Dead Sea Scrolls

Some think that ancient history and religious scholarship are boring and uneventful, but the atmosphere surrounding the discovery of the 870 or more scrolls in various caves surrounding the Dead Sea has been anything but mundane. The decades since the first scrolls were discovered in a cave on the northern shore of the Dead Sea have been filled with intrigue, debate and struggle for control of the precious documents among various groups of scholars.

The scrolls were found between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves surrounding the Dead Sea. Most of the scrolls date from one century B.C. through the first century A.D. Most are written on animal hides or papyrus. One special scroll is inscribed on a thin sheet of copper. The texts are written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Aramaic was the common language of Jews in Palestine from 200 B.C. to 200 A.D., and was the language used during the time of Jesus.

There were three types of scrolls found in the Qumran caves. The first group of scrolls contains copies of parts of the Hebrew Bible. These have great religious and historical importance because they are apparently the oldest surviving copies of the biblical text. The second group of scrolls are copies of other religious books such as those of the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha. The writings in these two groups are considered to be of questionable authorship, so these early writing were not incorporated into the official canon.

The final group contains documents thought to be from an ascetic community that contains the temple scroll which gives ritual law. It has been thought for some time that the community is that of the Essene sect in Qumran. The Essenes were a Jewish religious sect that practiced a communal life. Scholars have long proposed that the scrolls are part of the library of the Essene sect that was secreted away in the caves before the colony was destroyed in 68 A.D. Scrolls not tied to this community have also been found near the Dead Sea at Masada.

Scholarly debate focuses on two areas in particular. One is whether or not the documents are from the Essenes or from some other source. Recently this controversy has been fueled by a 2009 publication by Rachel Elinor, a teacher of Jewish Mysticism at the Jerusalem Hebrew University. She has proposed that the Essenes never existed and that they were invented centuries ago by the Jewish-Roman historian, Flavius Joseph. Elinor asserts that the past six decades of research and debate has been wasted on a myth. She has pointed out that the Essenes are never actually mentioned in the scrolls.

The second area of focus is, simply, whether the scrolls clarify or confuse the accepted interpretation of the origins of Christianity and Jewish history. Edmund Wilson published an article in 1955 relating the observation of the scholars that there were many similarities between the Christian Jesus and the 'Teacher of Righteousness' described in the scrolls. He suggested that the Christian idea was taken directly from these writings. This is an important area of study for both Christians and Jews.

Because there is such important information in these documents, scholars all over the world have complained for decades about the limited access and the slow rate of publication of the material. Access was tightly controlled until, finally, in 1991, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. allowed academics to examine their master set of negatives. Israel protested this release. They have had control of the scrolls since they passed to the Israeli Antiquities Authority at the end of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.