by Patrick Hunt
By now it was late afternoon and the shadows of the even higher cliffs above them in the dry Wadi Qumran began to lengthen over them. There was barely enough rope for the boy to reach bottom, but he just made it. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light, making sure there were no scorpions or vipers lurking, he gave a shout of triumph and wonder. The full tribal name of this boy was Mohammed Ahmed el-Hamed, but he was nicknamed adh-Dhib, which meant “the Wolf ” in the Arabic of his Ta’amireh Bedouin clan. He grabbed a dim handful of the jumbled material from the broken pottery, surprised that some of it crumbled in his grasp. It was too lightweight to be gold or silver treasure, as they had fantasized, but he was still fascinated. He pulled on the rope to ascend and with grunts and wiry strength, the boys together were able to extricate Mohammed from the cave below. They then both climbed up from the slim cliff track and back to more solid ground. As they examined their finds and collected their herd, the sun began to set, and they knew it was time to return home to their village tents. They could better examine their secret discovery by the light of a kerosene lantern after their evening meal when the village elders sat outside around the tents under the starry night and talked. The details of this discovery have been debated for half a century, and perhaps we will never know the exact sequence. The two Bedouin boys didn’t know that the treasure they discovered in the Qumran cave was worth far more than any volume of gold they could have imagined.
Since 1947, these hidden desert texts have revolutionized our perceptions of early Jewish and Christian religion; their discovery has, as mentioned, pushed back our possession and knowledge of biblical manuscripts by a thousand years. The accidental finding of the scrolls and the intermittent secrecy of this true story sometimes reads like international intrigue. At other times it reads frustratingly, about a handful of scholars who were determined to keep as much as possible to themselves, using the texts for power and academic advancement.
Mohammed adh-Dhib and his older cousin eventually explored further and then shared their discovery with their village elders, who also retrieved more and more of the fragile texts with ancient writing on them. But it wasn’t until a chain of outsiders got involved a few years later that the true significance of the discovery was understood.
The scrolls came to the desert through the dramatic destruction of Jerusalem
In some sense the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls starts as much in Rome as in Jerusalem and the desert nearby, where the scrolls were first hidden away for protection between about AD 66 and 70, when Rome was marching on Jerusalem to quell a Judean rebellion. Judea was only one of several provinces trying to break away during Nero’s lax rule as emperor, perhaps thinking Rome was weakening for good. In Rome, with the retirement and death of his wise old adviser Burrus and the forced suicide of his old teacher Seneca, Nero’s abuses went unchecked and the empire was now without proper leadership.
Nero preferred racing chariots and his public performances on his kithara, a type of Greek lyre, to actually ruling the Roman empire. These activities were unbecoming to a Roman and even more so to an emperor, according to the historian Tacitus. Nero entirely forsook his imperial duties over the legions, who languished in the provinces. Discipline must have appeared lax to watchful eyes, and word got out to the edges of empire that Rome was disinterested. Within the space of four years between AD 61 and 64, three provinces saw their chance to revolt and did. Queen Boudica stirred up her Britons in the far north of Britannia and burned Roman cities, slaughtering Romans and townsfolk alike in a bid for freedom. Then Caius Julius Civilis led a revolt in Batavia—today the Netherlands; and the simmering eastern province of Judea, always a powder keg under the Jews, who made little attempt to conceal their hatred of the Roman yoke, rebelled under the Sicarii, or Zealots.
Initially, for decades after 1947, it was thought that a sect called the Essenes controlled Qumran, but this is now most unlikely since new excavations at Qumran (1996 onward) have turned up startling results contrary to any isolated, ascetic Essene community intentionally separated from the world. Instead, Qumran appears to have been the fortified desert villa of a wealthy cosmopolitan Jew who had learned from the original Nabatean people how to trap winter storm water in the desert behind earthen dams and divert it to cool deep cisterns where the water stored underground would not evaporate as it would on the surface. This remote location of Qumran was actually more than a stop on the road to the En Gedi oasis. Roman information about the area came from Pliny the Elder, suggesting that Qumran was an extremely arid place no Roman would be likely to venture. This may have been just what some Judeans wanted the Romans to think. At just about the same time Jerusalem was rebelling, Pliny writes:To the west of Lake Asphaltitis out of the region of the noxious coastal air lives the solitary Essene tribe, remarkable beyond all others because they have no women and have renounced all sexual desire and wealth and their only living company is the palm tree. Their number grows by means of other refugees from life who join them, having also given up such desires or driven by poverty to such ascetism . . . Lying below these Essenes was found in antiquity the desert oasis of En-Gedi.
Pliny was either misinformed about the Essenes or their sites are yet mostly undiscovered. Yet Pliny mentions the balsam trade and other rich products of the Dead Sea. We now know that the oasis of En Gedi was the source of a precious ointment called balsam, secreted as the fragrant healing sap of opobalsam, a desert plant unique to En Gedi, and this balsam trade was possibly controlled in part by the owner of the fortified villa at Qumran. The Dead Sea, then called Lake Asphaltitis, was not as barren of life as Pliny suggests, and while it could be seen shimmering from the low buildings of the Qumran plateau, its water was undrinkable. Yet Qumran had ample cistern reservoirs of collected rainwater and was also a pottery production center for Dead Sea products. Rome coveted the Dead Sea region’s wealth in the healing balsam industry, famous sweet dates and huge natural resources in medicinal bitumen (used in Egyptian mummification, ship caulking and for pharmaceuticals), and it was most likely for financial gain that the Romans marched to Qumran. But the nearby caves would hardly attract the attention of Roman legions bent on wiping out a political rebellion and appropriating wealth. The caves became the secret location, under the Roman noses, where the Jewish scriptures could be safely hidden. Negotiations from Jerusalem had probably been very quick, and more activity than usual made Qumran a temporary repository of many scrolls rather than just a fortified agrarian villa. Nearby cliffs were riddled with caves because the geology of the eroded plateau was of karstic limestone, a stone that even sparse water could penetrate and dissolve over eons. These caves, mostly invisible from view, would be perfect places to hide sacred treasures until the trouble with Rome blew over.
Sometime between AD 66 and 70, the priests of the Jews lovingly wrapped their sacred writings, some hundreds of years old, along with authoritative commentaries by respected rabbis, and carefully lifted them out of the synagogues around Judea and from the Second Temple itself or its genizas, storage places under floors for sacred texts. They placed them in safe hands or, disguised, on merchant carts bound for the desert of Qumran. Perhaps the last oxcarts of hidden documents had just departed the city in AD 70 when highly disciplined Roman legions under Titus, son of Vespasian, closed the last loophole and Jerusalem’s great temple roof went up in columns of smoke, as Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century AD, sadly tells in Wars of the Jews (6.5.1):While the holy house was on fire, everything was plundered that came to hand . . . The flame was also carried a long way, and made a great noise together with the groans of those who were slain. And because this hill was high and the works of the temple very great, one would have thought the whole city had been on fire.
Possibly looking back at their burning temple, the Jews traveling incognito and in secrecy quickly conducted the treasures of the Law to safety. They could once again affirm (as they had in their Babylonian captivity a half millennium earlier) that their sacred scriptures
were more defining of their ancient faith than a mere building, however glorious it had been.
Dead Sea Scroll texts and materials are incredible treasures for biblical scholars
Even though the great number of the separate documents—many only fragmentary—are spread out over centuries and various sects, the actual materials of the Dead Sea Scrolls are fairly uniform and many of the scrolls were originally wrapped in linen for protection. The total number of scrolls varies, depending on whose inventory is used. There are at least 850 scrolls, although it appears to some scholars that this is a conservative number, with perhaps a higher count around 1,000 because of confusion over the possibility of quite a few unpublished documents still being in private hands. Sheepskin was the primary medium and the scribes’ ink was a mixture of carbon residue, usually derived from lamp black, and a bit of olive oil or a lubricating agent like a vegetal material of gum arabic or something similar. Because the texts are written in ink, the most likely method of application was by a brush of hairs or even a type of reed quill long used by Egyptian scribes. Although the text is not exactly cursive—what we would think of as written out in longhand with joined letters—but rather brushed letter by individual letter, the letters themselves show rounded edges typical of brushstrokes. Paleographers—who study different scribal hands and writing styles—estimate that up to five hundred different scribes wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls over several hundred years.
The languages of the Dead Sea Scrolls are, in order by volume, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. The oldest scrolls are written in Hebrew, itself modified after the Babylonian captivity of around 600 BC into an early form of Aramaized Hebrew. While Aramaic was already a linguistic cousin of Hebrew, this was initially the spoken language they had brought back from Babylonian captivity around 535 BC as the lingua franca, or trade language, of Mesopotamia. The classical Hebrew alphabet, itself borrowed from the Phoenicians, had been altered to the Aramaic one, but over time—in this case a half millennium—the differences between old Hebrew and Aramaized Hebrew and even later Aramaic were not that great, roughly similar to the differences between Shakespearian English and Victorian English.
Although the great majority of ancient texts from Qumran are on sheepskin, one 1952 document, known as 3Q15, stands out because it is made of copper, the so-called Copper Scroll from Cave 3, which is now in two rolled sections. The sheet copper oxidized over two millennia, so it is quite brittle, and it was initially read by X-rays before being carefully sawed and opened up between 1955 and 1956 in a Manchester University laboratory in Britain. The letters were pressed or punched into the sheet copper and its text reveals an inventory of what may have been the Jerusalem temple treasury, smuggled out of the city just before or even during the Roman siege, but most likely not hidden in only one desert location but rather parceled into different caves. One entry on the Copper Scroll (item 10) reads: In the cavity of the Old House of Tribute, in the Platform of the Chain, 65 bars of gold. Although the total treasure—and even its very existence—has been debated, this ledger item may have represented a considerable portion of the gold and silver. At least sixty-five caches or treasure deposits are enumerated in the scroll. But this treasure has never been found or, if it has, never been made public. More than a few adventurers have searched the desert for it, in the hopes that the treasure itself still lies in a cave somewhere.
Before the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest Jewish scriptural manuscripts dated back only a thousand years to the Middle Ages, and were mostly copied by a group called Masoretes. The oldest previous biblical collections were the Aleppo Codex, also called the Keter Aram Tzova and vocalized by Ben Asher in AD 920, although it is not a complete collection of Hebrew scripture, followed by the Leningrad Codex, also dated to the tenth century AD. Rather than being a scroll, a codex is an early book of groups of pages sewn together. The previous oldest single manuscript fragment of Jewish scripture was the Nash Papyrus, a small Egyptian fragment of the Ten Commandments from around 100 BC. After this, the oldest complete Old Testament Christian codices were the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus in the British Library, both fourth century AD.
As mentioned, the Dead Sea discovery pushed written text dates back to more than a thousand years earlier, circa AD 70 and in some cases a few centuries earlier to the second century BC, enabling scholars to understand how many texts were copied virtually unchanged over centuries. The drama of the discovery and decipherment of these scrolls crosses three continents and reads like a saga of national pride as well as espionage, as several intelligence services were employed to track down and buy material from assorted collections of these precious scrolls. How different cultures, religions and nations wrestled over these desert fragments for fifty years is a story worthy of attention.
The story after 1947 made politics and religion uneasy bedfellows
Politics and religion are not conducive to archaeological research. In total there are eleven major Qumran caves. Since 1947, the caves of Qumran have yielded many hundreds of scrolls, the majority of which are fragmentary, but some caves, like Cave 4, probably discovered in 1952, produced up to almost four hundred scroll texts alone, about 40 percent of the total volume known, a number of which were intact in the same kind of clay jars. In addition to the original Cave 1 discovered by Mohammed adh-Dhib on the bluff, and the enormously rich Cave 4 adjacent to it, about eight feet wide and twenty feet long, other caves along the cliffs and above the wadi have proved that the whole canyon and the surrounding region of up to several square miles were all used for safekeeping these vital documents at the heart of ancient Judaism.
The story is murky and there are many side trails that are hard to track, but the main narrative must run something like this. In late spring of 1947 after the Ta’amireh Bedouin tribe found enough scrolls to warrant their curiosity, their elders took at least four scrolls from Cave 1 either directly to Bethlehem or indirectly through a local sheikh, hoping an antiquities dealer named Khalil Iskander Shahin, locally known as Kando, could give them a bit of money for their finds. Kando dealt mostly in illicit ancient pottery or the kind of pilgrim relics and souvenirs one could then still find around Bethlehem, and he couldn’t read the texts.
But Kando was shrewd, and he knew these tattered skins were old enough to sell to someone who treasured such things. He brought in another friend, George Isaiah, who probably helped to squirrel such things out from under the not-so-watchful eyes of the British Mandate authorities, who were more concerned with the incendiary politics of feuding Palestine than a few old skins. Both Kando and George Isaiah were members of the Syrian Orthodox Church and, rather than report and turn in their finds to the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem as law required, they instead negotiated through contacts within their church in Old Jerusalem, correctly surmising they would never see the documents again and lose any possible sale if they followed the letter of the law. These scrolls now came to the attention of the Syrian archbishop, Athanasius Yeshua Samuel, whose ecclesiastic office gave him near autonomy over his Jerusalem diocese.
Although he was anything but a scholar, more a church bureaucrat and unable to read Hebrew or Aramaic, Archbishop Samuel sensed these documents were valuable because his monastery had a library of old manuscripts. Through Kando and George Isaiah, the archbishop requested the Bedouin bring whatever they had to the Monastery of St. Mark, where he presided. Apparently they came, bringing more scrolls than anyone expected—possibly eight to ten—but there was a communications breakdown and the unannounced Bedouin were turned away. This was not surprising, given both their and the monastery gatekeeper’s obvious mistrust of outsiders, the local political turmoil, and the Bedouins’ “uncouth” desert appearance.
Kando managed to salvage something of the stymied sale from the angry Bedouin, buying four scrolls, all apparently from Cave 1. This first cache turned out to be an incredible treasure. Not only was one scroll an entire book of Isaiah, measuring twenty-four feet long, but there was also the Habakkuk Pesher
(a commentary on the biblical book of Habakkuk) and the Genesis Apocryphon, as they are known today. Considering their pricelessness to history, the low price the Syrian church paid to Kando is still amazing: only twenty-four British pounds. The Bedouin probably received only a fraction of that paltry sum.
Archbishop Samuel, now encouraged by his own manuscript acquisition, commissioned George Isaiah and a priest to conduct their own illegal archaeological dig at Qumran, having found out this was the provenance of the scrolls. It is impossible to determine what George Isaiah found in mid 1947, but ultimately these first four scrolls acquired from the Bedouin were brought for consultation to Syria and the Damascus-Homs region, where the patriarch of the Syrian Jacobite Church presided over the larger church headquarters. Apparently permission was given to proceed with the illegal desert excavations, since the scrolls seemed to have returned to Jerusalem and the St. Mark’s monastery. In Jerusalem, Archbishop Samuel sought clandestine advice from Hebrew scholars, including Professor Eleazar Sukenik, who headed the Archaeology Department at the new Hebrew University. This was dangerous and difficult because Jerusalem was heavily partitioned. Several visits were necessary between Sukenik and intermediaries at the monastery, and finally Sukenik himself went incognito to Bethlehem in late November. This was a very dangerous trip because Jews, Muslims and Christian Palestinians were all in a state of constant uproar over the frequent abductions and murders of soldiers (even British “peacekeepers”) and citizens alike in dark alleys and even public places where hotheaded factions patrolled the walled-up sectors of Jerusalem. Bethlehem was definitely “enemy” territory for Sukenik.