DEAD SEA SCROLLS

ancient manuscripts (of leather, papyrus, and copper) discovered in desert caves and ancient ruins in the wilderness of Judaea. They are among the more important discoveries in the history of modern archaeology. Their recovery has enabled scholars to push back the date of a stabilized Hebrew Bible to no later than AD 70, to reconstruct the history of Palestine from the 4th century BC to AD 135, and to cast new light on the emergence of Christianity and of rabbinic Judaism and on the relationship between early Christianity and Jewish religious traditions. Documents were recovered in the Judaean wilderness from five principal sites: Khirbat Qumran, Wadi Al-Murabba'ah, Nahal Hever (Wadi Khabrah) and Nahal Ze'elim (Wadi Seiyal), Wadi Daliyeh, and Masada. The first manuscripts, accidentally discovered by a young Bedouin shepherd (1947) in a cave at Khirbat Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, were almost immediately labeled Dead Sea Scrolls. Later finds (especially in the 1950s to mid-1960s) in neighbouring areas were similarly designated. Eleven caves near Qumran yielded numerous documents, all long presumed part of a library belonging to a fundamentalist Jewish religious sect (Essenes) that flourished at Qumran from the mid-2nd century BC to AD 68. Some scholars have suggested that the scrolls were not the work of Essene monks but rather a collected library of important Jewish works that was hidden for protection during the Roman invasion of AD 67 to 73. Though the documents themselves date from the mid-3rd century BC to AD 68, the majority were composed during the 1st century BC and 1st century AD. The oldest manuscripts are biblical. The best-preserved documents are those found in Cave I at Qumran, including an Isaiah Scroll; the Rule of the Community (also called the Manual of Discipline); The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, or War Scroll; a scroll of thanksgiving hymns; and a commentary on the Book of Habakkuk. Cave II contained only fragments. Cave III yielded the Copper Scroll, a list of Temple treasures and their hiding places. Cave IV sheltered the main deposit of the allegedly Essene library. Of the approximately 400 manuscripts, generally in poor condition, most were sectarian writings. About 100 are biblical and represent the entire Hebrew Old Testament, excepting the Book of Esther. Several well-preserved documents also were recovered from Cave XI, including a large scroll with canonical, apocryphal, and unknown psalms. There was also a copy of Leviticus (dated to the 3rd century BC). The Temple Scroll, purchased in 1967 from Bedouins, was probably removed from Cave XI more than a decade earlier. Its 66 preserved columns give details for the construction of the ideal Temple of Jerusalem. Wadi Al-Murabba'ah, a second site 11 miles (18 km) south of Qumran, contained documents left by fugitives from the armies of Bar Kokhba (who led the Jews in a suicidal revolt against Rome in AD 132135). Besides two letters of Bar Kokhba, legal documents in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and fragmentary biblical works of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, archaeologists recovered a remarkably well-preserved scroll of the 12 minor prophets that is virtually identical with the traditional biblical text. When shepherds reported a third site in 1952, this one south of 'En Gedi, they presented as evidence a lost Greek translation (1st century AD) of the minor prophets, a letter of Bar Kokhba, biblical fragments, and legal documents of the Bar Kokhba era in Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean. Excavations at Nahal Ze'elim, in the Cave of Scrolls, uncovered clear evidence of the Bar Kokhba era and, in the Cave of Letters, 15 papyri of Bar Kokhba with a psalms fragment. Later diggings produced additional letters of Bar Kokhba and a large body of Nabataean, Aramaic, and Greek documents. At Nahal Hever, in the Cave of Horrors (containing skeletal remains), there were bits of a Greek recension of the minor prophets. A fourth site, 8.5 miles (13.6 km) north of ancient Jericho, yielded about 40 badly damaged documents deposited in a cave by Samarians who were massacred there by soldiers of Alexander the Great in 331 BC. These legal documents are all in Aramaic except for seals in Paleo-Hebrew. As the earliest (375335 BC) extensive group of papyri ever found in Palestine, they are of immense value to historians. A fifth site, at Masada, produced a Hebrew manuscript of Ecclesiasticus (c. 75 BC) and fragments of Psalms, Leviticus, and Genesis. Found also was a Scroll of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, possibly of Essene authorship. A similar manuscript was found in Cave IV at Qumran. All the manuscripts were placed under the control of a small committee of scholars. Most of the longer, more complete scrolls were published soon after their discovery. The majority of the scrolls, however, consist of tiny, brittle fragments. These fragments were published at a pace considered by many to be excessively slow, and access to the unpublished documents was severely limited by the editorial committee. In September 1991 researchers at Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio, announced that they had created a computer program that used a previously published concordance to the scrolls to reconstruct one of the unpublished texts. Later that month, officials at the Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., announced that they would allow researchers unrestricted access to the library's complete set of photographs of the scrolls. With their de facto monopoly of the scrolls broken, the official scholars of the Israeli Antiquities Authority agreed to lift their long-standing restrictions on the use of the scrolls. Additional reading Roland de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1973); Geza Vermes and Pamela Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective (1977); Hershel Shanks (ed.), Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls (1992).