The Story of the Scrolls

by The Story of the Scrolls- The Miraculous Discovery

  When I first started serious Hebrew studies, the best critical text of the Bible was the third edition of Biblia Hebraica, published by the German scholar Rudolf Kittel in 1938, which contained a major innovation compared to its earlier versions. Instead of the text used in the first and second editions, based on the Bible printed in Venice in 1517, and relying on late medieval Hebrew manuscripts, Kittel’s colleague, Paul Kahle, substituted the more reliable Leningrad Codex, dating to AD 1008. He would have preferred to use the Aleppo Codex (first half of the tenth century) rather than the manuscript from Leningrad, but the owners of the Aleppo manuscript were unwilling to allow their precious treasure to be photographed. The biblical text was accompanied by a critical apparatus containing the sporadic manuscript variants, mostly spelling differences, and some more meaningful discrepancies furnished by the Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Syriac translations of the Old Testament, all older than the Hebrew manuscripts, as well as some hypothetical improvements suggested by commentators, ancient and modern.

  In parenthesis, for the study of the New Testament the standard edition we had in the 1940s was the twelfth edition (1937) of Eberhard and Erwin Nestle’s Novum Testamentum Graece, before it was revised by Kurt Aland and others in 1981. The critically edited New Testament differed fundamentally from the scholarly version of the Hebrew Bible. The latter confronted the student with the uniform text of a given manuscript (the Leningrad Codex), whereas owing to the much larger quantity and diversity of the Greek variants, an eclectic text was made up by scholars with the help of readings borrowed from diverse manuscripts. It may cause a shock to the uninitiated to learn that the text arrived at by the learned authors of the most advanced critical edition of the New Testament does not correspond to any existing manuscript. Both the Greek text and the translations made from it are founded on a hypothetical reconstruction.

  Of incomparable historical importance in themselves, but only indirectly relevant to the study of the Hebrew Bible, are the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Syria. Scientific Egyptology started during Napoleon’s campaign in the delta of the Nile in 1798 and reached its first climax with the decipherment of the hieroglyphs by Henri de Champollion in 1822. The Egyptological finds enlightened various aspects of the Old Testament, in particular Wisdom literature. Assyriology, the study of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, took off in the middle of the nineteenth century. The pioneers were bored European diplomats, the French Paul Émile de Botta who began to dig in Nineveh in 1842, and the Englishman, Austen Henry Layard, who soon joined de Botta and competed with him on the same site. Within thirty years the cuneiform or wedge-shaped script of Mesopotamia was decoded and opened up to students of the Hebrew Bible such treasures as the Babylonian myths of the Creation and of the Flood, prefiguring the parallel stories in the Book of Genesis, and various allusions to the conquest of Samaria and Judaea by Assyrian and Babylonian kings, clarifying episodes of biblical history. In 1929, French archaeologists tumbled on the ruins of the ancient city of Ugarit at Ras Shamra in Syria, which yielded a previously unknown alphabet written with cuneiform characters and revealed the language and literature of the Canaanites, the original inhabitants of Palestine, whose religious ideas and practices were the frequent target of criticism in the law and the prophets of the Old Testament.

  A final area of knowledge that a prospective Scripture specialist was expected to master was extra-biblical Jewish religious literature in the inter-Testamental period (200 BCE – 100 CE) as it was then called, now more commonly referred to as the late Second Temple era. It was considered to be an indispensable tool for the study of the Old and New Testaments. Knowledge of these works called the Apocrypha (books included in the Bible of Diaspora Jews, but rejected by the Palestinian Jewish religious authorities) and the Pseudepigrapha (religious compositions which, although influential, have never entered the canon of either Palestinian or Hellenistic Jewry) was held to be essential, and was to play a major role in the treatment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  In regard to the Apocrypha, transmitted in the codices of the Greek Bible, a major breakthrough occurred in 1896 when two marvellously brave and enterprising Scottish lady travellers, the sisters Margaret Dunlop Gibson and Agnes Smith Lewis, discovered and acquired a gigantic collection of medieval Jewish texts in a genizah or manuscript depository attached to the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fustat in Old Cairo. Among them figured remains of five copies, dating to the eleventh and twelfth century CE, of the Hebrew Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira, previously known from the Greek Bible as the Book of Sirach or Ecclesiasticus. Altogether the fragments represented two thirds of the original document translated into Greek by the author’s grandson for the use of Hellenized Jews at the end of the second century BCE. They were first published in Cambridge in 1899 by Solomon Schechter and Charles Taylor under the title, The Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira: Portions of the Book of Ecclesiasticus from Hebrew Manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah Collection. On the eve of the Qumran discovery, two schools of thought were competing regarding the Ecclesiasticus from the Cairo Genizah. Important authorities held it to be the slightly distorted version of ben Sira’s Hebrew original, whereas other scholars of repute believed that it was a medieval retranslation into Hebrew of the Greek Ecclesiasticus. New evidence was needed to settle the debate.

  Of the Pseudepigrapha (or literary works spuriously attributed to Old Testament personalities), only a few titles were known in their entirety prior to the nineteenth century: the Fourth Book of the Maccabees and the Psalms of Solomon were preserved in some manuscripts of the Greek Bible and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was first published in Oxford in 1698 by J. E. Grabe and reissued by J. A. Fabricius in his noted Pseudepigraphic Codex of the Old Testament (Codex pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti) in 1718. (Fabricius was the inventor of the term Pseudepigrapha.) Greek excerpts from the pseudepi-graphic Book of Jubilees and Book of Enoch also survived in quotations by Church Fathers and Byzantine writers. But the major advances were made in the nineteenth century. They resulted from the discovery of ancient Ethiopian literature, rich in Pseudepigrapha. Robert Lawrence, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, successively issued between 1818 and 1839 the Ethiopic version of the Ascension of Isaiah, the Fourth Book of Ezra and the Book of Enoch. In 1851, the renowned German Semitist, August Dillmann, published an improved version of the Ethiopic Enoch and added to it in 1859 the first edition of the Ethiopic translation of the Book of Jubilees. The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch joined the collection in 1871 thanks to the Italian scholar, A. M. Ceriani. Textual information relative to the Greek Book of Enoch was further enriched with U. Bouriant’s publication in 1892 of the Akhmim papyri and with the edition, in 1937, of the last chapters of the Greek Enoch from the Chester Beatty-Michigan papyri by Campbell Bonner. The Aramaic sayings of the wise Ahiqar, mentioned in the apocryphal Book of Tobit and known from numerous translations (Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian) unexpectedly showed up in the fifth-century BCE Aramaic papyri found at the beginning of the twentieth century at Elephantine in Egypt and published, in 1923, by Sir Arthur Cowley, Bodley’s Librarian in Oxford. The Cairo Genizah further added fairly extensive Aramaic fragments of a Testament of Levi, possibly the source of the Greek version of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.

  From the same Cairo source also emerged a curious writing, attested in two medieval Hebrew manuscripts dating from the tenth to the twelfth century, that its editor, Solomon Schechter, called Fragments of a Zadokite Work when he published it in 1910. It also became known as the Damascus Document. Describing the doctrine and the laws of a Jewish sect, it caused a frisson in the scholarly world in the years immediately preceding the First World War, reminiscent, and not without good cause, of the excitement generated by the publication of the first Dead Sea Scrolls which contained several more than 2,000-year-old copies of the same work.

  The new knowledge, accumulated between 1800 and 1900, was incorporated in the early twentieth century in two
major fully annotated collections of the Pseudepigrapha edited by leading scholars with the help of the best specialists of the day. The first to appear in 1900 was Die Apocryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments, vols I–II, a German work under the editorship of Emil Kautzsch. It was followed in 1912–13 by R. H. Charles’s The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. The latter, more thorough and up-to-date and still indispensable today in spite of its age, made use of the relevant Cairo Genizah material: the Hebrew ben Sira, the Aramaic Testament of Levi and the Hebrew Damascus Document.

  Equipped with all these outstanding tools of research and, less commonly among non-Jewish students, with sufficient competence in rabbinic writings, Hebrew scholars were obliged to face up to the totally unbelievable discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. For prior to 1947 no such finds were expected. Indeed, they were declared to be impossible. In the light of a century of archaeological search, exploring every nook and cranny of the Holy Land from Dan to Beer Sheba, the excavators’ spade had failed to turn up even a single ancient text written on skin or papyrus. Hence it was handed down from master to pupil as an axiom that no pre-Christian text recorded on perishable material could survive in the climatic conditions of Palestine. However, those who defined the axiom forgot that the area where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found lay 400 metres below sea level and that the climate of that part of the Judaean desert scarcely differed from that of Egypt where innumerable ancient papyrus documents survived.

  The facts proved the axiom wrong.

  Postscript: Biblical Studies in the Roman Catholic Church

  In addition to the universally accepted rules governing biblical studies, Roman Catholic practitioners of scriptural or Scripture-related research were supposed to abide by the relevant directives of the Roman Catholic Church. (I remained a Catholic until the parting of the ways in 1957, when I left the church, the priesthood and France and settled in Britain, first in Newcastle then in Oxford, and slowly reverted to my Jewish roots if not to Jewish practice.)

  The early years of the twentieth century were a period of gloom for Catholic exegetes. The war against ‘critics’ and ‘modernists’ was waged by the Vatican’s ‘watchdog’, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, a body made up of cardinals and aided by expert consultants. The pontificate of Pope Pius X (1903–14, canonized in 1954) represented the darkest days of tyrannical Church interference with free inquiry. The dictates assumed to be scientifically sound and self-explanatory, issued by the Commission, strike an unbiased observer of today as hardly believable. The freedom to write and teach, in some way the livelihood of Catholic Bible professors, the majority of whom happened to be priests, depended on their blind acceptance of pre-modern positions considered by their non-Catholic colleagues as wholly untenable.

  In the field of the Old Testament they had to accept that the five books of the Law (the Pentateuch) were written by Moses himself, because they are so cited in the Old and the New Testament, and to reject the multiple source theory of modern scholarship. They had to accept the biblical narrative of the creation as strict historical truth and any link with ancient Mesopotamian cosmogonies had to be denied. The whole book of Isaiah had to be ascribed to the eighth-century BCE prophet. Mention of a Second and Third Isaiah, responsible for chapters 40–66 and dating to the second half of the sixth century BCE, was taboo. Likewise in regard to the New Testament, the ‘two-source’ theory (the Gospel of Mark and a hypothetical other source called Q) was anathema and was not to be used to account for the similarities and discrepancies among the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. As for the Fourth Gospel, it was firmly assigned to the apostle John and declared, contrary to the view of most critics, historically reliable.

  The encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, issued by Pope Pius XII in 1943, allowed a chink to open up and a ray of light to shine through the dark clouds when it referred to ‘literary genres’ in Scripture (i.e. that everything was not to be taken strictly to the letter). Nevertheless Catholic teachers were still advised to proceed with extreme caution: if you wish to survive, beware of the Pontifical Biblical Commission!

  In the subsequent years, chiefly under Paul VI and John Paul II, the Biblical Commission, the erstwhile savage Vatican guard dog, was tamed and reorganized in 1971, and the combination of cardinals and consultants was transformed into a board of twenty experts, though still under the chairmanship of the cardinal heading the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger until his elevation to the papal throne in 2005). Thanks to the presence of real specialists, the Commission became more enlightened and published liberal directives on Bible and Christology (1984) and on The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible (2002). Nevertheless, the recent book Jesus of Nazareth (2007) by Pope Benedict XVI, ex-president of the Biblical Commission, although repeatedly paying lip service to the historico-critical method of Bible interpretation, constitutes a volte-face and augurs ill for the future of Catholic scriptural exegesis. It would be interesting to know how many members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in their heart of hearts agree with the Pope.

  Only time will tell.

  II

  Epoch-making Discoveries and Early Blunders

  The news of a sensational manuscript discovery in the Palestine of the British Mandate first burst on the unsuspecting world in the spring of 1948. Newspapers carried colourful headlines: the funniest I can remember announced in the leading Brussels daily, La Libre Belgique, the find of an ‘eleventh-century BCE’ biblical scroll on the coast of the ‘Black Sea’. (The date should have been 100 BCE and the venue the shore of the Dead Sea.) The discovered material represented the Hebrew Bible and the literature of an ancient Jewish sect. Later in 1948 my professor of Hebrew showed me the photocopy and transcription of several lines of the Book of Isaiah which was claimed to date to the pre-Christian era, an assertion that was in breach of all the rules contained in the textbooks (see chapter I, pp. 16–17). Having thus tasted the sweet novelty of the Scrolls, with youthful recklessness I swore that I would devote myself to solving the mystery of what was called ‘the greatest ever manuscript find in the field of biblical studies’. In retrospect, I can say that I have remained faithful to my vow: in a true sense, the Scrolls have become part of my life.

  1. The Original Find and its Sequels

  The story of the first Scrolls discovery is an amalgam of fairy tale, hesitant scholarship and heaps of erroneous judgements, perfectly understandable in a totally novel domain of research. In the opening scene of the fairy tale, three nomadic Palestinian Arabs of the Taamire tribe are looking for a stray goat on rocky cliffs not far from the Dead Sea. The date is uncertain: somewhere between the end of 1946 and the summer of 1947, probably in the spring of 1947. The youngest, by the name of Muhammed edh-Dhib (Muhammed the Wolf), was amusing himself by throwing stones. One of these fell into a small hole in the rock and was followed by the sound of the breaking of pottery. Muhammed climbed in and found several ancient manuscripts in a jar. Altogether seven scrolls were subsequently removed from the cave.

  Act two of the drama revolves around the Bedouins’ desire to make money and to this effect they approached the Bethlehem cobbler and antique dealer, Khalil Eskander Shahin, who was to gain international fame under the nickname of Kando, and entrusted him with the scrolls. Two prospective buyers were contacted through intermediaries. In the summer of 1947, Kando and his incompetent advisers, believing that the manuscripts were in Syriac (one of the dialects of Aramaic), offered some of them to the head of the Syrian monastery of St Mark in Jerusalem, Archbishop Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel. He apparently acquired four of them for 24 Palestinian dinars (just under $100).

  Later in 1947, Eleazar Lipa Sukenik, the professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was contacted through an Armenian acquaintance and invited to inspect some important manuscripts. Keeping his plan secret from his wife and disregarding the advice of his son, Yigael Yadin, then the
Chief of Operations of the Jewish Defence Forces, Sukenik put his life in peril and visited the Arab sector of the city. A deal was struck on 29 November, on the day the United Nations decided to partition Palestine between Israel and Jordan. On that momentous date, Sukenik succeeded in purchasing three manuscripts: an incomplete Book of Isaiah, a Scroll of Hymns and the War Scroll. Having learned that further texts were held in the Syrian monastery, the lucky professor managed to borrow them for a few days, but his eventual bid was turned down. The Syrian monastery hoped for a larger sum of US dollars.

  While the documents bought by Sukenik were in competent hands, the same could not be said of Mar Athanasius. He needed expert advice and in February 1948 the librarian of the monastery visited the American School of Oriental Research (ASOR) in Jerusalem and told a typical Levantine tale: he pretended that they had found in their library some ancient Hebrew manuscripts, about which the catalogue said nothing. The American scholar John C. Trever examined the four documents and promptly informed the archbishop about their supposed antiquity and importance: a complete Scroll of Isaiah, a commentary on the Book of Habakkuk, the Manual of Discipline, later called the Community Rule, and an unopened, hence unidentified, manuscript subsequently recognized as the Genesis Apocryphon. Trever was allowed to photograph the Scrolls and the archbishop authorized the American School to publish them in due course. In April 1948, both ASOR and Sukenik released the news of the discovery, which was broadcast worldwide by all the media. In the Bulletin of ASOR, leading American archaeologist and Orientalist Professor William Foxwell Albright called the Scrolls ‘the greatest archaeological find of modern times’ and his colleague, Professor W. E. Wright, writing in the Biblical Archaeologist, spoke in equally superlative terms of ‘the most important discovery ever made in the field of Old Testament manuscripts’. Excitement was spreading like wildfire. My own lifelong involvement with Qumran studies goes back to that epoch. It was my first academic love affair.