The Mysterious Biblical Manuscripts Of The Judaean Desert | Dead Sea Scrolls | Absolute History

on the desolate shores of the Dead Sea 200 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 forego into the wilderness to prepare there 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 two thousand years dust blew over the graves of the sons of light who remained forgotten in Jerusalem undertake the painstaking work of piecing together bits of ancient Biblical Scrolls found in a mountain cave near the Dead Sea 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 government's 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 and fragments of the past that scholars and scientists have labored over for half a century Stevan fond of the Center for the study of early Christianity in Jerusalem is working towards the synthesis of science scholarship and archeology at Qumran what we're doing is we're returning to the scene of the crime to solve mystery we come back to the place where the events took place here at Qumran and study the place in context we study the actual documents these people had in their hands and and to relate them to the site and the events that took place there and we consult the witnesses eyewitnesses that knew these people and spoke in detail about them and that the time in which they lived [Music] Magan bro she archaeologists 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're 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 crumbles in your hands so it doesn't require very hard labour on the floor we found hundreds of pictures which testified that the place was occupied the Dead Sea Scrolls is an expensive 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 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 was smaller than a 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 of 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 comprised three distinct groups of literature the first group contains the entire Hebrew Bible saved the book of Esther these are the oldest copies of Old Testament texts by 1000 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 have 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 the study of old writing with with the end of the gold of dating a material because scripts change over time like all artifacts whether it's cars or dresses or musical styles or whatever each letter and an alphabet changes steadily and not at the same rate so that you're able to examine where each of the letters is of a given alphabet and that gives you the basis for an absolute date or at least a relative date in your type of logical sequence the early Padilla graphical dating performed by Frank cross on the Dead Sea Scrolls has laid have 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 the [Music] 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 e note texts have been found that a younger than 70 CE e indicating that this is the time when the scrolls were hidden in the caves [Music] the real question cold biblical Jerusalem is a Catholic priest and world class purely ographers he has spent 30 years PC together the broken texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls sediment Pena I try to impregnate myself a little with their mentality their ideas I can imagine them organizing themselves at the beginning in their habitation in pain and copying out the biblical texts and then composing other texts useful for their community their everyday life community por la vida seclusion to fill the gaps in the manuscript amel 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 was 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 hyssop teeth like Mont Blanc I found for example this little fragment and this one is and I said can they go with what I had reconstructed yes they found their place plus Emile's artistic gift allows him to almost feel the personality of his ancient brother in scholarship they became for me familiar people French people with whom I would love to talk to I would like to share with them I would like them at least to inspire me to comprehend the gannis in the manuscript it was with the appointment of Emmanuel 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 and most of the work is really done on photographs in 1950s in the beginning of the six superb photographs infrared were made of the scrolls and they are still our best tools I should answer this that even better ones are being made in these very days it labs off the suite halls at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena Gregg Behrman has worked on digital optics used to capture distinct images of the Earth's surface from five miles up Gregg hypothesized that multispectral 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 selected fragments darkened by aging and deteriorating rapidly are put to the test Berman'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 [Music] in an instant Greg bourbon 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 every gene 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 on the scene and then you use spectroscopy which is a traditional physicist tool to help me 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 400 and for 10 for 20 worked all the 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 in 680 this is the red part 720 this is infrared you see that 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 Behrman and his team today's scholars also have the advantage of replacing the traditional method of scrolls scholarship involving hours of tedious work on fragrance 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 community open up the database select the transcription that he wants select the area of this fragment drop it and then you can 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 Ackerman 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 we have up here a Dead Sea scroll or a section of saying from the Genesis apocryphon 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 the tear now what we did here if 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 we 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've done any kind of manipulation so this is a good example 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 one would say are a little bit more questionable now here's a text where we have done some computer imaging in habit 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 sins 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 yard 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 and 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 that you can note no problem see 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 live 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 covenant errs the Essenes that you had 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 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 had offered 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 Furman 3rd 2nd 1st 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 rebelled 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 1,300 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 sons 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] [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 two sons of light from the rest of the world they were separatists in what they separated themselves from the general community they were piety stand 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 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 [Music] 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 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 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 Deaf 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 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 her 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 incoming before eating they purified themselves they would have to come in and and put a loin cloth on take off their work clothes and put it over to the side comes 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 Qumran i'ts 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 the sect 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 [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 vyu 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 suns of life lived on the shore of the Dead Sea this is a custom-designed antenna we built the overall system operates at about two gigahertz this is a patched phased array antenna it's very flat panel kind of innovative but it's not something that a lot of places couldn't do this one's unusual that we did it here so that we can get students involved with it and it's very broadband 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 well we hope to get we'd hoped it optically you see colors of the ground but a 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 is that we could see foundations that were buried because the ground will come up where old fences no piles of rock and we from sensors from the air we'd be able to see designs and maybe to see how the city was laid out so that would give a survey for an archaeologist to begin their other excavation plans for when they actually go in to excavate the side 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 [Music] one of the questions is is how big was the civilization was adjust where Qumran is or was it the whole shelf around the Dead Sea there so we hope we hope to be able to see new trails new ancient trails but going between different settlements who can get an idea how large that that civilization or that segment this population was Doug Thompson collects data as they fly over the sniper 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 and 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 fishka and a noir if I was one of the group four thousand 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 it hasn't existed at that time and the water reached the cliffs so there was not even a trail going the longer 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 civilization 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 safekeeping during the Jewish revolt in 68 C II scientists for mule 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 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 or cells scientists can create a genetic fingerprint of each individual animal my 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 texts we're on the key lines we'll go from there Wood woods partner in DNA research at the Hebrew University Milich Aquila 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 they 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 we'll be able to do for the scholars has helped 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 a 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 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 a harsh climate of the Dead Sea and were acceptable to use as skin for sacred or biblical text [Applause] I've expen 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 seemed 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 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 eleven 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 guna vague of the Hebrew University is applying the technology of nuclear activation to find out if the jars were made at the communities killed 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 as a kiln which is called a 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 good of it goes to the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem where the jars are kept one interesting characteristic of the school jars display is a blistering effect on the ceramic surface Goethe vague 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 Cooma Knights learned of the advancing Roman army people were in hurry now 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 linkages now after that they are fired with the clay and the calcium carbonate and then you get blisters all over the place [Music] this chart is from gate number eight in Kuna what we are going to do is to take a sample of this chart in order to find a match between anything what we have analyzed in Qumran itself and this chart we have meanwhile already done thirty other jars so if they match we can either prove whether it was made in Qumran or it was imported into Cumbre [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] good of eggs partner dr. Marta Bella prepares them for the nuclear reactor the samples are bombarded by neutrons which render the powder samples radioactive 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 and 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 myself that means there's not some piece of clay was not important now you find it there and I have analyzed three pieces of clay which are three clay balls they were found as balls now 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 that they really are made in Qumran they're made from the clay which was found at Qumran [Music] there is another interesting thing that is that the scroll jars don't analyze exactly the same as all the other pottery no so it seems at least basing ourselves on 30 shirts that there is some 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] [Laughter] another ceramic object found at Qumran 40 years ago has held its secrets well cosmic secrets about the alignment of heavenly time with earth three time only recently Stephen Fong identified the object as a sundial being historical significance of this sundial when it was modified in its final form is that it's the only tying piece in antiquity which accurately determined the fifth hour of the day any time 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 twelve 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 at the front of war prepared himself in purity you name it and even composing book about how the war is going to be handled this is the War of the children flight the consistent of not this 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] 1,000 men ranked seven lines deep they shall each hold shields of bronze garnished with mirrors the sons of light waited more than 200 years in the desert for this holy water 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 ward if the Romans tried their souls through and through by every variety of tests wrapped and twisting burned and and made to pass through every instrument of torture in order to induce them to blaspheme their lawgiver smiling at their Agony's and mildly dividing 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 they were 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 world 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 - 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 hopeful to come back to Jerusalem evangelism [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 are quite the number of artificial caves that caved in that crumbled we believe that there might have been even 20 the fact that that crumbled is an advantage because they haven't been rifled nobody disturbed it if they have crumbled at the right time so there is a very good possibility that it will dig those caves you'll find utensils and God willing even manuscripts even that's his cause though loss and 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 you you

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Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, dead sea scrolls bible, dead sea scrolls documentary history channel, dead sea scrolls documentary, religious history of the world, religious history, caves, manuscripts found in accra, religious manuscripts, jesus christ, dead sea, dead sea scrolls

Id: IKfIKicM8Co

Length: 49min 34sec (2974 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020