get a much closer view of that portion of the fragment [Music] the dazzling magic of this new digital technology masks flaws that some scholars find troubling although an advocate of this new road of research bruce zuckerman of the west semitic research project at the university of southern california is quick to point out the potholes in digital reconstruction of scroll fragments let me show you what what i mean here we have up here a dead sea scroll or a section of same from the genesis apocrypha one of the more interesting dead sea scrolls of what i would call a good use of computer imaging a kind of imaging that no one would argue with you see here there's a tear in the text you see where the ink was and uh the piece just sort of jags down because of of the tear now what we did here is we simply cut this little piece out electronically i should add you know it's not done don't try this with the real thing and we simply shoved it up and when you shoved it up we it became quite uh nice you'll notice that we left a line that's very clear that shows that we have done something to the fragment we would it would be very easy to go in and make this edge sort of melt away and just become part of the fragment above it you would not be able to tell and most scholars would have no idea that you'd done any kind of manipulation so this is a good example of of a type of manipulation g that one could do with the real text if the real text were not so fragile but there are other types of manipulation which uh one would say are a little bit more questionable here's a text uh where we have done some computer imaging inhabitants see here is the on this one end this is the raw image or the image that is on unprocessed and here on the other end is a really absolutely gorgeous if i do say so myself image of the text and we could say computer enhancement yielded that but you see hiding behind that is a multitude of sense this image in some respects as a fake now what do i mean by that here i can show you how we quote faked it okay i am lightening the image around this what turns out to be a yud so that you can very clearly see where the letter begins and where it ends as if it had been originally written by the scribe i'm taking all of that little bleeding that has taken place because of the deterioration of the text you can also let's make a little darker on there you can uh no no problem see now beautiful ink original looks like it was written yesterday pull it back now zoom out when we pull back if i were to show people this material and this material and said computer imaging yielded that if i don't explain what i did they would assume that that is a totally objective maneuver and it's not it's a highly selective highly idiosyncratic maneuver indeed using this type of technology i can put your name in a dead sea scroll although this brave new world is not without risk as more scholars gain access to the scrolls with these new tools new ideas and theories begin to take shape regarding the sons of light and the lives that they led [Music] jerusalem today strains at the close of the 20th century with the voices of many faiths the differing voices within judaism worship at the same wall different christians come as pilgrims to this hallowed ground each proclaiming the way of christ muslims worship as they have for centuries at the dome of the rock known among scholars variously as the covenanters the essenes the jihad and the sons of light as the desert community defined themselves they also lived in a time and place of many voices sadducees pharisees essenes and other groups all claimed to be the true israel judaism was evolving from this rich tapestry of voices that pitched jews against each other in a spiritual battle for souls [Music] the sons of light emerged from this world and followed their leaders out of the chaos of second century bce jerusalem to the purity of the desert and the peace that it offered [Music] in their flight to the desert to establish a new order they could not have known that they were living in a world that was in the throes of giving birth to rabbinic judaism and christianity as we know them today this was a period of tremendous religious firmament third second first centuries bce and judaism from second temple time but there were all kinds of other trends as well like strong apocalyptic messianic trends and these feed to some extent into christianity to some extent into rebellious groups within judaism who rebel against rome twice and we have a kind of sorting out of traditions at this time in which some parts of second temple judaism end up sort of flowing into rabbinic judaism and some other elements end up flowing into christianity and some other elements just sort of die off the scene but it's a very complex set of developments which lead to the religious picture that we know of once we emerge into the early centuries of this era departing jerusalem the sons of light also left behind the sacred temple this temple in the eyes of the sons of light had been defiled and therefore could not serve the truly righteous of israel and so what happened was that the members of the qumran community basically felt that that temple was not being run right because of hellenistic influence on the high priests various other specific rituals that they disagreed with so they withdrew from it and for them the dream of a perfect temple that they would return to and that would be run the way they thought it should be run was perhaps the greatest of all dreams [Music] propelled by visions of a new temple these men forged a sacred community out of the desert on the shores of the dead sea to achieve their final destiny the lowest place on earth at 1300 feet below sea level the dead sea has a salt content seven to eight times that of the world's oceans and it evaporates at a rate of 55 inches a year often creating a thick heavy stench in the air along the shoreline gravel terraces indicate recent levels of the inland sea less than two inches of rain falls on this desolate land in any given year temperatures hover above 100 degrees fahrenheit for days on end during the long summer life has always had a tenuous foothold here in the judean desert [Music] most scholars agree that the subs of light belong to a group in antiquity known as the essenes a group that was dedicated to strict observance of religious doctrine from dawn through the night [Music] the main complex was used for study worship and the communal meals that were served during the day it is likely that the sons of light slept in the caves of the nearby cliffs and in tents around the sacred building only entering into the east gate after two years of initiation and probation [Music] this building separated the sons of light from the rest of the world they were separatists in which they separated themselves from the general community they were pietists and most scholars believe that the sect of the dead sea scrolls is a scene one manuscript found in the caves the community rule details the daily rituals of the sons of light and underscores their complete devotion to god [Music] before i move my hands and feet i will bless his name i will praise him before i go out or enter or sit or rise each brother was pledged to a strict code of conduct that reinforced the sanctity of a place where angels tread and prayer was constant even simple murmuring was met with swift's justice on this the rules of the community were clear whoever has murmured against the authority of the community shall be expelled it was a tough regime far removed from later christianity and other religions preaching compassion for the weak and sick but within this rigid community was the belief that their piety and purity led to a higher dimension the blind the death and the lame are not allowed into the sacred precincts and the reason for this is that the blind cannot see if they're touching something that makes them impure the death because they can't hear the proper interpretation of the torah to be able to know whether they are becoming impure or not and the lame because they scare the angels away to be among the angels the sons of light had to be pure in heart and body and water became the key to purification for the sons of light [Music] through an elaborate system of aqueducts the water from the judean hills was channeled into cisterns and baths built by the community at qumran it is ironic given the fact that only two inches of rain falls here annually that much of this water was dedicated to ritual purposes at the so-called fifth hour of each day the community would return from their labors to eat in common before eating they purified themselves they would have to come in and and put a loincloth on take off their work clothes and put it over to the side come down on these steps and go down to the level where the water had settled to or evaporated to immerse themselves come back up on the other side [Music] to be able to walk in the steps of the kumara knights is like walking back in time the most important part of the main complex was the scriptorium the place where scrolls were copied or written and the rooms where the scrolls were studied no doubt dissect had a large collection of scrolls to read from some of historical significance such as copies of older biblical texts but also those containing the harsh rules for their daily lives but these ancient ruins take on a new meaning when seen through the eyes of the space age so [Music] nasa's synthetic aperture radar sar for short is designed to read the earth's surface even when obscured by dense cloud cover today's israel and palestine can be seen in detail and physical features are enhanced by the satellite technology but the amazing feature of this technology is that it allows us to see beyond the observations of the naked eye it can actually work as a time machine and allow us to glance back into history byu scientists david long and david arnold teamed up to create a smaller version of nasa's sar that promises to shed light on how the sons of light lived on the shore of the dead sea this is a custom designed antenna that we built the overall system operates at about two gigahertz this is a patched phased array antenna it's a very flat panel kind of innovative but not something that a lot of places couldn't do this one's unusual that we did it here so that we could get students involved with it and it's very broad band these scientists and students worked to deploy this backyard sar equipment at a fraction of the cost of the nasa space model to capture microwave images of the ruins of qumran and other sites in israel from a small plane what we'd hoped to get we'd hope that optically you see colors of the ground but at radar frequencies where your wavelengths are more like this long you'll see roughnesses on the ground of that scale so you'll see rocks of that size so our hope was that we could see foundations that were buried because the ground will come up or old fences piles of rock and we'd run census from the air we'd be able to see designs maybe to see how the city was laid out so that would give a survey for an archaeologist to begin their excavation plans for when they actually go and excavate the site the first attempt with the new technology had everyone excited mounting the radar device under the small plane was the easy part the whole system will be operated from the inside of the plane using computers [Music] on the ground a number of metal cones are deployed to form a grid on which the photographs could be aligned [Music] the flight route is carefully mapped out as they need to fly as low and level to the surface of the ground as possible to get the best reading [Applause] [Music] one of the questions is how big was the civilization was it just where qumran is or was it the whole shelf around the dead sea there so we'd hope we hope to be able to see you know trails you know ancient trails with going between different settlements so we can get an idea of how large that that civilization or that segment those population was doug thompson collects data as they fly over the site at this stage he has no visual control of the images the system captures only later in the lab will he be able to analyze the material the first flyover at qumran was marred by turbulence which scattered the images of the site in the trails in the sand but other flyovers in the holy land proved the technology could work to pinpoint ancient trails and structures not visible to the naked eye but it's already clear that the qumran site was a place well connected with nearby communities such as jericho ain fesca and anguar if i i was one of the group 2000 years ago i was given the map of the country i would say this is the place because it has all the advantages it has the seclusion i mean real seclusion you have to remember that the road that you see now hasn't existed at that time and the water reached the cliffs so there was not even a trail going along the coast there so this is a real seclusion on the one hand on the other hand it's one day's walk to jerusalem one day's work to jerusalem it's a couple of hours to jericho so they're far from civilization but not too far from the but if qumran was so well connected to other parts of palestine and neighboring areas can we be sure that the scrolls were actually written at the site could they have been produced in another place and brought to qumran for safe keeping during the jewish revolt in 68 ce scientists from new fields have joined the biblical scholars in their search for answers microbiologist scott woodward of brigham young university has worked on extracting ancient dna from mummies in egypt hearing of his work the israeli antiquities authority approached him regarding dna sampling of the scrolls when we were originally approached by the antiquities authority in israel the idea was what can we do with all of these fragments of the scrolls the pieces that didn't belong in some large scroll was there any way that we could put those back together and reconstruct some of the dead sea scrolls from from a pile of unconnected fragments because parchment on which the texts are written is leather and comes from animals the scientists can look for the genetic material found in the cells finding small parts of dna strings in the so-called mitochondria of cells scientists can create a genetic fingerprint of each individual animal by testing piece after piece they can see if they come from the same original parchment thus likely belonging together in one of the other sequence of text put on the key likes and we'll go from there okay woodward's partner in dna research at the hebrew university gila kahila has started to sift through a large number of scroll fragments she realizes that her scientific approach to scroll research may not necessarily be met with ovations by traditional scholars we can say whether these two fragments belong to the same individual if they do so maybe the the matching that they did is okay if they don't that means it will change the text and it will change everything scholars don't want us to get to this conclusion back at his laboratory in the us woodward takes this study one step further not only can fragments be pieced together dna and genetic signatures can reveal even more information we have been able to show that the technology works what that will be able to do for the scholars is help answer the question where were the scrolls written in order to do that we have to take the genetic signature that we now have from some of these scrolls match it with the genetic signature that we would find from bones from some of the archaeological sites bones from qumran bones from jerusalem and other sites throughout the holy land and then probably finally the other the next thing that we ought to be able to do is take some of the unidentified fragments that are still sitting in boxes waiting to be pieced back together to see if we can in fact reconstruct some new pages from which the scholars would then be able to get new information so dna could help revealed if the parchments were actually from qumran or from somewhere else in the middle east the goats had always been prime suspects as the source of scroll material common domestic animals they were a natural fit because they could thrive in the harsh climate of the dead sea and were acceptable to use as skin for sacred or biblical text [Applause] ibex skin a wild animal was also found in scrolls which were not biblical in nature but in sectarian documents that were written for the regulation of the community ibex was an interesting choice but not a surprising one it was with more sampling however that the dna work took an unexpected turn startling scholars and raising more questions about the scrolls but what we found in this case was that these scrolls seem to have been written on parchment from bovine or from cows there may be a problem with cows here where where do you raise cows on the shores of the dead sea it's not very easy i think most people would agree that they probably weren't there so where did they come from so the origin of the scrolls is called into question by yet another source another way of asking where the scrolls were written is by studying the clay jars which held them for 2 000 years scrolls jars and pottery fragments were found in and around qumran and 11 caves that are adjacent to the site this wide range of locations leaves the door open to speculation about whether or not the scrolls were made at qumran [Music] professor yan guneveg of the hebrew university is applying the technology of nuclear activation to find out if the jars were made at the communities kiln in qumran or were perhaps brought there from another location such as jerusalem in police records all over the world are stored fingerprints of criminals according to which every individual can be identified so what we are doing here is the same more or less the same we are taking a chemical profile of a kiln which is called the chemical fingerprint and we can match it later with the ceramic which is found at the site after gathering clay samples from the kiln at qumran gunaway goes to the rockefeller museum in jerusalem where the jars are kept one interesting characteristic the scroll jars display is a blistering effect on the ceramic surface gunavig offers several theories to explain the effect one of the more intriguing is the idea that the jars were made quickly to hide the scrolls perhaps when the kumara knights learned of the advancing roman army people were in hurry you know to produce the jars and therefore they took whatever they could lay their hands on in order to produce these jars as soon as possible and therefore when they are going in the kiln you get different shrinkages now after that they are fired of the clay and the calcium carbonate and then you get blisters all over the place [Music] this jar is from cave number eight in kumra what we are going to do is to take a sample of this jar in order to find a match between anything what we have analyzed in qumran itself and this jar we have meanwhile already done 30 other jars so if they match we can either prove whether it was made in kumbram or it was imported into cumbra [Music] if dna analysis takes the scroll research to the molecular level neutron analysis takes it further into the building blocks of all matter after the samples are packed in vials numbered and identified they are sent to the technical university of budapest [Music] gudevag's partner dr martibala prepares them for the nuclear reactor the samples are bombarded by neutrons which render the powder samples radioactive [Music] the radiation given off by the sample is converted into electric pulses which are converted into numbers which show the quantities of chemical elements within the clay this is the fingerprint that will point the way to the location where the jar was made and a possible clue to the origin of the scrolls themselves the results from budapest are sent back to jerusalem where they are grouped and compared with tests on other pieces of qumran pottery in the data bank and now i have in entered in the data bank a sample which is one of the 15 storage jars what we have analyzed and nine of them are analyzing as a piece of clay what we found in qumran meself that means there's not a piece of clay but not imported now you find it there and i have analyzed three pieces of clay which are three clay balls they were found as bowls you know about two centimeters diameter and one of them is analyzing as nine of the 15 storage jars made in qumran that means in this case they really are made in qumran they're made from the clay which was found at kumra there is another interesting thing that is that the scroll jars don't analyze exactly the same as all the other pottery you know so it seems at least basing ourselves on 30 shirts that there is a kind of preparation in the clay which is used specifically for the scroll jars and another composition what is used for the rest of the ceramics [Music] another ceramic object found at qumran 40 years ago has held its secrets well cosmic secrets about the alignment of heavenly time with earthly time only recently stephen faun identified the object as a sundial the historical significance of this sundial when it was modified in its final form is that it's the only timepiece in antiquity which accurately determined the fifth hour of the day anytime during the year as the sun rose in the morning over the dead sea the sundial was calibrated to mark the hours of the day regardless of the season it was common at the time not only in qumran to divide the day between sunrise and sunset in 12 equal hours the length of each hour of the day would thus change according to the season they will be shorter in the winter and longer in the summer [Music] [Laughter] the day was divided into three watches sunrise noon or the fifth hour and sunset and the importance was to find the fifth hour the exact time when they had their meal at the site and when they aligned themselves with heaven the true alignment with heaven culminated in the final appointed battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness they were expecting a war like that for i believe at least two centuries they took it that seriously one of the reasons they went to the desert is to prepare themselves for that kind of war prepared himself impurity and you name it and even composing a book about how the war is going to be handled because the war of the children of flight against the extent of narcos is exactly a military manual on the points of the javelin they shall write shining javelin of the power of god bloody spikes to bring down the slain by the wrath of god flaming blade to devour the wicked struck down by the judgment of god [Music] one thousand men ranked seven lines deep they shall each hold shields of bronze burnished with mirrors the sons of light waited more than 200 years in the desert for this holy war what signs they were waiting for is unknown but when the roman army was mobilized to curb the jewish rebellion they believed the day had come [Music] [Applause] [Music] the historian josephus tells us of the fate of the essenes at the hands of the romans [Music] the war with the romans tried their souls through and through by every variety of tests wrapped and twisted burned and broken and made to pass through every instrument of torture in order to induce them to blaspheme their lawgiver [Music] smiling in their agonies and mildly deriding their tormentors they cheerfully resigned their souls confident that they would receive them back again the jewish revolt was an ironic end to the apocalyptic vision of the sons of light for it was the romans who had a dizzying array of weapons and legions of men well they took their revolt against the romans too seriously they believed that this is the apocalyptic war they were expecting so they entered the war with abandon so much so that they perished in the war they were just killed on the battlefields and after the battles they were hunted down by the romans and butchered and how did they know the fact that we have 800 scrolls i mean there was nobody to retrieve it although there is no archaeological evidence of a final courageous battle close to qumran it is certain the sons of light vanished a footnote in history to the roman conquest of judea the scattered remnants of the qumran group would have sort of melted in along with a whole variety of second temple groups that disappear off the face of the earth so to speak as a result of the consensus which takes place around pharisaic rabbinic judaism after the destruction whatever happened a dream was shattered [Music] at first they didn't think of staying more than a few months maybe a few years at most and they were planning to come back and purify the temple and they died there with some regrets since they were expecting the messiah and hoped to come back to jerusalem [Music] the dreams and visions that drove these men into the wilderness are not yet fully understood it is the science of the 21st century that will bring us closer to these forgotten voices in the desert in this area there are quite a number of artificial caves that caved in that crumbled we believe that there might have been even 20. the fact that they are crumbled is an advantage because they haven't been rifled nobody disturbed them if they have crumbled at the right time so there is a very good possibility that if we'll dig those caves you'll find utensils and god willing even manuscripts even that's his scrolls though lost in the aftermath of the roman military campaign the voices of qumran can once again be heard because of the painstaking work of dozens of scientists and scholars around the world but for every question answered many others are being asked and perhaps many answers still lie hidden in the desert in many ways the real work on the dead sea scrolls is just beginning [Music] in the judean wilderness of palestine on the shore of the dead sea the windswept desert ruins of qumran still conceal ancient secrets the human remains and artifacts unearthed by archaeologists 50 years ago are only now beginning to tell the story of the people who in desperation hid the dead sea scrolls in the caves above qumran never to return [Music] [Music] hidden away in a forgotten crypt beneath the busy streets of modern jerusalem is the grave of a remarkable man whose ghost still haunts the archaeologists and scientists eager to know the mysteries of the scrolls and those who hid them what secrets did father roland devoe take with him to the grave and why does his name still awaken controversy you can't go into somebody else's dig and that's what happened here in 93 during the scroll operation and start excavating before you have a final report of what the previous excavation was and now you can understand that they cannot publish their result before the vote will publish his the dead sea scrolls are accessible to everyone now why is the archaeological material from qumran not accessible the same argument that was made about the dead sea scrolls why should the dead sea scrolls be made accessible to everyone that same argument should be made about the archaeology of qumran we are 52 years after that the dead sea scrolls were found but from a point of view in archaeology we just start [Music] the story that consumed father devoe's life begins in the winter of 1947 with an arab shepherd boy named mohammed eddie looking for a lost goat in the limestone cliffs above the dead sea the boy throws a stone into a small cave opening the sound of breaking pottery comes back to him like a story from the arabian nights he enters the cave and to his amazement finds ten clay jars untouched since the time of christ all were empty or filled with dirt except one which held one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century the dead sea scrolls a total of seven scrolls were taken from cave number one they were the first manuscripts discovered in this ancient library that would eventually total over 800 texts located in ancient palestine on the shores of the dead sea and only a day's walk from jerusalem the qumran ruins were ignored for centuries with the discovery of the scrolls they suddenly took on new meaning was there a connection between the scrolls and the ruins in 1951 father roland devoe assembled a small team of archaeologists to probe the ruins of qumran they dug for five years and formed what was to become the accepted story of the community in the desert of a monastic brotherhood known as the essenes or pious ones an elite society gathering a massive library of sacred scrolls obsessed with ritual purity and the heavenly calendar when he began his excavations devoe was already a famous archaeologist and teacher the first time i met devoe was in october of 63 and after supper i was introduced to everyone who was sitting out in the garden and devoe was telling jokes and my french was fairly good but a lot of it was argo he had a great sense of humor and you could see you know the dynamism and the brilliance he was appointed director of the prestigious ecole biblique in jerusalem in 1953 and president of the rockefeller museum in 1954 the dead sea scrolls housed at the rockefeller were entrusted to his personal and exclusive care with the scrolls and the archaeological dig under his personal control devoe was in an extraordinary position to correlate the work of the field team digging at qumran and the young group of scholars he had assembled who were sorting and translating the texts at the rockefeller museum [Music] john strugnell was 26 when he came from oxford to join the team they smoked cigarettes in presence of the holy scrolls they everyone smoked cigarettes in those days um we had coffee served in the morning you might have spilt a cup of coffee on the straw and no we we were we didn't treat these scrolls with any great reverence we treated them with seriousness and no great scientific skill these young scholars were piecing together a vast jigsaw puzzle of thousands of individual fragments many from texts no living person had ever read the inner convolutions of the scroll were very tight it hadn't been unrolled for 2000 years and so i i really had to work away at chipping at the bottom to get the ebony part away and not lose any any information any words and letters and uh so that that was hard to do but i had to go to lunch that day and uh at the american school on uh in jerusalem and no actually what i did was i put a tea kettle on my stove which was an oil burning stove and and the and and let the tea kettle steam i put plenty of water in it ran got my lunch and came back and i didn't dare tell father to vote that that's what i'd done because he would have in fact when i did tell him later he got very upset that i'd done that but then the result was good i got it all under glass it was all it was you know just just had worked out perfectly and then later he claimed he had suggested it to me between 1952 and 1956 10 other caves were discovered which contained scrolls and fragments eventually over 800 texts would be identified during the same period massive amounts of data were being collected and recorded by davao and his team at the excavation site details that davao expected to publish in a definitive final report [Music] he was 66 and his heart was weak and he didn't care he go on you know he go on and he had a very light surgery and during surgery he died [Music] jean-baptiste umber of the ecole biblic is the man to whom the davao legacy was passed he presides over the ongoing study of the massive amounts of archaeological material devoe left behind but some people ask questions maybe not maybe it's not a saying and if qumran is not the same the glory disappear you know the the the fantastic weight of qumran is solved in water if it is not a saint it's why the question is serious because as long as the complete report is not published the people can hesitate to link caves and skulls with the sight devoe's sudden death left the world without a final report of his discoveries what we know about qumran comes from his lectures and notebooks a wealth of archaeological detail that tells the story of a thousand years the archaeological site at qumran is situated on a wide plateau that sits between the severe limestone cliffs to the west and the dead sea to the east [Music] when devoe's team began work here in 1952 they found piles of rubble that were barely distinguishable from the surrounding landscape the excavation took over five years to complete as devoe's team worked their way down into the rubble evidence of four periods of occupation was discovered [Music] beginning at the deepest and therefore oldest level some structures were dated to 900 bc the time of the israelite kings eight centuries later around 150 bc a new group came to the plateau and began constructing buildings kills to fire pottery and aqueducts and cisterns for moving and storing water this was the modest beginning of the essene community and the scrolls library in the middle of the first century bc the community took on what devoe called its definitive form the finished complex had three parts first the study area where the scrolls were collected and also a fortress-like watchtower second a group of service buildings including a kitchen third at the extreme south end the largest room in the complex used for dining and as an assembly hall and woven throughout a remarkable system of aqueducts and baths used for purifying the members of the community and in the final time period evidence of devastation ashes and arrowheads tell the story of the destruction of the essenes at the hands of the roman army in 68 a.d um and it was this settlement this main period of occupation which davao identified as a sectarian settlement believing that the people who lived at the site were the same people who deposited the scrolls in the caves and this view has remained well it remained basically unchallenged up until maybe 10 years ago or so and is still probably i think i could safely say the majority view the accepted view among most scholars the texts have been grouped by scholars into three categories biblical books sectarian documents and non-biblical religious writings the first third of the library was comprised of the oldest known copies of the hebrew bible including the great isaiah scroll older than any previously known copy by a thousand years and there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of jesse and a branch shall grow out of his roots and the spirit of the lord shall rest upon him the spirit of counsel and might but with righteousness he shall judge the poor and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked the messianic texts the the texts that predict the coming of messiah and all the things surrounded with that the restoration of the of the people of god the restoration of the country all the hopes that are connected with with the coming of the messiah and this was a central tenet of qumran just as it was a central tenet of christianity [Music] the second category of the library was the sectarian literature or the group of manuscripts that were written by the essenes themselves to govern daily life among these manuscripts is found the rule of the community which sets forth a strict lifestyle for the members of this elite group every man who enters the council of holiness and who deliberately or through negligence transgresses one word of the law of moses on any point whatever shall be expelled and shall return no more for one sin of inadvertance he shall do penance for two years but if he has sinned deliberately he shall never return to the community so that his way and counsel may be made perfect according to the judgment of the congregation [Music] josephus the ancient historian observed that those guilty of serious offenses often came to a most miserable end still bound by oaths and the seen practices they could not partake of other men's food or drink and so fell to eating grass and wasted away dying of starvation in the desert [Music] some scholars have speculated that john the baptist the cousin of jesus may have been excommunicated as seen surviving in the desert by eating honey and wild locusts and dressing in animal skins besides governing the community other sectarian texts found in the caves were used to protect and convey sacred teachings that were not for the eyes of outsiders [Music] currently new work is being done by stephen fahn of the university of the holy land on an unusual type of sectarian text the so-called cryptic script devised by the mosquito who was a visionary or prophetic leader in the community this new alphabet which he developed was one that was his own personal alphabet and perhaps of a few other people who he trusted and this was in order to help to keep pure and separate knowledge that others aren't allowed to have access to yet this scroll contains the secret wisdom spoken by the mosquito to those first entering the community for their time of testing the sons of dawn were coming out of the darkness of a wicked world into the light of god beginning a new life of strict discipline and purity [Music] so it can be very interesting to take a look at the way in which this community of the dead sea scrolls formed people gave them a new story for their lives gave them a new way of looking at themselves gave them new disciplines by which they could become in their view better people or to achieve a kind of spiritual perfection the third group of documents are harder to categorize but they offer the first glimpse that scholars have had into the great ferment that was taking place in judaism during this period they include retold biblical stories new psalms works of biblical commentary and interpretation as well as mystical writings describing angelic journeys however there's another kind of religious experience that happens in the setting of worship which comes very close to what we might want to call the mystical and that's represented quite well in the songs of the sabbath sacrifice where each week for a series of 13 weeks they would recite one of the songs that describes how the angels worship god in heaven when the wheels of his throne chariot advance angels of holiness come and go there is a fiery vision of most holy spirits about them the appearance of rivulets of fire like gleaming brass the spirits of the living gods move perpetually with the glory of his marvelous chariot uh i don't think it was consciously assembled as though there were from the start a librarian who asked people and ordered books to be brought there but my best imagining of how the library got there was that a number of the people who came to qumran to spend some time there and to study the scriptures and to embrace that whole ascetic life brought with them their treasures uh and especially their religious treasures some of those would be you know a book of you know books of the bible what we call scrolls of the scriptures um uh maybe a scroll of isaiah and a scroll of deuteronomy and a scroll of the psalms and maybe genesis or something like that their favorite ones but then also other religious works that were important to them as the publication of the dead sea scrolls near its completion attention is turning again to the story of the desert community devoe put forward nearly 50 years ago perhaps a new day is dawning for the archaeological study of qumran [Music] the temple priests that would reform the core of the qumran community left jerusalem around 150 bc they believed the temple the center of jewish life and worship had been corrupted by the influence of greek culture they carried with them into the desert the writings and rituals they believed would open the way to a renewed israel including an extraordinary plan for the creation of a new temple and every member of the house of separation who went out of the holy city and leaned on god at the time when israel sinned and defiled the temple shall rejoice and their heart shall be strong and they shall prevail over the sons of earth they settled on an isolated plateau near the dead sea a location where they could prepare the way of the lord in restoring the true israel after a period of confusion a great leader emerged whom the skrulls referred to as the teacher of righteousness for 20 years they were like blind men groping for the way and god raised for them a teacher of righteousness to guide them in the way of his heart under his direction the disciples devoted their lives to the production collection and study of the great library of scrolls and the congregation shall watch in community for a third of every night of the year to read the book and to study together many of the things that josephus says about the customs of the essenes are details that we don't pick up on because because they're normal practice today in modern western society but they were unusual at that time so what's unusual here they took their seats they sat when they dined as we sit today this was different from the usual greco-roman custom where you reclined the first century historian josephus refers to the dining room of the essenes as a holy temple where only men who were both free of physical handicaps and ritually pure could eat the sacred meal so they're sitting and each one receives a plate with his food well what's so unusual about that well you see in antiquity in in the roman world in judea at this time when you when you gather together to eat a meal you were served a big pot or a big sort of a crater or or cooking pot that had the food in it and this apparently was because of their concerns with ritual purity if you go back to the scrolls and you look it talks about the pure food and the pure drink of the community and they believed that ritual impurity could be transmitted through food and through drink and and liquids by the way were more susceptible than than solid food and for this reason they had all sorts of restrictions on who could participate in the communal meals and who could eat the pure food and who could eat the pure who could drink the pure drink and so apparently because of this concern with transmitting ritual impurity through dining each member received an individual plate of food another surprising similarity between the ancient essenes and modern hygiene concerns their toilet habits father devoe believed that an iron tool found in cave 11 was a hatchet or matic for digging individual latrines in the desert soil these characteristics make them seem very modern in the sense that they were concerned with toilet privacy so they would find a secluded spot and wrap their mantles around them unlike everybody else that struck him as very odd and afterwards they would immerse themselves and he says as if defiled again because they associated this with the ritual impurity of course these hygienic practices were not based on scientific knowledge but on the religious need for the members of the community to be pure before god in order that they might fulfill what they saw as their central role in the divine plan [Music] ideologically they were biblical jews in actual fact they were living in the post-biblical era and i believe that some of the difficulties which we have in understanding uh the world of ideas of the covenanters lies in this fact that we they are standing with one foot in one age with the other foot and the other age the long hours of study and discussion of discipline and purification were only a prelude to the restoration of the true israel and the building of the great temple in jerusalem [Music] the members of the qumran community were eagerly looking forward to a great final battle at the end of days between the sons of light and the sons of darkness with the hosts of heaven fighting on their side the elect of god were to have the final victory over their enemies [Music] but the future did not hold what they expected as the roman army marched south from jericho in their war against the jews the essenes looked to the cave surrounding qumran to protect the precious library of scrolls [Music] placed in clay jars and the cave entrances walled up from the outside the library of sacred scrolls was safe but the men who hid them never returned the romans tortured massacred and scattered the people of the new covenant their dream was shattered some of them fled to masada and took with them parts of their writings their scriptures and the pieces that were found there seemed to indicate that that was the case though the community of qumran was destroyed their ancient cemetery remains the essene graves have been an enticing mystery since the beginning of devos excavations of the 1200 graves neatly laid out on a north-south axis across the eastern edge of the qumran plateau 54 were opened before ultra-orthodox jewish criticism stopped the work in the early sixties the story of what happened to the bones and the questions they raised opens a new chapter in the archaeology of qumran father devoe's attitude toward the bones was perplexing different accounts suggest he was sometimes excited about what the bones could reveal and at other times indifferent he promised the bones to two different anthropologists henri de valois of france and gottfried curt of germany [Music] the bones excavated by devos team now reside in three collections in france germany and jerusalem all ignored for over 30 years and in various states of decay anthropologist sue sheridan is working on the frontier of archaeological science with tools that will finally allow the ancient bones to begin to tell their story when the bones were exhumed in the early 50s paleopathology was in its infancy recent advances now give us a biocultural picture of the qumran community this is the individual from tomb18 and we have represented here a very complete skeleton almost all the bones are here of an individual between age 30 to 33. he's very representative of the rest of the skeletons in the french collection in his degree of preservation and also being a robust man of um in his 30s to 40s the thing that makes this particular individual even more special is the fact that he was buried in the western area of the cemetery right near the actual ruins closest person to the ruins in a circle of stones that demarcates his grave as something special and also he has a coffin there were only three individuals that actually were buried in a coffin and we have large pieces of wood preserved as a result of that [Music] most of the graves in the cemetery are of similar construction after the body was prepared a hole was dug in the soft soil about one to two meters deep [Music] [Music] the body was lowered into the grave and then placed in a chamber which was cut sideways into the earth stones were then placed over the chamber opening to protect the body as it awaited a great final resurrection at the end of days over time water and earth movements caused the stones to collapse inward often breaking the bones apart [Music] devoe's team poured paraffin on many of the bones to keep them from crumbling or separating so the first step before any analysis could be done was a preliminary removal of the wax now that's been done the next step will be to chemically remove all the wax and extract it from the bones so that we can have clean edges it's particularly important in the skull so that you can get a nice tight fit reconstruct everything correctly and take measurements from within the skull and once we're able to rebuild the skull and the hips and the knee area we'll be able to look at several features of the skeleton we'll be able to look in great detail at the joint surfaces to get reconstructions of daily activity patterns we'll be able to come through for example and look at the vertebral column and see if there were special stresses and strains on the back we can come in and cast the teeth with epoxy resins which allow us to look at the microscopically look at the tooth wear patterns that tell us something about what the individuals were eating so there's a great deal of information about daily like daily life dietary intake etc that we can reconstruct once we have the skeleton cleaned up more at the university of notre dame sheridan partners with chemist mark sher to prepare bone samples for carbon 14 dating if the age of the bones can be determined perhaps we can get closer to the mystery of the origin of the community these samples are very rare and precious whenever you do a radiocarbon date you destroy the sample so we want to make sure that before we try to get a radiocarbon date we're going to have enough carbon in the bone that will be able to get a good date small fragments of bone are tested every precaution is taken to protect the integrity of the bone samples but two millennia of decay have taken their toll the results are disappointing and since i'm used to working on the inorganic fraction i wasn't wasn't viewing it through the same eye but uh it was clear these were were badly preserved bones i was hoping when we got through the paraffin that we we'd hit some good news but yeah there's a little cut off there if you've got less than two percent carbon you're gonna or two percent protein you're not going to get a good date probably but if you've got you know anywhere more than that even just three percent you'll be able to get a good radiocarbon date and i was you know hoping that at least we'd be right i knew it would be low i was hoping we'd be right above that lower limit you know the germans too have had to rely on forensic methods rather than chemistry to tease secrets from the poorly preserved bones dr olaf rora ertel inherited the german collection of qumran bones from gottfried curt in the early 1970s they are now housed in the catholic diocese of eichstadt he has used the same methods as sue sheridan to create a picture of the individuals in the essene community if you haven't done here we have here the left thigh this is typical for a man of the size you can also see here that the muscle system is present he was engaged in physical activity but didn't do any hard physical labor he probably did less physical activity than someone like you or i who did some occasional walking the german bones suggest a society divided into groups perhaps a scholarly or administrative elite and a working class we have here members of a rural ruling class part of a multi-level society which suggests there was also a lower class social stratification in the society is therefore more substantiated it must also be mentioned that we have skeletal remains of men women and children this indicates that family structures existed in the community of the 1200 graves 53 were excavated 11 of those were identified as female his conclusion counters the prevailing view based on the texts of the dead sea scrolls that qumran was a celibate male community um we have here a somewhat delicate cranium of a woman this is woman number 32 who is also the darker one the primary color again is somewhat faded interesting here is the strong abrasion of the teeth from here one can see the inflamed sinus cavities on both sides which were quite extensive and which caused much pain and annoyance over the years sheridan too has females from the french collection we know that we've got a woman we know that we have a woman that's buried deep enough to be fitting the pattern we see of the essene she's buried in the right barrier orientation she doesn't have things like beads and such which was claimed of the ones from the southern extension so she matches the burial pattern for the rest of the cemetery is devoe's monastic theory borne out by the evidence it is clear that the studies of the skeletons devoe relied on were at best preliminary educated guesses the challenges to the accepted theory based on this new evidence are provocative i once joked that they ate drank and were married and that corresponds fully with what i'm talking about today this was a very normal community who lived well orderly and were able to accomplish much whether they were truly of the essene sect of judaism i don't know and it doesn't interest me someone else must determine that but that which is described as as seen in today's literature they were not that sounds unique but this view of the presence of women and children at qumran is not shared by all scholars both the type and the number of gendered objects such as the spindle world must be considered qumran was occupied for approximately 150 years and we have one spindle whirl and four beads masada was occupied for no more than seven years and the caves the other caves were occupied for maybe a few months and yet we have many many more of these gendered objects so in other words if we summarize the archaeological evidence from qumran there is in fact evidence for the presence of women but it is very very very minimal scholars disagree on other issues as well arguments continue about the purpose of the buildings themselves one view holds that the presence of the large tower in the north section is evidence that the site was a military fortress this is a matter of of where you can take the same archaeological evidence and interpret it in different ways but you're not accounting for for a lot of it so yes you could say because there's a tower and there are arrowheads that means it's a fortress but you're disregarding everything else at the site [Music] fortress or religious community yet another interpretation of the evidence suggests that it was perhaps designed as a luxury villa replete with baths dining halls and groves of date palms in the second part of the second century some rich people from jerusalem or elsewhere jericho and then built villas in that end of the world close to a nice spring close the palm trees because it was large gardens and orchards and so on and so on it was not a desert at that time and the people could use the villa too as a agricultural center basically the location is not suitable it doesn't fit the the model of a usual location for a villa second problem is that uh it doesn't have the um the interior decoration that that you find in contemporary villas for example um uh most connemory villas have have wall paintings and mosaic and the other thing is is the in terms of the layout the way that that you have workshops rooms were used as workshops interspersed around the settlement whereas in a villa you know just like today you wouldn't want to have your working areas in your living areas you have them segregated from each other the answers to these questions about the ruins of qumran may be in the pages of these notebooks father roland devoe may yet have the last word devos hypothesis that these were a group living on the edge of the desert preparing the way of the lord and writing manuscripts um no it some have tried to dispute it but the vast majority still believe that this is the best hypothesis to deal with the evidence as we have it the qumran pottery offers another opportunity to test devoe's story the shards and jars may be the key to answering the fundamental questions of qumran when was the site established and where did the scrolls come from [Music] davao of course now here is the excavator of qumran he departed from the premise that everything what he found in the site itself was locally made he had published this within about six years and virtually nobody has ever challenged this no archaeologists the thing was that in the time that devoe excavated not many sites around there had been excavated there was no masada there was no jericho there was no kipros that is one of the other winter palaces king herod today we have them but at that time he didn't have anything so when he found this kind of ceramic no he just assumed this is made on the spot and this has been kept like that for the past 50 years [Music] jan gunaveg's research begins at the kiln used anciently to fire pottery at qumran gunaway takes a sample of the clay from the kiln to determine its chemical fingerprint that is the unique characteristics that belong only to this type of clay and that will later allow him to compare the pottery of qumran to the fingerprints of clay samples from many different locations at the rockefeller museum in jerusalem where the precious scroll jars are kept gunawag carefully removes a sample of one of the clay jars in which the scrolls were found both the kiln and jar samples will be subject to neutron analysis [Music] at the technical university of budapest the clay samples are prepared by dr marta bala they are bombarded with neutrons rendering them radioactive it is this process that yields the fingerprint gunaveg uses to compare the qumran pots with clay samples from throughout the middle east i have 100 samples the result of 100 samples and these indicate that there are four chemical compositions at kumra [Music] the first group matches the inner lining of the kiln at qumran and was made from the same clay as the kiln these are utility vessels of various kinds secondly there are cooking pots that match throwaways found near the kiln and were obviously fired there third are vessels of various types made from clay that came from north or south of qumran this group includes some scroll jars finally there is a fourth group of scroll jars that is not from qumran and not from jerusalem [Music] this is a surprise because some have guessed that the jars containing the dead sea scrolls may have come from the jerusalem temple but what do these results tell us about devos theory of the essene community the neutron analysis shows that some pottery from the caves and some from the settlement have the same chemical fingerprint proof that the scrolls and the community are linked as devote thought gunabek's research also confirms that some pots were imported into qumran from jericho and jordan but a mystery still remains 36 samples comprising most of the scroll jars from the caves remain unidentified where were the jars made that held the precious scrolls every year thousands of tourists come to qumran searching for their own answers about the men and women who settled here over 2 000 years ago and year after year in spite of intense international interest the work of archaeology starts and stops still subject to the whims of funding and political support but the discoveries are by no means over when i came to the university i was told look the sources are gone everything was already found in those 18 years the veterans found everything and there's no chance to find more documents because after 1965 until 1986 nothing was found in the judean desert hanan eschel is one of the most productive archaeologists working at qumran in the winter of 1996 eschel with fellow archaeologist mcginn brochi began looking beyond the main site devoe had excavated in the early 50s josie patrick who's teaching in a haifa university he said that there's no trail connecting cave three and eleven one and two and the side because he walked here and he didn't find a build trail now since i knew that in that area tanks were doing some maneuvers and i knew that this area is wounded i decided i want to do the opposite i came to the site and walked here trying to find the trail leading from the site to cave one and two and while i was walking here i found out that there is those caves that was never recorded by the vault i came here and i said well look there's a cave here and in cave sea the one that you see just below us uh we were lucky we got to the floor of the cave and we found 200 pieces of pottery lying on the surface but we found there evidence that the bedouins were there before us we found a newspaper in arabic from 1953 and we found other evidence that tells us that the cave was already excavated by the bedrooms though many of the dwelling caves have collapsed after two thousand years echelon brochi found support for the theory that members of the community took refuge in them at night this fragment from the damascus document found in cave 4 suggests the need for a geographically close community no man shall walk in any field to do business on the sabbath he shall not walk more than one thousand cubits from his own town over here we found another ball and over here we found complete vessels on the surface and a tent pole and coins and nails of shoes that were dropped here all from second temple period and we we think that in this area tents were built maybe in the winter people were afraid that their moral caves would collapse and they needed to place that they feel safety in a in a rainy day they built here tents and that's what we found here but very interesting is to find all those things on the surface of uh areas so close to the site qumran has not yet given up all its secrets there are still surprises in store and many new questions to ask was devoe right about the celibate monastic community are there more scrolls to be discovered that will reveal the source of the essene's wisdom what secrets to the ancient graves still hold what is the future of the archaeology of qumran well until the people that they call public will produce their final volume think that what we should do is to work outside of the site understand better decide and wait until we'll have a final report we have to to not to to cancel divorce results but we have to go on i think at this point we we really do have a pretty good idea of what was going on at qumran but obviously the final publication will be able to add a lot to that devoe was a supremely intelligent man so he knew the value of evidence and he never absolutized he came to very definite conclusions but had absolutely no trouble in changing his mind [Music] and to imagine that devoe would be upset by the criticisms of his methods and conclusions today no he would just love to be part of it [Music] in the judean wilderness of palestine on the shore of the dead sea the windswept desert ruins of qumran still conceal ancient secrets the human remains and artifacts unearthed by archaeologists 50 years ago are only now beginning to tell the story of the people who in desperation hid the dead sea scrolls in the caves above qumran never to return they were people of faith and dreams they shall separate from the habitation of unjust men and shall go into the wilderness to prepare their the way of him [Music] aligning themselves with heaven over a period of 200 years they prepared for the end of days a last great battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness hidden for two thousand years the scrolls are again talking to us giving life to the voices from the desert [Music] the story begins in the winter of 1947 with an arab shepherd boy named muhammad adeeb looking for a lost goat in the limestone cliffs above the dead sea the boy throws a stone into a small cave opening the sound of breaking pottery comes back to him he enters the cave and to his amazement binds ten clay jars untouched since the time of christ all were empty or filled with dirt except one which held one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century the dead sea scrolls [Music] located in ancient palestine on the shores of the dead sea a day's walk from jerusalem the village of qumran soon drew the world's attention [Music] scholars at the hebrew university in jerusalem undertake the painstaking work of piecing together bits of ancient biblical scrolls found in a mountain cave near the dead sea this parchment the story of the discovery and scholarship of the scrolls has often been shrouded in secrecy hidden documents false accusations and conspiracy theories involving governments and world leaders much has been at stake both politically and scientifically from the discovery of the first scroll hope and fear ran high hope that the scrolls would reveal eyewitness accounts from the very days of jesus's life in palestine fear that they would undermine the fundamental beliefs of christianity and judaism for 50 years the scene has been set for extraordinary research and for a never-ending controversy emil poesh of the ecole in jerusalem is a catholic priest and world-class paleographer he has spent 30 years piecing together the broken texts from the dead sea scrolls the scrolls are written in aramaic the language spoken by jesus and in old hebrew two languages that in some forms have survived to present day i try to impregnate myself a little with their mentality their ideas their point of view i can imagine them organizing themselves at the beginning in their habitation in qumran and copying the texts they use as biblical texts and then composing other texts useful for their community their everyday life to fill the gaps in the manuscript emil relies on a lifetime of studying ancient writing he considers many factors in deciding which of the thousands of fragments belong to the incomplete text the individual writing style of each scribe the time period of the letter style a vast knowledge of different types of ancient texts and a keen intuition sharpened by years of dedicated study i found for example this little fragment and this one and i said can they go with what i had reconstructed yes they found their place you emil's artistic gift allows him to almost feel the personality of his ancient brother in scholarship they became for me familiar people friends people with whom i would love to discuss i would like to share with them i would like them at least to inspire me to comprehend the gaps in the manuscripts who were they the writers copying old texts to new scrolls and composing new texts calling out for a society of their dreams once the scrolls were found interest turned to a forgotten place in the desert a place which could reveal the truth about the writers of the dead sea scrolls in 1951 father roland davao assembled a small team of archaeologists who probed the ruins of qumran they dug for five years and informed what was to become the accepted story of the community in the desert an elite society known as the essenes gathering a massive library of sacred scrolls davao assembled a group of young scholars to work on the scrolls at the rockefeller museum in jerusalem john strugnell was 26 when he came from oxford to join the team they smoked cigarettes in presence of the holy scrolls they everyone smoke cigarettes in those days um we had coffee served in the morning you might have spilt a cup of coffee on the straw and no we we were we didn't treat these scrolls with any great reverence we treated them with seriousness and no great scientific skill these young scholars were piecing together a vast jigsaw puzzle of thousands of individual fragments many from texts no living person had ever read [Music] the inner convolutions of the scroll were very tight it hadn't been unrolled for 2000 years and so i i really had to work away at chipping at the bottom to get the ebony part away and not lose any any information any words and letters and uh so that that it was hard to do but i had to go to lunch that day and uh at the american school on uh in jerusalem and no actually what i did was i put a tea kettle on my stove which was an oil burning stove and and the and let the tea kettle steam i put plenty of water in it ran got my lunch and came back and i didn't there tell father to vote that that's what i'd done because he would have in fact when i did tell him later he got very upset that i'd done that but then the result was good i got it all under glass it was all it was you know just just had worked out perfectly and then later he claimed he had suggested it to me eventually over 800 texts would be identified on tens of thousands of disintegrated fragments some were smaller than the tip of a finger and others were blackened and hardened with the passage of time the task was overwhelming and frustrating to scholars a tedious and groundbreaking work that was fueled by the rising expectations among academics religious leaders and the public at large [Music] scholars and the general public alike were hoping to find glimpses or much more than glimpses of jesus and early christianity in the scrolls this great expectation was met with frustration as the process of scholarship was painstaking and initially limited to eight scholars all christians and no jews the foundation was laid for widespread suspicions of a religious cover-up the established churches had much to lose if the scrolls contained information from the days of jesus which undermined age-long beliefs between 1952 and 1956 ten other caves were discovered which contained scrolls and fragments no one doubted this area still concealed other secrets from the time of christ the archaeological site at qumran is situated on a wide plateau that sits between the severe limestone cliffs to the west and the dead sea to the east when devoe's team began work here in 1952 they found piles of rubble that were barely distinguishable from the surrounding landscape the excavation took over five years to complete as devoe's team worked their way down into the rubble evidence of four periods of occupation was discovered beginning at the deepest and therefore oldest level some structures were dated to 900 bc the time of the israelite kings eight centuries later around 150 bc a new group came to the plateau this was the modest beginning of the essene community and the scrolls library they began constructing buildings kills to fire pottery and aqueducts and cisterns for moving and storing water [Music] this was a period of tremendous religious ferment third second first centuries bce and judaism from second temple time but there were all kinds of other trends as well like strong apocalyptic messianic trends and these feed to some extent into christianity to some extent into rebellious groups within judaism who rebel against rome twice and we have a kind of sorting out of traditions at this time in which some parts of second temple judaism end up sort of flowing into rabbinic judaism and some other elements end up flowing into christianity and some other elements just sort of die off the scene but it's a very complex set of developments which lead to the religious picture that we know of once we emerge into the early centuries of this era jerusalem today strains with the voices of many faiths just as it did two thousand years ago based on the same historical facts many depicted in the dead sea scrolls sects and religions have carved out their own religious beliefs jews and different christians come as pilgrims to this hallowed ground muslims worship as they have for centuries at the dome of the rock known among scholars variously as the covenanters the essenes the yahada and the sons of light as the desert community defined themselves they also lived in a time and place of many voices sadducees pharisees essenes and other groups all claimed to be the true israel judaism was evolving from the rich tapestry of voices that pitched jews against each other in a spiritual battle for souls the sons of light emerged from this world and followed their leaders into the desert to establish a new order unaware of the fact they were living in a world that was in the throes of giving birth to rabbinic judaism and christianity as we know them today departing jerusalem the sons of light also left behind the sacred temple the temple in their eyes was defiled and therefore could not serve the truly righteous of israel [Music] and so what happened was that the members of the qumran community basically felt that that temple was not being run right because of hellenistic influence on the high priests various other specific rituals that they disagreed with so they withdrew from it and for them to dream of a perfect temple that they would return to and that would be run the way they thought it should be run was perhaps the greatest of all dreams and every member of the house of separation who went out of the holy city and leaned on god at the time when israel sinned and defiled the temple shall rejoice and their hearts shall be strong and they shall prevail over the sons of earth they settled on an isolated plateau near the dead sea a location where they could prepare the way of the lord in restoring the true israel in the middle of the first century bc the community took on what devoe called its definitive form the finished complex had three parts first the study area where the scrolls were collected and also a fortress-like watchtower second a group of service buildings including a kitchen third at the extreme south end the largest room in the complex used for dining and as an assembly hall there were also remains of an extensive system for water storage and use unique to this site reconstructing the site it bears all the signs of a fortress a place which is as hard to enter as it is to leave it is likely that the sons of light slept in the caves of the nearby cliffs and in tents around the sacred building only entering into the east gate after two years of initiation and probation the most important part of the main complex was the scriptorium the place where scrolls were copied or written and the rooms where the scrolls were studied no doubt the sect had a large collection of scrolls to read from some of historical significance such as the copies of older biblical texts but also those containing the harsh rules for their daily lives through an elaborate system of aqueducts the water from the judean hills was channeled into cisterns and baths built by the community at qumran at the so-called fifth hour of each day the community would return from their labors to eat in common before eating they purified themselves the men would take their work clothes off and put on a loincloth walk into the deep pool and submerge themselves after this ritual of purification they would then return to the community on the holy or pure side of the stairs could this water ritual be linked to the development of the christian baptismal rite of later times purity was of utmost importance to the essenes living at qumran it affected all walks of life the first century historian josephus refers to the dining room of the essenes as a holy temple where only men who were both free of physical handicaps and ritually pure could eat the sacred meal unlike others in the area at the time each member of the community had his personal plate and cup they didn't eat out of communal pots and pans they were concerned with contamination and cleanliness both physical and spiritual [Music] the blind the deaf and the lame are not allowed into the sacred precincts and the reason for this is that the blind cannot see if they're touching something that makes them impure the death because they can't hear the proper interpretation of the torah to be able to uh know whether they are becoming impure or not and the lame because they scare the angels away [Music] it was a tough regime each brother was pledged to a strict code of conduct that reinforced the sanctity of a place where angels tread and prayer was constant even simple murmuring was met with swift justice whoever has murmured against the authority of the community shall be expelled among the dead sea scrolls are texts definitely written by the essenes themselves among these manuscripts has found the rule of the community which sets forth a strict lifestyle for the members of this elite group every man who enters the council of holiness and who deliberately or through negligence transgresses one word of the law of moses on any point whatever shall be expelled and shall return no more for one sin of inadvertance he shall do penance for two years but if he has sinned deliberately he shall never return to the community josephus the ancient historian observed that those guilty of serious offenses often came to a most miserable end still bound by oaths and as seen practices they could not partake of other men's food or drink and so fell to eating grass and wasted away dying of starvation in the desert some scholars have speculated that john the baptist the cousin of jesus may have been excommunicated as seen surviving in the desert by eating honey and wild locusts and dressing in animal skins could john have brought the rite of baptism with him to his own mission along the jordan river not far from qumran thus establishing a direct historical link to jesus it is probable that many aspects of the essene's beliefs echo in john the baptist teachings as well as in early christianity and judaism but the tough regime was far removed from later christianity and other religions preaching compassion for the weak and sick yet they believed that their piety and purity led to a higher dimension but archaeology points to a different story in the fourth layer at qumran archaeologists have found ashes and arrowheads telling the story of the community's destruction at first they didn't think of staying more than a few months maybe a few years at most and they died there with regrets since they were expecting the messiah and hoped to come back to jerusalem though the community of qumran was destroyed their ancient cemetery remains the essene graves have been an enticing mystery since the beginning of dubose excavations of the 1200 graves laid out on a north-south axis across the eastern edge of the qumran plateau 54 were opened before ultra-orthodox jewish criticism stopped the work in the early sixties the story of what happened to the bones and the questions they raised opens a new chapter in the archaeology of qumran father devoe's attitude toward the bones was perplexing different accounts suggest he was sometimes excited about what the bones could reveal and at other times indifferent most of the graves in the cemetery are of similar construction after the body was prepared a hole was dug in the soft soil about one to two meters deep [Music] the body was lowered into the grave and then placed in a chamber which was cut sideways into the earth devoe's unpublished notes accurately depicts the graves [Music] stones were then placed over the chamber opening to protect the body as it awaited a great final resurrection at the end of days but the mystery about the skeletal remains have deepened over time the bones excavated by devoe's team now reside in three collections in france germany and jerusalem all ignored for over 30 years and in various states of decay today the bones are fueling an academic controversy perhaps the society was divided into groups a scholarly or administrative elite and a working class whose bones are scarred by hard labor this could still fit with the theory of a monastic society but other findings do not anthropologist gustav rora ertel men are found we have skeletal remains of men women and children this indicates that family structures existed in the community of the 1200 graves 53 were excavated 11 of those were identified as female his conclusion counters the prevailing view based on the texts of the dead sea scrolls that qumran was a celibate male community his devos monastic theory borne out by the evidence before he could publish his final report and open up his conclusions to a normal academic procedure and debate father devos suddenly died at the age of 66. his archaeological evidence remains unpublished to the dismay of the scientific community it is clear that the studies of the skeletons devoe relied on were at best preliminary educated guesses the challenges to the accepted theory based on new evidence are provocative i once joked that they ate drank and were merry and that corresponds fully with what i'm talking about today this was a very normal community who lived well orderly and was able to accomplish much whether they were truly of the essene sect of judaism i don't know and it doesn't interest me someone else must determine that but that which is described as as seen in today's literature they were not in the literature anthropologist sue sheridan is working on the frontier of archaeological science with 21st century tools that will finally allow the ancient bones to begin to tell their story sheridan is fascinated with the presence of women in the cemetery know that we've got a woman we know that we have a woman that's buried deep enough to be fitting the pattern we see of of the scene she's buried in the right barrier orientation she doesn't have things like beads and such which was claimed of the ones from the southern extension so she matches the burial pattern for the rest of the cemetery but this view of the presence of women and children at qumran is not shared by all scholars both the type and the number of gendered objects found at qumran present problems qumran was occupied for approximately 150 years and we have one spindle whirl and four beads masada was occupied for no more than seven years and the caves the other caves were occupied for maybe a few months and yet we have many many more of these gendered objects so in other words if we summarize the archaeological evidence from qumran there is in fact evidence for the presence of women but it is very very very minimal scholars disagree on other issues as well arguments continue about the purpose of the buildings themselves one view holds that the presence of the large tower in the north section is evidence that the site was a military fortress this is a matter of of where you can take the same archaeological evidence and interpret it in different ways but you're not accounting for for a lot of it so yes you could say because there's a tower and there are arrowheads that means it's a fortress but you're disregarding everything else at the site space age technology is shedding new light on ancient qumran [Music] nasa's synthetic aperture radar sar for short is designed to read the earth's surface even when obscured by dense cloud cover today's palestine can be seen in detail and physical features are enhanced by the satellite technology but the amazing feature of this technology is that it allows us to see beyond the observations of the naked eye it can actually work as a time machine and allow us to glance back into history the same technology mounted on a small plane will allow the scientists to probe even further seeing caves hidden underground trails covered over time and objects only centimeters big on the ground a number of metal cones are deployed to form a grid on which the photographs can be aligned the flight route is carefully mapped out as they need to fly as low and level to the surface of the ground as possible to get the best reading [Music] some believe that there are still sights to be on earth that qumran that we have not yet found all the details about this community new technology paired with ancient texts could hopefully give us a better picture of the religious group that lived here doug thompson collects data as they fly over the site at this stage he has no visual control of the images the system captures only later in the lab will he be able to analyze the material but it's already clear that the qumran site was not an isolated island in the desert it was a place well connected with nearby communities such as jericho ein feshka and eingwar another space age method developed by dr greg baerman at the jet propulsion laboratory is put to use on the scrolls themselves at the invitation of the israeli antiquities authority selected fragments darkened by aging and deteriorating rapidly are put to the test [Music] i guess this is reverse writing notice there's three of those images and they're kind of on their side bearman's technology is based on using infrared light to capture the lost images just as the satellite's camera can reveal stories about life on earth he can see beyond the limitations of the naked eye the situation is tense in the room whatever is on the piece of parchment no one has seen it for almost 2 000 years oh look at that that's what you want look at that in an instant greg bearman washes away two thousand years of dirt bat dung and animal urine revealing for the first time lines of text that will divulge even more about the sons of light what we found out was that as you move further in the infrared this is 640 and 680 this is the red part uh 720 this is infrared you see that as you move further out the text begins to emerge from from the background and down here at the bottom is an enhanced version of 970 nanometers once in the computer scientists can work with the new images and texts the dazzling magic of this new digital technology masks flaws that some scholars find troubling although an advocate of this new road of research bruce zuckerman of the west semitic research project at the university of southern california is quick to point out the potholes in digital reconstruction of scroll fragments let me show you what what i mean here we have up here a uh a dead sea scroll or a section of same from the genesis apocrypha one of the more interesting dead sea scrolls of what i would call a good use of computer imaging a kind of imaging that no one would argue with you see here there's a tear in the text you see where the ink was and the piece just sort of jags down because of of the tear now what we did here is we simply cut this little piece out electronically i should add you know it's not done don't try this with the real thing and we simply shoved it up and when you shoved it up we it became quite nice you'll notice that we left a line that's very clear that shows that we have done something to the fragment it would be very easy to go in and make this edge sort of melt away and just become part of the fragment above it you would not be able to tell and most scholars would have no idea that you'd done any kind of manipulation so this is a good example of of a type of manipulation g that one could do with the real text if the real text were not so fragile but there are other types of manipulation which uh uh one would say are a little bit more questionable here's a text uh where we have done some computer imaging inhabitants see here is the on this one end this is the raw image or the image that is on unprocessed and here on the other end is a really absolutely gorgeous if i do say so myself image of the text and we could say computer enhancement yielded that but you see hiding behind that is a multitude of sense this image in some respects is a fake now what do i mean by that here i can show you how we quote faked it okay i am lightening the image around this what turns out to be a yud so that you can very clearly see where the letter begins and where it ends as if it had been originally written by the scribe i'm taking all of that little bleeding that has taken place because of the deterioration of the text you can also let's make a little darker on there you can uh no no problem see now beautiful ink original looks like it was written yesterday pull it back now zoom out when we pull back if i were to show people this material and this material and said computer imaging yielded that if i don't explain what i did they would assume that that is a totally objective maneuver and it's not it's a highly selective highly idiosyncratic maneuver indeed using this type of technology i can put your name in a dead sea scroll but the one name everyone has looked for in the scrolls is the one of yeshua ben yosef known to christians as jesus and to the muslims as isa ibn maryam but his name is nowhere to be found the texts have been grouped by scholars into three categories biblical books sectarian documents and non-biblical religious writings the first third of the library was comprised of the oldest known copies of the hebrew bible including the great isaiah scroll older than any previously known copy by a thousand years the second category of the library was the sectarian literature or the group of manuscripts that were written by the essenes themselves to govern daily life the third group of documents is harder to categorize but they offer the first glimpse that scholars have had into the great ferment that was taking place in judaism during this period they include retold biblical stories new psalms works of biblical commentary and interpretation as well as mystical writings describing angelic journeys after a period of confusion a great leader emerged whom the scrolls referred to as the teacher of righteousness under his direction the disciples devoted their lives to the production collection and study of the great library of scrolls could this teacher have been john the baptist could jesus himself have been part of this community speculations abound because there is still a lot we do not understand about this group of people and the mystery deepens as scholars have found cryptic texts among the scrolls sacred teachings that were not for the eyes of outsiders could the name of jesus be hidden in these secret documents [Music] stephen fong of the university of the holy land has worked to decipher the unusual alphabet he has not found the name of jesus in the text but apparently the cryptic writing was devised by a man called the mosquil who was a visionary or prophetic leader in the community in a way the text reads like an instructional manual and fawn believes the mosquil kept this text close to his heart and carried it with him at all times this new alphabet which he developed was one that was his own personal alphabet and perhaps of a few other people who he trusted and this was in order to help to keep pure and separate knowledge that others aren't allowed to have access to yet it is easy to believe that the texts of the community such as the mosquitoes coded language were actually written at qumran where the community was established and where the scrolls were found two thousand years later but could some of the scrolls have been written somewhere else and then brought to qumran for safe keeping during the jewish revolt in 68 ce scientists from new fields have joined the biblical scholars in their search for answers [Music] scott woodward of brigham young university has worked on extracting ancient dna from mummies in egypt the israeli antiquities authority approached him regarding dna sampling of the scrolls when we were originally approached by the antiquities authority in israel the idea was what can we do with all of these fragments of the scrolls the pieces that didn't belong in some large scroll was there any way that we could put those back together and reconstruct some of the dead sea scrolls from from a pile of unconnected fragments because the parchment on which the texts are written is leather and comes from animals the scientists can look for the genetic material found in the cells finding small parts of dna strings in the so-called mitochondria of cells scientists can create a genetic fingerprint of each individual animal by testing piece after piece they can see if they come from the same original parchment thus likely belonging together in the same sequence of text a little bit of that put on the key likes and we'll go from there okay not only can fragments be pieced together dna and genetic signatures can reveal even more information we have been able to show that the technology works what that will be able to do for the scholars is help answer the question where were the scrolls written in order to do that we have to take the genetic signature that we now have from some of these scrolls match it with the genetic signature that we would find from bones from some of the archaeological sites bones from qumran bones from jerusalem and other sites throughout the holy land and then probably finally the other the the next thing that we ought to be able to do is take some of the unidentified fragments that are still sitting in in boxes waiting to be pieced back together to see if we can in fact reconstruct some new pages from which the scholars would then be able to get new information so dna could help reveal whether the parchments were actually from qumran or from elsewhere in the middle east goats had always been prime suspects as the source of scroll material common domestic animals they were a natural fit because they could thrive in the harsh climate of the dead sea and were acceptable to use his skin for sacred or biblical text ibex skin a wild animal was also found in scrolls which were not biblical in nature but in sectarian documents that were written for the regulation of the community ibex was an interesting choice but not a surprising one it was with more sampling however that the dna work took an unexpected turn startling scholars and raising more questions about the scrolls [Music] but what we found in this case was that these scrolls seem to have been written on parchment from bovine or from cows there may be a problem with cows here where where do you raise cows on the shores of the dead sea it's not very easy i think most people would agree that they probably weren't there so where did they come from so the origin of the scrolls is called into question by yet another source the shards and jars of the qumran pottery may be the key to answering the fundamental questions of qumran when and why was the site established and where did the scrolls come from professor yan gunevik of the hebrew university is applying the technology of nuclear activation to find out if the jars were made at the communities kiln in qumran or were perhaps brought here from another location such as jerusalem in police records all over the world are stored fingerprints of criminals according to which every individual can be identified so what we are doing here is the same more or less the same we are taking a chemical profile of a kiln which is called the chemical fingerprint and we can match it later with the ceramic which is found at the site after gathering clay samples from the kiln and qumran gunaway goes to the rockefeller museum in jerusalem where the jars are kept one interesting characteristic the scroll jars display is a blistering effect on the ceramic surface gunavec offers several theories to explain the effect one of the more intriguing is the idea that the jars were made quickly to hide the scrolls perhaps when the kumra knights learned of the advancing roman army people were in hurry you know to produce the jars and therefore they took whatever they could lay their hands on in order to produce these jars as soon as possible and therefore when they are going in the kiln you get different shrinkages you know after that they are fired of the clay and the calcium carbonate and then you get blisters all over the place but not all jars look the same and they are found in different places and containing different scrolls one conclusion doesn't answer all the questions if dna analysis takes the scroll research to the molecular level neutron analysis takes it further into the building blocks of all matter after the samples are packed in vials numbered and identified they are sent to the technical university of budapest [Music] gunaveg's partner dr marta bala prepares them for the nuclear reactor the samples are bombarded with neutrons which render the powder samples radioactive [Music] the radiation given off by the sample is converted into electric pulses which are converted into numbers which show the quantities of chemical elements within the clay this is the fingerprint that will point the way to the location where the jar was made and a possible clue to the origin of the scrolls themselves in jerusalem gunavag can compare the result with an extensive data bank from around the middle east i have 100 samples the results of 100 samples and these indicate that there are four chemical compositions at kumra the first group matches the inner lining of the kiln at qumran and was made from the same clay as the kiln these are utility vessels of various kinds secondly there are cooking pots that match throwaways found near the kiln and were obviously fired there third are vessels of various types made from clay that came from north or south of qumran this group includes some scroll jars finally there is a fourth group of scroll jars that is not from qumran and not from jerusalem this is a surprise because some have guessed that the jars containing the dead sea scrolls may have come from the jerusalem temple [Music] the neutron analysis shows that some pottery from the caves and some from the settlement have the same chemical fingerprint proof that the scrolls and the community are linked as devoe thought gunavec's research also confirms that some pots were imported into qumran from jericho and jordan but a mystery still remains 36 samples comprising most of the scroll jars from the caves remain unidentified where were the jars made that held the precious scrolls the members of the qumran community with a strong apocalyptic belief were not surprised that they were heading into a final battle the long hours of study and discussion had prepared them for a great battle at the end of days between the sons of light and the sons of darkness with the hosts of heaven fighting on their side in the year 68 ce the roman army marched south from jericho they mobilized the army to curb the jewish rebellion the qumran knights were probably not the prime target but they would not escape the romans rage [Music] the essenes look to the caves surrounding qumran to protect their precious library of scrolls [Music] [Music] the scrolls were safe but the men who hid them never returned they went out to fight the battle they had prepared for and the scrolls had described in detail [Music] on the points of the javelin they shall write shining javelin of the power of god bloody spikes to bring down the slain by the wrath of god flaming blade to devour the wicked struck down by the judgment of god one thousand men rank seven lines deep they shall each hold shields of bronze burnished with mirrors the sons of light waited more than 200 years in the desert for this holy war what signs they were waiting for is unknown but when the roman army was mobilized to curb the jewish rebellion they believed the day had come [Music] [Applause] the historian josephus tells us of the fate of the essenes at the hands of the romans the war with the romans tried their souls through and through by every variety of tests wrapped and twisted burned and broken and made to pass through every instrument of torture in order to induce them to blaspheme their lawgiver smiling in their agonies and mildly deriding their tormentors they cheerfully resigned their souls confident that they would receive them back again the jewish revolt was an ironic end to the apocalyptic vision of the sons of light for it was the romans who had a dizzying array of weapons and legions of men archaeologist dr magen brosher well they took their revolt against the romans too seriously they believe that this is the apocalyptic war they were expecting so they entered the war with abandon so much so that they perished in the war they were just killed on the battlefields and after the battles they were hunted down by the romans and butchered and how did they know the fact that we have 800 scrolls i mean there was nobody to retrieve it [Music] hidden away in a forgotten crypt beneath the busy streets of modern jerusalem is the grave of the remarkable man whose ghost still haunts the archaeologists and scientists eager to know the mysteries of the scrolls and those who hid them what secrets did father roland devoe take with him to the grave and why does his name still awaken controversy [Music] the dead sea scrolls are accessible to everyone now why is the archaeological material from qumran not accessible the same argument that was made about the dead sea scrolls why should the dead sea scrolls be made accessible to everyone that same argument should be made about the archaeology of qumran we are 52 years after that the dead sea scrolls were found but from a point of view in archaeology we just start the arguments are spinning faster and faster around the ruins of qumran a place that has not yet given up all its secrets there are still surprises in store and many new questions to ask was devoe write about the celibate monastic community are there more scrolls to be discovered that will reveal the source of the essene's wisdom what secrets do the ancient grave still hold what is the future of the archaeology of qumran the dreams and visions that drove these men into the wilderness are not yet fully understood it is the science of the 21st century that will bring us closer to these forgotten voices in the desert [Music] in this area there are quite a number of artificial caves that caved in that crumbled we believe that there might have been even 20. the fact that they are crumbled is an advantage because they haven't been rifled nobody disturbed them if they have crumbled in the right time so there is a very good possibility that if we'll dig those caves you'll find utensils and god willing even manuscripts even that's his cross though lost in the aftermath of the roman military campaign the voices of qumran can once again be heard because of the painstaking work of dozens of scientists and scholars around the world but for every question answered many others are being asked and perhaps many answers still lie hidden in the desert in many ways the real work on the dead sea scrolls is just beginning

Channel: Parable - Religious History Documentaries

Views: 290,816

Keywords: parable, parable channel, parable documentary, religious history, religious history documentary, bible documentary, bible documentary bbc, jesus documentary, dead sea scrolls documentary, dead sea scrolls explained, dead sea scrolls bible, what are the dead sea scrolls, who found the dead sea scrolls, who wrote the bible, who wrote the dead sea scrolls, search for the dead sea scrolls, qumran, dead sea, religious mystery documentary, judaism history, bible history

Id: 8PuogYgGtTQ

Length: 147min 45sec (8865 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021