Chapter 9
From the Silver Amulet Scrolls to the Dead Sea Scrolls
In 1979, Gabriel Barkay, then a professor at Tel Aviv University, was able to illuminate the biblical account from a unique perspective, while excavating a number of tombs in Jerusalem in an area overlooking the Hinnom Valley. The tombs are located at the site of Ketef Hinnom (the “Shoulder of Hinnom”), an Iron Age cemetery situated to the south of the King David Hotel and next to the Scottish Presbyterian Church of St. Andrew.
One of the tombs—actually a burial cave (Cave 24)—had multiple chambers. In one of the chambers (Room 25) were the remains of more than ninety-five individuals, along with more than one thousand objects. At least seven hundred of the objects were found in a single repository, left undisturbed for at least 2,500 years under one of the burial benches. Among 263 intact pots and other vessels, numerous gold objects, one hundred or more pieces of silver jewelry, arrowheads, and axeheads was a silver coin minted in the sixth century BCE on the Greek island of Kos. It is one of the earliest coins ever found in Israel, for coinage had only just been invented at the beginning of the seventh century BCE in Turkey.
Even more interesting were two small amulets, each consisting of a small rolled-up strip of silver: one approximately four inches long by one inch wide; the other approximately one and a half inches long by half an inch wide. It took three years of painstaking work at the Israel Museum before the strips were fully unrolled. When that was finally accomplished, it was apparent that they were inscribed with minuscule writing. One word on the longer inscription jumped out at Yaakov Meshorer, curator of numismatics at the Israel Museum: YHWH, the tetragrammaton for the Divine Name Yahweh (Lord). Later it was established that the same word, YHWH, was inscribed on the smaller piece as well.
The two inscriptions appeared to contain priestly blessings in Hebrew, similar to the Priestly Benediction found in the Bible in Numbers 6:24–26, which says: “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace” (NRSV).
However, it was still not clear exactly what was written on the two amulets, for the writing on them was nearly illegible, due to the ravages of time. It took the combined efforts of the members of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California, headed by Bruce and Kenneth Zuckerman, to tease out the full text of the inscriptions, using a combination of photographic and computer imaging techniques, including fiber-optic technology.
Eventually it became clear that the inscription on the smaller piece reads “May he/she be blessed by Yahweh, the warrior [or helper] and the rebuker of [E]vil: May Yahweh bless you, keep you. May Yahweh make his face shine upon you and grant you p[ea]ce.” The inscription on the longer piece is similar, reading
. . . ]YHW . . . the grea[t . . . who keeps] the covenant and [G] raciousness towards those who love [him] and those who keep [his commandments]. the Eternal? [...]. [the?] blessing more than any [sna]re and more than Evil. For redemption is in him. For YHWH is our restorer [and] rock. May YHWH bles[s] you and [may he] keep you. [May] YHWH make [his face] shine . . .
Barkay suggested that the two amulets may have been deposited soon after the city’s destruction by Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonians in 586 BCE, since most of the pottery and other objects found associated with them date to just after this period. It is, however, impossible to tell exactly how old the amulets are, although the paleography—the script used in the inscriptions— suggests that they were inscribed sometime during the seventh or sixth centuries BCE. What is clear, though, is that they have a singular importance, for they are the oldest biblical texts currently extant. The fact that they so closely repeat what is said in today’s versions of the Hebrew Bible only adds to their importance.
It is noteworthy that the amulets were found in what was essentially a routine, albeit very carefully conducted, excavation by a traditional team of archaeologists and students. What makes their story so compelling—in addition to their inscriptions—is the manner in which sheer ingenuity coupled together with modern technology enabled determined scholars to unroll the amulets and study the inscriptions.
Similar ingenuity and modern technology are now being used on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which William Albright once called the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times. Found more than sixty years ago, these scrolls, written mostly between the third century BCE and the first century CE, are relevant to both Jews and Christians. The initial discovery of these famous scrolls was not made by archaeologists but by Bedouins, who sold them to antiquities dealers.
According to the traditional account of the story, back in 1947 three young men from a local Bedouin tribe were watering their sheep and goats in the harsh desert area near the western side of the Dead Sea. One of them began idly tossing rocks at the mouth of a cave high up on a cliff above him. One of the stones sailed through the cave entrance, and the young boy standing below heard a crash. With evening rapidly approaching, the boy made his way back to camp and told his two acquaintances what had happened. In the morning, they climbed the cliff and entered the cave, where they found pieces of a shattered jar and several intact jars. At least one of the jars contained several tightly wrapped leather scrolls. Disappointed that they had not found gold, the boys gathered up the scrolls and returned to their camp.
Sometime later, the boys rejoined the rest of their tribe and hung the scrolls from a tent pole until the tribe’s wanderings brought them close to the town of Bethlehem. There they brought the scrolls to an antiquities dealer named Kando, who bought them thinking that if he could not sell them as antiquities he could always sell the leather to be made into sandals. Kando, in turn, contacted Professor Eliezer Sukenik of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who traveled down to Kando’s shop in Bethlehem to examine the scrolls. Sukenik purchased the three scrolls that Kando offered him and returned to Jerusalem just hours before fighting broke out in the Israeli War for Independence. The scrolls proved to be extremely important. One was a copy—at least one thousand years older than any previously known copy—of the book of Isaiah from the Hebrew Bible. The second scroll, now known as the Thanksgiving Scroll, contained hymns of thanks. The third scroll, known as the War Scroll, described an apocalyptic war between the “Sons of Light” and the “Sons of Darkness.”
Subsequently, four more scrolls appeared on the antiquities market. These were eventually purchased by Yigael Yadin, Eliezer Sukenik’s son (who had taken a Hebrew name by this time), through an intermediary after he saw a classified advertisement for them in the Wall Street Journal. The discovery of these first Dead Sea Scrolls touched off a race between the archaeologists and the Bedouins to find more scrolls. In the end, primarily between the years 1947 and 1960, both intact scrolls and thousands of fragments were discovered in at least eleven different caves located in the cliffs along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, behind the archaeological ruins of the site of Qumran. All told, more than eight hundred scrolls, both intact and fragmentary, were found in these caves, most dating between 200 BCE and 70 CE. Other scrolls, and material artifacts as well, including leather sandals and woven baskets, were found in other caves located farther away from this region, some dating to the later period of the Second Jewish (or Bar Kokhba) Rebellion from 132 to 135 BCE, but it is these more than eight hundred scrolls from the Qumran region that are most well known to the general public.
The discovery of the scrolls was only the beginning of the story, for although they had been recovered from the depths of the caves in which they had lain for nearly two thousand years, the scrolls in their entirety were still far from being translated and published. In fact, while some of the scrolls were published very quickly, a logjam of unpublished material still existed as recently as the early 1990s, with a number of scrolls from Cave 4 still being studied by a small group of senior scholars who had been granted the publication rights decades earlier. Their work had been compl
icated by the fact that the scrolls from that cave had disintegrated into some 15,000 small fragments, essentially rendering their work similar to a jigsaw puzzle enthusiast trying to work on an unknown number of puzzles simultaneously and without the help of the puzzle-box cover pictures to aid reconstruction.
9. The Dead Sea Scrolls caves, located in the hills behind Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea, held more than eight hundred whole and fragmentary scrolls written primarily during the second century BCE through the first century CE. The scrolls contained both biblical and nonbiblical material, including virtually all the books of the Hebrew Bible.
The delay in publication led to all sorts of outlandish conspiracy theories, including the accusation that the Vatican was suppressing publication of the scrolls because they contained texts that would undermine the very tenets of Christianity. Suffice it to say, there was no such conspiracy and no such texts within the Dead Sea Scrolls, as was revealed when the publication logjam was finally broken and the final volumes with photographs, translations, and analyses began to appear in the late 1990s. Work on the scrolls continues today with techniques such as infrared photography and fiber-optic technology being used to help read and reconstruct the most damaged of the fragments, especially by the same West Semitic Research Project team members who had worked on the Ketef Hinnom silver amulets. Eventually, high-resolution digital photographs of all the fragments will be placed on the Internet for all to see.
Excavations at the nearby site of Qumran, located in front of the caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, were first begun in the 1950s by Father Roland de Vaux, of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française. He believed that Qumran had been a monastery and that the monks who lived there had written the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls themselves, he thought, were hidden by their owners in the caves behind the site when the Romans invaded the area in 68 CE, destroying the site and removing its inhabitants. The scrolls then remained undisturbed for the next two thousand years.
Later scholars and excavators of the site have frequently disagreed with de Vaux’s conclusions, suggesting instead that the site served as either a Roman villa, or a place of pottery manufacture, or a fortress. They have argued over whether the inhabitants were Essenes, a Jewish religious group that flourished from the second century BCE to the first century CE, as the Roman historian Josephus seems to imply, or some other Jewish group such as the Sadducees or Pharisees. It is also a matter of debate as to whether the scrolls came from Jerusalem or other parts of Judaea and were later deposited in the area of Qumran.
Regardless of such academic discussions, it is clear that the Dead Sea Scrolls are an extremely important part of the history of both Judaism and Christianity. The biblical texts they contain are a millennium older than the oldest ones previously known, which date to ca. 900 CE and were found in 1896 in a synagogue in Cairo. They therefore provide insights into the textual history of the Hebrew Bible and how the texts evolved over time. It is clear, however, that they represent merely one of at least three versions of the Hebrew Bible in existence at that time (different versions were known in Babylon, Palestine, and Egypt), demonstrating how fluid the situation was before the Hebrew Bible was canonized in its present form.
The nonbiblical texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls are fascinating as well. For instance, documents detailing the precise rules of the community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls provide an example of one type of Judaism that was practiced in that era, including instructions and prohibitions about eating, drinking, and congregating, and recording the fact that the people who wrote the scrolls were waiting for an Armageddon and the coming of a messiah.
One of the scrolls is written on copper, found separated into two pieces in Cave 3. It took years before the scroll was able to be unrolled, using distinctly old-fashioned technology in the form of a metal lathe at the Manchester Institute of Technology in England. This was used to cut the scroll into small segments, which were then pieced back together again and read. The scroll turned out to contain directions to sixty-four different buried treasures consisting of gold, silver, and other precious objects. Despite repeated attempts, primarily by amateur archaeologists, not one of the treasures has ever been located. In part this is probably due to the vagueness of the instructions; for instance, the directions to the first treasure are given simply as: “In the ruin which is in the valley, pass under the steps leading to the East forty cubits . . . there is a chest of money and its total [is] the weight of seventeen talents.”
It is unclear what these treasures represent, if they even existed in the first place. If the scroll does reflect reality, then most likely they either were precious objects from the treasury of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, which had been hidden at the outbreak of the First Jewish Revolt in 66 CE, or were the annual tithes that had been destined for the Temple but which could not be brought to it because of the ongoing rebellion. Alternatively, the scroll may not reflect reality, but if that is the case, then one wonders at the reason for its existence.
Taken as a whole, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain copies—and in some cases multiple copies—of every book in the Hebrew Bible except for the book of Esther, and even its absence is probably an accident. However, there is not a single copy of any book from the New Testament to be found among them. There are, though, in the scrolls, a number of statements and ideas that would eventually evolve into portions of the Christian canon and that anticipated the religious developments that were to come very soon. This is especially evident when comparing the War Scroll, in which God and his angels are described as joining the “Sons of Light” (the Essenes) in wiping out their enemies the “Sons of Darkness,” with the Gospel of Paul that says, “But you, brethren, are not in darkness . . . For you are all sons of light and sons of the day...” (1 Thess. 5:4–5) and with the Letters of John that say “...he who walks in the darkness does not know where he goes. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light” (John 12:35–36).
Both the Silver Amulet Scrolls and the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate the importance of discovering ancient texts. Most material artifacts found by biblical archaeologists are mute, without a voice, and must be interpreted by those who find them. Ancient texts and inscriptions, if able to be translated, literally speak volumes to both the archaeologists and the general public.
Chapter 10
From Herod the Great to Jesus of Nazareth
Just as there are many questions remaining to be answered, from an archaeological point of view, regarding the account in the Hebrew Bible, so there are many remaining to be answered regarding the account in the Christian Bible. Of primary interest to New Testament biblical archaeologists and the general public are topics such as archaeological evidence for the historical Jesus; whether Herod’s and Jesus’ tombs have been discovered; if John the Baptist could have been an Essene; what it was like to live in cities such as Caesarea, Capernaum, and Sepphoris during this time; and what archaeology can tell us about the lives of the apostles.
Biblical archaeology of the New Testament generally is concerned with events that occurred immediately before, during, and after the life of Jesus, from the time of Herod in 40 BCE until the death of the apostles toward the end of the first century CE. The archaeology of the New Testament must cover the lands of Israel and Jordan (the Holy Land), as well as Turkey, Greece, and Italy in order to accommodate the voyages of Paul around the Mediterranean and the death of Peter in Rome. Overall, the archaeology of the Christian Bible covers a much shorter period of time (approximately two hundred years) and a much smaller geographical area (the Mediterranean region) than does archaeology of the Hebrew Bible (which covers about 1,500 years and most of the ancient Near East).
To begin with Herod the Great, we know that Herod’s father, Antipater, was appointed commissioner of Judaea by Julius Caesar after the year 49 BCE. At the same time, Herod and his brother Phasael were appointed district commissioners. When their father died, Herod and his br
other took over as commissioners of Judaea, but they soon faced a rebellion in the year 40 BCE. Herod’s brother was captured and eventually killed, but Herod escaped across the desert to the fortress of Masada. There he left his family and his fiancée, Mariamne, along with eight hundred troops, and continued on to Rome to seek the assistance of Mark Antony and the Roman Senate. The Senate viewed his entreaties favorably, and it designated Herod as the “King of the Jews.” Thus confirmed, Herod returned to Judaea, retrieved his family and fiancée, took over Jerusalem, and proceeded to rule Judaea for the next several decades.
Herod continued to fortify Masada over the course of his reign. Although he never had to take refuge at Masada, his building activities there marked the beginning of a reign filled with construction projects across the length and breadth of the land over which he ruled. Of these, one of the best known is the city and port he built at a coastal site south of modern-day Haifa.
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