Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History

by Patrick Hunt

  Professor Sukenik was able to verify the authenticity of the scrolls and just after he returned to Jerusalem, the newly formed United Nations by a majority vote established the formation of the State of Israel. The historic value of the scrolls from Cave 1 was now dramatically enhanced by a coincidence of great historic proportions: just as the scrolls had been placed for safekeeping in Judean caves two millennia before, when Judea and its Jews were about to be destroyed by Rome, so a resurrected state for Jews was now capable of finding its own past in biblical writings.

  Having hurriedly found means to buy this portion of the scrolls from the Syrians, Sukenik haggled and made an offer. But his offer was put off for a week, during which time the archbishop had found a better price, offered by the Americans through Professor William F. Albright from Johns Hopkins University and the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem (renamed in honor of Albright in 1970). Given the increasing instability in Jerusalem, the scrolls were taken first to Beirut and then New York for storage in a bank vault to await the imminent purchase.

  The discovery then went public in the United States. In April 1948, Yale University’s spokesperson was Professor Millar Burrows, who was director of both Yale’s Department of Near Eastern Languages as well as the American School of Oriental Research’s Jerusalem Institute. The press release in the New York Times on April 11, 1948, excerpted here, was hardly dramatic at the time:the earliest known manuscript of the Book of Isaiah . . . was found in the Syrian monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, where it had been preserved in a scroll of parchment dating to about the first century BC. Recently it was identified by scholars of the American School of Oriental Research at Jerusalem.

  Also mentioning other Hebrew scrolls, the press release deliberately obscured if not outright manipulated the exact find location. Burrows’s statement was a half-truth because while the manuscripts were now the property of the Syrian Monastery of St. Mark, their cave source was kept secret for fear of others ransacking the desert at Qumran. It is likely that this was what Archbishop Samuel and his agents told the Oriental Institute, which had sufficient resources to undertake its own excavations even in the political hot potato of Palestine. The press release hardly caused a ripple in the news of rising turmoil in Palestine.

  In 1948, backed by increasingly sympathetic United Nations resolutions, Israel had declared its independence and an immediate war ensued between Israel and the surrounding Arab states. The hostilities between the fledgling state and its neighbors were fed by invading troops hailing not only from adjacent Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Lebanon but also Saudi Arabia and Iraq. It wasn’t until January 1949 that hostilities ended with a negotiated cease-fire. Transjordan now changed its name to Jordan, and Jerusalem was divided in half between Israel and Jordan. Qumran and the Dead Sea region was under the jurisdiction of Jordan, and was to remain so for almost two decades.

  Father Roland de Vaux was the director of the Ecole Biblique but not an archaeologist by training. De Vaux was also the primary proponent of the Essene community theory. He proceeded to work with the British expatriate and Jordanian director of antiquities, Gerald Lankester Harding, in excavating the ruins of Qumran itself in 1951. They produced a survey of all caves and possible sites—over 270—in the area. They also turned up more scroll material, as well as finding the Copper Scroll in Cave 3 in 1952. Cave 4, perhaps the richest of all Dead Sea Scroll caves, was discovered and excavated in 1952. Naturally, the same Ta’amireh Bedouin tribesmen who had found the first material were again involved in the actual digging and cave exploration. All of the scroll material acquired by excavations at Qumran under Jordanian auspices between 1951 and 1953 was organized and categorized. The material was housed in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem by 1955 but removed to a bank vault in Amman, Jordan, during the Suez Crisis in 1956 and not returned to the Rockefeller Museum—somewhat the worse for wear—until 1957. In 1966, although it had been an independent and international institution, the Rockefeller Museum was nationalized by Jordan, and the resident scrolls from Qumran officially became Jordanian property.

  The story now becomes even more convoluted. Professor Eleazer Sukenik had a tactically brilliant son who renamed himself Yigael Yadin, a Hebrew name, rather than keep his European surname of Sukenik. Yadin had resigned his post in the Israeli Defense Force in 1949 and went on to study archaeology at Hebrew University, earning a Ph.D. on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  Despite the initial clamor of publicity, intended to escalate a bidding war, back in the Syrian Orthodox community, the sale of the three scrolls held by Archbishop Samuel had stalled for several reasons during the years since 1948. The potential American buyers had backed down because Jordan had claimed that the scrolls held by the Syrian church were stolen property from Qumran. Now that the asking price had deteriorated to a measly half million dollars in 1954 from the original million dollars, Yadin made disguised efforts to purchase the three scrolls from the Syrian Orthodox Church through intermediaries. This was necessary because Jordan and the Syrian church would have strenuously objected if it were openly known that Israel was the only real potential buyer. Jordan would have been irate on diplomatic grounds because it was still smarting from the war, when it lost part of west Palestine on the other side of the Jordan River. The Syrians could balk on religious grounds because they were a Christian entity, preferring that their three published scrolls and a fourth that had not been published would soon belong to Christians of some persuasion rather than Jews.

  Yadin now made perhaps his most brilliant strategic move in the chesslike game of high stakes with the scrolls. He invented a story of a man named “Mr. Green” to conceal Israeli involvement and possession of the scrolls, and this ruse was unknown to the Syrian Christians at the time. In New York, Yadin worked through a local banker to negotiate with the Syrians and found another anonymous benefactor to provide the money. An agreed-upon low price of $250,000 transferred hands between the Syrian church and intermediaries after the mysterious “Mr. Green” guaranteed the four scrolls’ authenticity. “Mr. Green” was actually Professor Harry Orlinsky, an American scholar of Hebrew. The following day the four scrolls were transferred from the bank to the Waldorf-Astoria’s hotel vault and removed quietly and quickly to the Israeli Consulate in New York before anyone could object. The scrolls traveled secretly and independently of each other to Israel. Yadin returned to Jerusalem after communicating in code during the whole journey about the whereabouts of his acquisition, a major diplomatic coup for Israel.

  In 1967 war broke out between Jordan and Israel. During this rapid Six Days’ War in 1967, the Israelis took the rest of Jerusalem and occupied the Rockefeller Museum. The museum now faced Israeli appropriation of the scroll materials it held, amid the mounting anger of the Ecole Biblique. The political climate in Jerusalem, where Israel now occupied Jordan’s eastern half of the city, made 1967 a very different time. Father de Vaux feared that Israel would manipulate its conquest of Jerusalem to sequester all the scrolls housed there. This was partly because in the years since 1951, he had refused any requests of Jews to work on the scrolls. Perhaps to keep peace with a new population of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Israel left the research and publication of Cave 4’s enormous material of around eight hundred scrolls to the Ecole Biblique and its team. But Israel considered the Cave 4 scrolls its property as spoils of war, whereas the Ecole Biblique group working in the Rockefeller Museum continued to resist Israeli participation in what it perceived as its personal scroll collection.

  Finally making the Dead Sea Scrolls public was a great coup

  For decades the international Dead Sea Scrolls team, dominated by the Ecole Biblique, eked out a few fragments a year and blocked efforts of every outside biblical scholar and archaeologist, myself included, to conduct research on the scrolls under their aegis. Requests by distinguished Hebrew scholars were turned down dozens of times by the parochial Ecole Biblique team or their successors in the United States and elsewhere. Finally,
in 1991, the Ecole Biblique-dominated “cabal” was dramatically broken.

  There were several precipitating causes. First, Hershel Shanks, the tenacious publisher of Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR) and Bible Review in Washington, DC, had been pushing the international team of a dozen or so scholars to either speed up their painfully slow publication rate to keep pace with the Israelis, whose scrolls were fully published, or turn over the huge volume of material to younger scholars worldwide. Shanks was met with silence for several years and snubbed professionally. In 1989, the Israel Archaeological Council assumed oversight of the huge amount of unpublished Qumran Cave 4 material being held by the international Dead Sea Scrolls team, including those in the hands of scholars abroad. The Israeli council issued an ultimatum for quicker publication. It was agreed upon but effectively ignored through John Strugnell, Dead Sea Scrolls team director.

  Then in 1985 Shanks launched a publicity campaign through BAR to break through the publication barriers. Shanks finally determined that the Rockefeller Museum had made complete photographs of all the scrolls and fragments in their collection almost fifty years previously. Back in the 1960s the Ecole Biblique had given permission to the Rockefeller to take the photographs because Jerusalem was not considered the safest place for their survival. The microfilm negatives went to faraway San Marcos, California, to be placed in the vaults of the Huntington Library for safekeeping.

  Shanks first published in BAR an unauthorized set of facsimile documents, and the international Dead Seas Scrolls team threatened a lawsuit, which hardly fazed this lawyer-turned-publisher. Shanks then persuaded the Huntington Library’s director, Dr. William A. Moffett, to release the Dead Sea Scrolls photographic negatives for publication, which the Huntington’s prescient board of directors saw as in the best public interest. This was announced on September 22, 1991, to extensive media coverage. The secrecy dam was finally broken, once and for all.

  The second unpredictable tumult that broke the publishing monopoly of the Cave 4 material (40 percent of the total texts) unfolded in a sadly unpredictable event. An unwell John Strugnell had publicly declared in what he miscalculated was a private venue that Judaism was nothing more than a reaction against Christianity. This outrageous comment was published in the New York Times, followed by an enormous public outcry. Within two days, Strugnell, already mostly retired, was summarily dismissed from his post as project director for the international team, and the Israelis swiftly consolidated all the control of the Dead Sea Scrolls documents and fragments under one oversight, stripping the parochial remnant faction of exclusive rights to hold back or monopolistically publish their trove. In one move, Israel accomplished what Father Roland de Vaux had feared most years before: the new director of the Dead Sea Scrolls project was an Israeli, Emanuel Tov of Hebrew University. The fifty years of stonewalling and parochialism was over. The control of a group who thought only they knew best, who had kept the bulk of the Dead Sea Scrolls to themselves, keeping the world guessing wildly about the contents and their ramifications, was now broken forever.

  Since 1991, a multitude of books have summarized, published or compiled Dead Sea Scrolls material. In microfiche form, all the Dead Sea Scrolls photos have also been published by the Israel Antiquities Authority in conjunction with Brill Press in 1993, but not all are translated as of 2007. The exact volume of yet-untranslated material is unknown, partly because there is still an unverifiable amount of Dead Sea Scrolls documents in private hands. The usual assessment is that this untranslated material is less than 1 percent of the total volume of Dead Sea Scrolls. It is likely that debates about the meaning of the scrolls will rage for at least another half century or more, but there is consensus that they are of vital importance to biblical studies and archaeology.

  The texts represent both religious and secular writing over centuries

  The Dead Sea Scrolls documents have been given an alphanumeric descriptive code based on where they were found, although a few are still without this context, having derived from the illegal antiquities market. For example, the designation of 1Q means that the document was from Cave 1 at Qumran. The texts are also categorized separately by subject, as shown below, into biblical and nonbiblical material. While most are fragmentary, at least one scroll is remarkably well preserved apparently in near entirety: this is the so-called Temple Scroll (11Q19-20) from Cave 11 at Qumran. The longest document of the group, it is 26.7 feet long, but some have suggested that it was originally almost 2 feet longer.

  The subject categories of the Dead Sea Scrolls include:

  Scripture (e.g., Torah; Law, as in Genesis and Nevi’im; Prophets, as in Isaiah and Toledot; Generations or Histories, as in 2 Samuel and Ketubim; Writings, as in Psalms). Nearly every biblical book in the Jewish canon is represented and at least one whole book, that of Isaiah, is preserved among other books on one scroll. Every Old Testament book except Esther is represented at least in part and many biblical books exist almost in their entirety, such as Psalms, Deuteronomy, Genesis and Isaiah.

  Commentaries (e.g., Talmud, Targums, Pesherim, or Mishnah). These are usually rabbinical writings about scripture (but can also be nonrabbinic) and contain many individual biblical text references to scripture.

  Apocalyptic/Apocryphal/Pseudepigraphic (e.g., War Scroll, Damascus Scroll, Community Rule). These are mostly religious texts that include rules and observances for the community as well as writings about impending judgment. These also include texts that were rejected from canonic scripture but are nonetheless valuable, as well as texts claimed to be written by known or legendary biblical individuals. Divination and magic texts also fall under this category. This is perhaps the most interesting of all Dead Sea Scrolls material because it sheds light on an otherwise unknown body of religious observances that is otherwise absent from Judaism.

  Documents (e.g., Copper Scroll). These are not religious texts but items identifying accounting and inventories of treasure. Sometimes contemporary correspondence fits in this category as well.

  The overall umbrella of the term Dead Sea Scrolls has been enlarged to allow for Greek as well as Aramaic and Hebrew language. The materials include leather and papyrus but the greatest majority, at least 98 percent of the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus, is written in ink on sheepskin and in the contemporary language of Aramaic or Aramaized Hebrew. The dating of some of the material is much older than the time of the Jerusalem destruction around AD 70. For example, the Isaiah Scroll, which some arguably date to about 250 BC, appears the oldest. The great majority, however, date to the middle of the first century AD, around the time of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, just before they were hidden from certain destruction.

  Despite conspiracy theories, the scrolls do not easily connect to Christianity

  To date no verifiable New Testament material has been discovered, which supports the fact that it was a Jewish community that hid the texts. It also highlights the historically accepted perception that Christian texts hardly existed at this time. This obviously leads to controversy about the texts. Many have sought in vain to find Christian connections in the Dead Sea Scrolls or references to Jesus, but they apparently do not exist. While a few have also tried to connect the New Testament person of John the Baptist to the Essene community because the gospels portray him as ascetic, this conjecture is also without any evidence. The closest parallel to Christianity may be that one religious leader of the Essenes or the Qumran community appears to have been led by a mysterious figure called the Teacher of Righteousness. At least a few Christian scholars have tried to claim this person follows a precedent set by Jesus, however unlikely this might be.

  Conspiracy theories are nothing new, but because the international Dead Sea Scrolls team, originally assembled around 1950 by the Ecole Biblique and others, maintained an atmosphere of high-handed control over the bulk of their documents for almost fifty years, not all scholars are completely convinced that there isn’t some collusion yet to be revealed.

  For years rumors ab
ounded about the contents of many of the scrolls, leading to many unfounded conspiracy theories. This was mostly due to the deliberate blocking of access to outsiders and the monopolistic snail’s pace of publication of Cave 4 Qumran material. One rumor even had it that the Vatican was suppressing the scrolls’ publication because some of their contents would undermine Roman Catholicism and its dogmatic version of early Christianity. While understandable, given the reprehensible secrecy and tightfistedness of this team (many of whom were not even trained as translators), this is absurd because Christianity appears not to be mentioned. Others have long rumored that some of the texts made reference to Jesus and New Testament activities but that such references were destroyed or expunged. One such popular book published in the late 1980s, titled Jesus and the Secret of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was clearly marketed for an audience created out of the hype over the absence of published Cave 4 material. In other rumors, modern Jews were said to have suppressed publication because it would destroy official positions about ancient Judaism. This is also unreasonable given that the then mostly secular state of modern Israel actively pursued publication of all the texts it possessed and constantly pushed the others who controlled texts to publish their portions.

  Such views about New Testament or Christian connections are highly doubtful for several reasons. The first argument against this position is the fact that for nearly five decades, from around 1950 to 1990, at least 40 percent of extant texts, all from Cave 4, were held within the control of the French Roman Catholic Dominicans of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem or their handpicked Christian successors. If verifiable New Testament material existed, they most likely would have hailed it as fundamental to understanding early Christian beginnings. As such, the unique religious community material appears to bridge late Judaism of the first century and New Testament gospels mostly in that our knowledge of this hitherto-unknown Jewish sect—possibly Essene but not necessarily so—is now greatly enlarged. The second primary argument against this rumor of Christian connections is that because Jerusalem at the time of destruction was overwhelmingly populated by religious Jews of traditional Judaism, they would hardly be sympathetic to hiding Christian writings they would consider heretical alongside their own biblical texts.