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Симметрия в физике Наука Эллиот Дж., Добер П. Year: 1983 Language: russian File: DJVU, 3.54 MB Your tags: 0 / 0

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What Goes Around Comes Around Utah State University Press Kimberly Lau Year: 2004 Language: english File: PDF, 1.25 MB Your tags: 0 / 0

The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Very Short Introduction

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Timothy H. Lim

THE DEAD SEA
SCROLLS
A Very Short Introduction

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford o x 2 6 d p
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Published in the United States
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© Timothy H. Lim 2005
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First published as a Very Short Introduction 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
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outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
ISBN 0–19–280659–9
978–0–19–280659–8
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall

For my dear children
Jonathan and Alison

Contents

List of illustrations ix

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

The Dead Sea scrolls as cultural icon 1
The archaeological site and caves

20

On scrolls and fragments 32
New light on the Hebrew Bible
Who owned the scrolls?

40

58

Literary compositions from the Qumran library 66
The Qumran-Essene community in context 72
The Qumran community

84

The religious beliefs of the Qumran community
The scrolls and early Christianity

106

The greatest manuscript discovery 117
References

121

Further reading 127
Appendix: Hitherto unknown texts
Index

135

130

100

List of illustrations

1

Headline from the Times,
6 June 1996
2

7 The Habakkuk Pesher 33
© The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

NI Syndication

2 Judaean Desert

8

© Timothy H. Lim

3 The Shrine of the Book,
Israel Museum
10

8 The Rule of the
Community

9 The Leningrad Codex 44
Department of Manuscripts,
National Library of Russia

© Buddy Mays/Corbis

4 Front cover, On Scrolls,
Artefacts and Intellectual
Property
19
Timothy H. Lim, Hector L.
MacQueen, and Calum M.
Carmichael (eds.) (Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 2001)

10

Copy of Samuel,
preserving 1 Samuel
10–11

48

Israel Antiquities Authority

11

5 Aerial view of Khirbet
Qumran
24
Albatross

6 Maps of the Dead Sea
area, showing location of
Khirbet Qumran, the
caves, and cemetery
28

34

© The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Fragment of
4QGen-Exoda naming
Mount Moriah as
‘Elohim Yireh’
50
Israel Antiquities Authority

12

David and Goliath in
battle

53

The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan,
1917

13

Reconstruction of the
‘scriptorium’ and ‘library’
of the Qumran
community
67
Leen Ritmeyer

14

Sectarian document
Israel Antiquities Authority

83

15

Fragment with Greek
letters from Cave 7
108
Israel Antiquities Authority

16

The ‘slain messiah’
fragment from
Cave 4

110

Israel Antiquities Authority

The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions
in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at
the earliest opportunity.

Chapter 1
The Dead Sea Scrolls as
cultural icon

Many people have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but few know
what they are or the significance they have for our understanding
of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, ancient Judaism, and the
origins of Christianity. Since their discovery in 1947, and
especially from 1991 when all the remaining, unedited scrolls
were released to the world at large, there has been a surge of
publications, ranging from the popular to the technical. The
technical works are inaccessible to most people apart from
specialists, and the popular books vary in quality, from the
sensational blockbusters (often involving a Vatican conspiracy
theory) to the sound and reliable.
In this Very Short Introduction to the Dead Sea Scrolls, I will
discuss the discovery, the controversies and personalities involved
in the scholarly debates, the legal actions, the politics, and the
vested religious interests. Moreover, I will introduce traditional
and specialist studies of Jewish history and thought between
200 BCE and 70 CE, the archaeology of the Khirbet Qumran
(the area where the scrolls were discovered), palaeography
(‘study of old handwriting’), textual criticism, philology, linguistics,
and ancient biblical exegeses. There will also be a discussion of
the most recent scientific techniques, often neglected by
introductory textbooks. In keeping with the aims of this series,
the treatment of each topic will necessarily be brief and selective;
1

The Dead Sea Scrolls

the intention is to whet your appetite and to pique your interest
rather than to provide a comprehensive introduction to the Dead
Sea Scrolls.
A newspaper headline in The Independent on 12 November 2004
read ‘Afghanistan wants its ‘‘Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism’’ back
from UK’. The article, written by Nick Meo, reported that Dr
Sahyeed Rahneen, the Minister for Culture and Information of
Afghanistan, was attempting to restore the collection of the Kabul
Museum and would be formally requesting the return of the
Kharosti scrolls from the British government. The Kabul Museum
had been ransacked during the war that ousted the Taliban
government and the collection of sixty fragments of scrolls, written
on birch bark and in the ancient script of Kharosti, disappeared into
the antiquities market before resurfacing at the British Library in
1994 (Figure 1).
Notable is the way the newspaper headline used ‘the Dead Sea
Scrolls’ to signify a collection of ancient manuscript finds. The
Kharosti texts are Buddhist scrolls dating to the 1st century CE and
have no historical connection to Judaism. They are significant for
the study of the early development of Buddhism and the search for
the historical Buddha. The comparison, suggested by the staff of the
British Library, was intended to underscore their great antiquity
and importance. The peculiar usage of the name in a national
newspaper is evidence that the Dead Sea Scrolls have taken on a
symbolic status. They are no longer just the scrolls of a Jewish sect

1. A newspaper headline in The Times on 6 June 1996 using the ‘Dead
Sea Scrolls’ symbolically to represent ancient and important
discoveries
2

that lived by the Dead Sea, but represent any important discovery of
ancient manuscripts.
In transcending, so to speak, the historical context of Second
Temple Judaism (515 BCE to 70 CE), the Dead Sea Scrolls have
become a cultural icon. Popular fiction, such as the bestseller The
Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, peppers its narrative with references
to them in order to add intrigue and mystery to the story. Or again,
in an earlier novel called The Mandelbaum Gate, published in 1965
by Muriel Spark, the well-known author of The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie, the fiancé of the main character works as an archaeologist
excavating Khirbet Qumran. How did the scrolls become so
popular?

The reasons for the popularity of the Dead Sea Scrolls are not far to
find. From their initial discovery by two Bedouin shepherds in 1947
to the ‘battle for the scrolls’ in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the
media have always been involved in reporting the finds, the politics,
the personalities, and the academic squabbles, to an interested
public. Some of the reporting trades on sensationalism, with or
without the backing of one or more academics; other reports offer
sound coverage of the latest developments in scrolls research; and
there is, moreover, a whole range of other types of publicity between
these poles. In any case, the involvement of the media –
newspapers, television, and radio – have ensured that the public,
especially in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and
Australia, would have read or heard about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Early in my own academic career, I experienced first hand the role
the media played in popularizing the scrolls. In 1991, I had just
finished my doctorate on the scrolls in Oxford and had become the
Kennicott Hebrew Fellow at the Oriental Institute. It was during
that time that access was being sought to the remaining unedited
scrolls from Cave 4, in what has been described as ‘the battle for the
3

The Dead Sea Scrolls as cultural icon

The media and the scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls

scrolls’. Essentially, the conflict was drawn between a small group of
scholars who had in their possession unpublished material from the
largest depository of the eleven caves of Qumran, Cave 4, and others
who wanted and demanded access to them for research and study.
The tension between the haves and have-nots had been building up
for several years, but it came to a head in the summer and autumn
of 1991. On 29 October 1991, after much bad blood had been spilt,
the battle was won by the advocates of free access when it was
announced by the Israel Antiquities Authority that a new policy of
access was being implemented. An article reported in The Times
heralded the news with this headline: ‘Israel opens access to the
Dead Sea scrolls’.
Within weeks of the announcement of the new policy, two
American scholars, Michael Wise, then of the University of Chicago,
and Robert Eisenman of California State University at Long Beach,
announced to the world the discovery among the hitherto
unpublished scrolls of a small fragment that allegedly attests to a
slain or pierced messiah. With Geza Vermes, one of the leading
scrolls scholars, I organized a seminar in Oxford that examined the
six-line text, concluding that quite to the contrary the fragment
does not speak of a messiah who is slain but rather an anointed
Prince of the Congregation who puts his enemy to death. I will
discuss the details of these diverging interpretations in a later
chapter on the relationship between the scrolls and early
Christianity.
The seminar was covered by a journalist, Oliver Gillie, and his
article appeared on the front and inside page of The Independent
published on 27 December 1991. One of the features of the seminar
that was highlighted in the subsequent reporting was the use
of computer technology and imaging software to enhance the
Hebrew script. The imaging equipment was available at Yarnton
of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies as part of the
Qumran Project, funded by an anonymous donor under the
guidance of Alan Crown, formerly of the University of Sydney. I had
4

produced an enlarged and enhanced image of what turned out to be
fragment 5 (now renumbered as 7) of 4Q285 (4 = Cave 4;
Q = Qumran; and 285 = the number assigned to the scroll), which
was subsequently published in the Journal of Jewish Studies. This
was one of the first applications of imaging software to the study of
the scrolls, and the publication of the enhanced and blown-up
fragment 5 astounded readers of the Journal.

The reason is that it is the connection to Christianity that makes the
scrolls sensational. If, for instance, ‘a slain messiah’ could be found
in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, then some have argued that it would
call into question the uniqueness of Jesus and the foundations of
the Christian faith. As an aside, this type of argument, baldly stated
as it often is in the media, depends upon a rather simplistic
understanding of Jesus and the Christian faith in supposing that the
discovery of an archaeological artefact would undermine
Christianity in this way. Within Jewish history, Jesus was not the
only person to have been considered a messiah, even a suffering
one, by his followers. Regardless, it could be argued that ‘a slain
5

The Dead Sea Scrolls as cultural icon

Several aspects of this episode are noteworthy. First, the date of the
publication of the newspaper article coincided with the Christmas
season. This was reasonable since the Oxford seminar was
convened on 20 December. Over the years, however, I have noticed
that the pattern of media reports and broadcasts, in the
broadsheets, on the radio, or television, almost always follows
Christmas or Easter. Of course, this should not be surprising, since
the scrolls are religious documents and are of particular interest
during the annual cycle of festivals, but it is the Christian, and not
Jewish, holy days that are followed. The fact that the movable
feast of Easter is based upon the date of the Passover does not
detract from the point that the media have in their sights the
Christian rather than Jewish religious cycle. Why not publish
reports to correspond to the Jewish New Year or Yom Kippur (Day
of Atonement), for instance, since almost all scholars believe that
the scrolls are Jewish and not Christian?

messiah’ figure in the scrolls would not question the uniqueness of
Christ, but would rather underscore the view increasingly accepted
by Christians in the post-Holocaust, interfaith dialogue that Jesus
was a Jew and not a Christian.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Second, the application of modern technology to the study of
ancient manuscripts has its own inherent fascination, the contrast
between the very old manuscripts and cutting edge electronic tools.
With the explosion of computer applications and web technology in
the past decade and a half, there are now impressive sites, like the
Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated
Literature (http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il/) of the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, mounted on the web that will allow a ‘surfer’ to take
a virtual visit of Khirbet Qumran, join an ongoing discussion group
or search the bibliographical database.
Computer technology is used in an increasing number of
applications for scrolls research and the dissemination of
information. In 1997, I edited The Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic
Reference Library, a CD ROM database that would allow scholars to
search for images of specific scrolls, enhance and print them out for
personal study. This was followed by volume 2, produced by the
Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, Brigham
Young University, with a database edited by Emanuel Tov, including
a searchable transcription and translation of all the non-biblical
scrolls.
Other notable developments and projects in the United States
include the enhancing and reduction of background ‘noise’ of a text
called Genesis Apocryphon by Gregory H. Bearman, a scientist of
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, who specializes in
analysing satellite images. Bearman developed a technique called
multi-spectral imaging to produce readings (for instance, ‘the book
of Noah’) invisible to the human eye from the badly deteriorated
script. Application of computer enhancing technology is likewise
being deployed at Princeton in connection with the Princeton
6

Theological Seminary Dead Sea Scrolls Project edited by James H.
Charlesworth.
Access to the Cave 4 scrolls and the reading of a putative ‘slain
messiah’ fragment are two of the recent controversies. There have
been others in the eventful past half century or so. For instance,
John Allegro, a British scholar at the University of Manchester, led
expeditions to the Judaean Desert to hunt for the treasures
mentioned in the Copper Scroll (Figure 2).

Tourism and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Another reason for the popularity of the Dead Sea Scrolls is
tourism. Every year thousands of tourists and pilgrims descend on
Israel, visiting places holy to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Among them the archaeological site of Khirbet Qumran in the
Judaean Desert and the Shrine of the Book of the Israel Museum,
figure high on the list of places to visit. At Khirbet Qumran they are
led by informed guides around the archaeological site and are given
a viewing of the nearby caves. Even at a time of unrest, the number
of tourists is impressive. According to Israel’s Ministry of Tourism
figures, last year 46,000 visitors passed through the Qumran site.
7

The Dead Sea Scrolls as cultural icon

This scroll from Cave 3 is unique among the Dead Sea Scrolls in
using copper as its writing material. All the other scrolls were
written on skin or papyrus. The text, etched on copper plates,
describes sixty-four hiding places of gold, silver, Temple sacrifices
and another copy of the same scroll in the Judaean Desert. These
treasures are what Allegro set out to find. Other scholars interpret
the treasures, amounting to some sixty-five tons of silver and
twenty-five tons of gold, as literary fiction and liken the copper
scroll to the text massekhet kelim (tractate of the Temple vessels), a
mediaeval text that described how the treasures of the Solomonic
Temple were sequestered to a tower in Baghdad and their hiding
places recorded on a copper tablet. Allegro failed to turn up any
treasure, but his expeditions were widely reported in the media.

2. The Copper Scroll itemises sixty-four places in the Judaean Desert where treasures are hidden

Interested consumers can now purchase facsimiles of scrolls and
the jars in which some of the manuscripts were stored, as well as a
whole range of paraphernalia, including ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ pens,
t-shirts, ties, scarves and mud.

Politics and the Dead Sea Scrolls

The political capital made out of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Israel’s
leading politicians was not lost on us, but a dignified silence was
maintained. It was only when it was mentioned that the Dead Sea
Scrolls were vital for Jerusalem did a disapproving titter ripple
9

The Dead Sea Scrolls as cultural icon

The Dead Sea Scrolls are also regarded as a cultural icon in Israel.
On 20–25 July 1997, scholars from around the world were invited to
Jerusalem to mark the Jubilee celebration of the discovery of the
Dead Sea Scrolls. Among the many events of this occasion was the
memorable opening of the proceedings by the then Prime Minister
of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former mayors of Jerusalem,
Teddy Kolleck and Ehud Olmert, and James Snyder, the Director of
the Israel Museum. Sitting outdoors on the grounds of the Israel
Museum and in the dimming light of a Jerusalem evening, I along
with Christian, Jewish and other scholars from Israel and abroad
heard of how the scrolls were politically significant to the State of
Israel. The year of the discovery of the scrolls, 1947, coincided with
the re-establishment of the Jewish State after some two thousand
years. The scrolls, we were told, played a symbolic role in the return
of the Jewish people to their origins, and this point was underscored
by the setting of the ceremony. It was a marvellous celebration and
there was even a specially commissioned musical composition by
Michael Wolpe whose libretto is based upon texts from the scrolls.
The Shrine of the Book, a specially constructed underground
museum built to display the Dead Sea Scrolls, has an above ground
structure that was built to resemble the lid of an ancient jar in
which some of the scrolls were kept. We were seated in front
of it and in the background was Israel’s parliament, the Knesset
(Figure 3).

3. The Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, where the Dead Sea Scrolls are on display

through the audience. This was amusing to the assembled, since
most experts believe that the Dead Sea Scrolls belong to a pious
Jewish group of Essenes who, among other things, held that the
Jerusalem priesthood was corrupt and as a result separated
themselves from the majority of the people and went into a
self-imposed exile in the Judaean Desert!

In the United Kingdom, the political association was explicit in the
1998 Scrolls from the Dead Sea exhibition at the Kelvingrove Art
Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. The Israel Antiquities Authority
had decided to allow an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be set up
in Glasgow as recognition of the Jewish community there and in
celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the State of
Israel. The Jubilee exhibition was the only one to be held in Britain
and it attracted hundreds of thousands of people.
11

The Dead Sea Scrolls as cultural icon

When the scrolls were first discovered in 1947, Khirbet Qumran, the
caves associated with it and the Judaean Desert were under the
authority of the British Mandate and the Antiquities Ordinance of
1929. With the political changes after 1948, almost all of the scrolls
fell into Israeli hands. Most are kept at the Shrine of the Book and
the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem. The Copper Scroll is an
exception and still finds its home in the Department of Antiquities
in Amman, Jordan. There are also a few fragments in the
Bibliothèque nationale de Paris and scattered in private collections
throughout the world. There is even one stamp-size fragment, the
so-called ‘McGill fragment’, in Canada. Ownership of antiquities, in
general, is a much disputed issue that carries a complex set of
political and legal considerations. Using the legal principles of
succession and territorial link Wojciech Kowalski has argued that
‘the fact that the scrolls are currently stored in Israel is in full
harmony with international standards of the protection of cultural
property’. Not everyone will agree with this view. Legal
considerations of ownership aside, there is little doubt that the
scrolls belong first and foremost to the Jewish people before they
are mankind’s common heritage.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Vatican and the Dead Sea Scrolls
A conspiracy theory involving the Vatican has long been attached to
the publication of the scrolls. It is unclear who originally came up
with the conspiracy theory, but John Allegro was certainly one of
the first to have expressed it. According to him, the original team of
international, inter-denominational scholars had access to all the
scrolls and the publication of the manuscripts was progressing
apace in the early fifties. By the late 1950s, however, John Allegro
was beginning to suspect a Catholic monopoly and even conspiracy.
Certain members of the editorial team were being assigned more
and more of the manuscripts; Josef Milik, Jean Starcky and John
Strugnell, all Catholics, were given the lion’s share. Allegro had
remarked to a friend: ‘I am convinced that if something does turn
up which affects the Roman Catholic dogma, the world will never
see it’. This suspicion has two notable features. One was his
exclusion of access from the remaining unpublished scrolls. Even
though he was one of the original editors, by the late fifties, Allegro
felt debarred from the team. In a letter he wrote to Frank Cross,
another original editorial team member, on 5 August 1956, Allegro
stated that ‘the non-Catholic members of the team are being
removed as quickly as possible’. Two, a suspicion was being cast that
the Vatican might repress information damaging to the Christian
faith.
Allegro’s account of the delay in publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls
and the restriction of access to the remaining unpublished material
have been recounted recently by his daughter Judith Anne Brown in
John Marco Allegro. Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Using private
letters and personal recollections, she described how Allegro
attributed his exclusion from the team of editors to a Catholic
monopoly and conspiracy of silence, although she could not find
any evidence to support her father’s suspicions.
John Strugnell, a former Editor-in-Chief of the official publication
series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, and Geza Vermes, one of
12

the most vocal critics of the original editorial team, have given
different accounts of the publication process and restriction of
access. Strugnell and Vermes were on opposite sides of ‘the battle
for the scrolls’, but neither scholar attributed the delay and access
issues to a Vatican conspiracy. Strugnell defended the speed of
publication of the scrolls as comparable to other projects of the
kind, like the editing of the Oxyrhynchus papyri from Egypt,
whereas Vermes blamed Roland de Vaux, excavator of Khirbet
Qumran and the first Editor-in-Chief of the Discoveries in the
Judaean Desert publication project, in appointing a team too small
to cope with the demanding task of editing thousands of fragments.

In any case, the Vatican conspiracy theory continued to circulate in
the public arena. Fact and fiction often became blurred. Consider
the novel The Judas Testament (1994) by Daniel Easterman, which
vividly describes an imagined conspiracy to suppress information
damaging to Christian faith. The hero, a certain Jack Gould, a
doctoral candidate working on the prophecies of the star and
sceptre in the Damascus Document at Trinity College Dublin, is hot
on the trail of the Jesus Papyrus which apparently came from one of
the caves by Qumran. While Gould is following clues elsewhere, in
the Old City of Jerusalem in the fictitious Catholic Institute for
Biblical Studies, a certain Father Raymond Benveniste struggles
with his conscience as he contemplates the fate of an Aramaic
fragment in his possession. I cite extracts from it to give you a
flavour of one imagined version of the conspiracy theory.
13

The Dead Sea Scrolls as cultural icon

John Allegro’s view of a Catholic conspiracy is dubious, since at
least one of the original team members, Frank Moore Cross,
Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, who remained on the
editorial team, is not Catholic. There are more mundane reasons,
including academic aspirations and jealousies, personal problems
and conflicts, financial constraints, perfectionism, procrastination
and the fragmentary state of preservation of the remaining
unpublished scrolls that can account for both the delay and
restriction of access.

Father Raymond Benveniste took a handkerchief from his pocket,
coughed into it, and replaced it . . . On the desk in front of him lay a
papyrus fragment sixteen centimetres by twenty-one. It contained
thirty lines of Aramaic writing, marred here and there by holes or
smudges, but generally legible . . . . It was not much importance in
itself. Just a letter to a Temple functionary from an unknown
correspondent . . . . Ordinarily, Benveniste would have passed it on
for further study and eventual publication in an issue of the
Institute’s quarterly journal. But for one thing.
The fragment contained a reference, admittedly brief, to ‘the
followers of Jesus’, a group seemingly attached to the Temple in
some way and ‘zealous for the Law of Moses’. There were, of course,
several possible interpretations of the passage. On its own, it would

The Dead Sea Scrolls

send out few ripples . . . .
But there were people in Rome who preferred caution above all
things. On his last visit, Della Gherardesca of the Biblical
Commission had spoken frankly with him. A number of books had
been published recently, suggesting that Jesus Christ had been little
more than a Hasid, a Jewish holy man, and that his father had been
a scholar, a naggar – the Aramaic word for ‘carpenter’ used
metaphorically . . . .
Benveniste looked at the scrap of papyrus again. It was hardly
important. But it could be considered yet another piece of
confirmation for such scandalous theories. In the wrong hands it
could be put to wicked use.
He took a box of matches from his pocket. As a scholar, he was
ashamed of what he was about to do. As a priest he had been trained
in obedience. His hand did not even shake as he struck the match.

The Judas Testament is a tale involving an obedient priest’s
destruction of an Aramaic fragment that evidently attested
to Jesus’s zeal for the Mosaic law. The conspiracy centres on the
14

The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception by Michael Baigent and Richard
Leigh, published a few years earlier in 1991, however, was not
fiction. It claimed to have uncovered the sensational story behind
the religious scandal of the century. The blame for the publication
delay was laid at the doorstep of the Vatican that was supposedly in
control of de Vaux, who was also Director of the Dominican centre
of the biblical and archaeological school in Jerusalem, L’Ecole
biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem. It was alleged
that there was a conspiracy, in the form of a modern inquisition by
the Pontifical Biblical Commission and the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the new
Pope Benedict XVI), to suppress unpublished Qumran scrolls that
might be ‘inimical to Church doctrine’.
Conspiracy theories, by their nature, depend upon some known
material that has been inexplicably concealed. The lack of access to
the Dead Sea Scrolls by some scholars seemed ideal as the subject of
a conspiracy theory. When The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception
appeared, however, it did not have in the United Kingdom the
impact that might have been hoped for. This was primarily due to
the announcement, a few months after its publication, of the new
15

The Dead Sea Scrolls as cultural icon

suppression of information, accidentally found and not transmitted
through official Christian channels, which would represent Jesus in
a different light from the way he is depicted in the Gospels. In this
novel, the papyrus shows that contrary to the way that he is
portrayed in the New Testament, Jesus did not abrogate halakha or
Jewish law. He was a pious man and a zealot of the law. The story is
entirely fictional, but Easterman’s Jesus has similarities to Geza
Vermes’s well-known argument, published in Jesus the Jew (1973),
that the man from Nazareth is best seen as a hasid. The difference is
that Vermes’s Jesus was a charismatic holy man, not an expert of
Jewish law. Even Easterman’s use of the metaphorical
understanding of the Aramaic word naggar, not as its literal
meaning of ‘carpenter’ but ‘scholar’, is based on Vermes’s work,
although the latter has since retracted the view.

policy of access. The theory of a Vatican concealment could now be
tested, and it was evident to most scholars that ‘the smoking gun’, to
use a recent analogy, was not to be found. Subsequent interviews
with the authors that were published in the media, suggested that
the Vatican would already have destroyed anything that was
doctrinally damaging. For most Britons, this smacked of special
pleading.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

When the book was translated into German as Die Verschlusssache
Jesus: Die Qumranrollen und die Wahrheit über das frühe
Christentum (The Secret File of Jesus: The Qumran Scrolls and the
Truth about Early Christianity) and its chapters serialized in a
national magazine, Der Spiegel, it became a bestseller. In fact, the
book was so popular, with sales over 300,000 copies, that German
academics felt compelled to write refutations of it.

The Biblical Archaeology Society and the Dead
Sea Scrolls
For the lay readership, one magazine stands out in popularizing the
scrolls and that is Biblical Archaeology Review of the Biblical
Archaeology Society, Washington DC. This monthly magazine,
founded and edited by Hershel Shanks, the indefatigable lawyerturned-publisher, is known for the high quality of its articles. ‘BAR’,
as it is known by over 300,000 readers of the magazine, is often
controversial as it publishes the latest finds related to Biblical
archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Through its publications and
public seminars, Biblical Archaeology Society has played an
important role in the dissemination of knowledge about the scrolls.
It also championed ‘the liberation of the scrolls’.

Copyright, intellectual property, and the Dead
Sea Scrolls
The battle over access to the Cave 4 material in the early nineties
included at least two legal and academic collateral skirmishes
16

about the propriety of transcriptions and translations of then
unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls. The more notorious of these was
the clash over the unauthorized publication of a transcription of a
text called 4QMMT (MMT stand for the Hebrew miqsat ma‘aseh
ha-torah or ‘some precepts of the torah’). In an attempt to free
the remaining scrolls from the academic control of a small
group of scholars, Biblical Archaeology Society published in
1991 a two volume set of photographs entitled A Facsimile of the
Dead Sea Scrolls. Prepared with an Introduction and Index by
Robert H. Eisenman and James M. Robinson. At the head of
the volume was a Foreword, written by Hershel Shanks, which
included the transcription of a working copy of the composite
text of MMT.

17

The Dead Sea Scrolls as cultural icon

MMT is a text between 116 and 135 lines (the number of lines
changed in the course of the editing process) that discusses some
20 or so legal points of dispute between unknown individuals and
groups identified simply by ‘you’ (in the singular and plural), ‘we’
and ‘they’. It is believed that this text refers to an early stage of the
Qumran community’s split from the majority of the Jewish people.
The composite text was the editorial reconstruction of the
presumed original text from six copies of the scroll. The editorial
process was a collaborative effort between Elisha Qimron and John
Strugnell. Hartmut Stegemann, a Professor from Göttingen
University well known for his methods of reconstructing scrolls,
also publicly stated in a conference in Basel on 7 August 2001 that
he had a hand in the editorial process, but he did not stake a
claim in the legal proceedings. Qimron, but not Strugnell, sued
Biblical Archaeology Society, its president, Hershel Shanks, and
the two editors, Eisenman and Robinson, for copyright
infringement. The case was tried in Israel and on 30 March 1993,
the District Court of Jerusalem, with the then Judge Dalia Dorner,
found in favour of the plaintiff. An appeal was lodged and the
Supreme Court of Israel, sitting as the Appellate Court for Civil
Appeals, upheld the decision of the Jerusalem court on 17 March
1998.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The case has far reaching ramifications for the legal definition of an
author, for editorial work, in the form of reconstruction and
transcription, of a two thousand year old manuscript written by
someone else can now be legally protected under copyright law.
Copyright of the composite text of MMT belongs to Elisha Qimron.
The case was a watershed in copyright law and Houston Law
Review 38.1 (2001) devoted a whole issue to a book-length
discussion of the case by David Nimmer, a leading American
copyright lawyer, who questioned the original Judgment and
subsequent appeal Decision. Hector MacQueen, Director of the
Arts and Humanities Research Board Centre for Intellectual
Property and Technology Law of the University of Edinburgh, takes
a different view and agrees with the Judgment of the Jerusalem
District Court, suggesting that editorial work should be protected
by copyright law. At issue is the criterion of ‘originality’ in the legal
definition of authorship. Broadly speaking, American copyright law
sets the bar of originality very high, requiring as it does ‘sparks of
creativity’, whereas the Israeli and British ones confer originality on
‘the right kind of skill and labour’.
MacQueen further argues that conferring copyright on edited texts
will positively promote rather than hinder scholarship: potential
editors will have an incentive to expend the labour with the reward
of copyright protection; and publishers will maintain their
economic interest to publish edited texts. Whatever view one takes
on the case of Qimron v. Shanks et al., a precedent has been set for
conferring copyright on editorial work.
There is no doubt that the Dead Sea Scrolls have become a cultural
icon. The main reasons for their popularity include the publicity
generated by the media, tourism, cultural and political
institutionalization, controversy over access to the scrolls, the
conspiracy theories involving the Vatican, the role of Biblical
Archaeology Society, and the legal case over copyright
infringement. All these factors contribute to the symbolic status of
the Dead Sea Scrolls.
18

4. The front cover of a book on the legal battle over the intellectual
property of a scroll. Note the copyright symbol hidden within

Chapter 2
The archaeological site
and caves

No one is entirely sure when the scrolls were first discovered, but
1947 has been designated the official year of the discovery. There are
several versions of the story and details diverge from one telling to
another. One version is that three shepherds had been tending their
flock of sheep and goats by En Feshkha, south of Qumran. In the
course of their pasturage, one of the three cousins, Jum‘a
Muhammed Khalil, who loved to explore the crags, threw a rock
into a small opening and heard the breaking of earthenware. A
different version of this story is that the cousins threw rocks into the
openings because they were looking for a goat that had gone astray.
In any case, as it was too late in the evening to investigate and the
next day was devoted to watering the flocks, the three agreed to
return two days later.
But Muhammed Ahmed el-Hamed, nicknamed ‘edh-Dhib’ (‘the
wolf ’), the youngest of the cousins, thinking that there was gold to
be found there, slipped away early in the morning to climb the 100
metres from their camp to the rock face. Once inside what was
later known as Cave 1, Muhammed saw about ten jars, some of
which had lids and handles, lining the wall of the cave. Eight of the
jars contained manuscripts and he took three scrolls that turned
out to be the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Habakkuk Pesher and the
Manual of Discipline (later renamed as Rule of the Community)
and returned to his cousins who were angered by his
20

impertinence. The two older cousins took the three scrolls and two
jars that they themselves had retrieved from the same cave and
showed them to various antiquities dealers in Bethlehem. There is
an intriguing story of how these and other scrolls came to the
attention of the world, involving among many others a
Bethlehemite cobbler named Kando, the leader of the Syrian
Orthodox Church in Jerusalem the Metropolitan Mar Athanasius
Samuel and Prof. Eliezer Sukenik of the Hebrew University who
authenticated the scrolls. There were secret meetings in the
partitioned city of Jerusalem and even an advertisement offering
‘The Four Dead Sea Scrolls’ for sale in the Wall Street Journal of
1 June 1954.

For Khirbet Qumran, de Vaux explained that the impetus for its
excavation in the early 1950s was the discovery of pottery which
was identical with that found in Cave 1. Scholars had known
about Qumran for over a hundred years and the earliest explorers
(Louis-Félicien Caignart de Saulcy and Henry B. Tristram) were
looking for the remains of the city of Gomorrah, well-known for
having been destroyed by brimstone and fire because of its
wickedness and debauchery (Genesis 19). When they were unable
to find evidence for the existence of the biblical city, the interest in
the site was lost. Charles Clermont-Ganneau, who excavated one of
the graves of the Qumran cemetery in 1874, observed that ‘the ruins
are insignificant in themselves’. Phrased differently, had it not been
21

The archaeological site and caves

What is important to remember is that Khirbet Qumran was
exceptional in having been excavated because of its links to the
scrolls and not because it corresponded to a place mentioned in the
Bible. In the past, Palestinian archaeology was dominated by the
biblical agenda. Sites, like Jericho or Megiddo, were excavated
because they were prominent in the biblical narrative. Nowadays,
there is a heated debate between those who believe that
archaeology should serve the needs of biblical scholarship and
those who champion an independent discipline of Palestinian
archaeology.

for its connection to the scrolls, Khirbet Qumran would have been
unremarkable as an archaeological site.

Periods of occupation

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Like most building complexes that have been used over hundreds of
years, Khirbet Qumran was not built in a day. Different stages can
be discerned as the site was adapted for subsequent use.
Archaeologists use a method called stratigraphy to differentiate the
distinct levels or strata of a site. Essentially, the method depends on
the layer-cake principle where one level is placed on top of another,
thereby creating a cake or chronological history of occupation: the
layer on top being more recent than the one below it and so on.
Within each layer or stratum, the remains of pottery sherds and
coins help date the period. Pottery can sometimes be established
typologically by its form, material of manufacture and firing
techniques and it provides a valuable indicator of changes from one
period to another. Coins also help to establish the chronology by
giving the earliest possible date or terminus post quem (‘the end
after which’). Thus, if a coin that was struck, say, during the High
Priesthood of John Hyrcanus I, was found in one of the strata, then
other considerations aside the date of that period cannot be earlier
than 135–104 BCE, the time of his reign. There is theoretically no
latest period, since even an antiquities collector today can have
coins of the Hasmonaean period in his possession. In practice,
however, and so long as the archaeological trench remains
undisturbed, the date of a level can be determined by the coin’s
relative position in the strata.
All descriptions of the periods of occupation at Khirbet Qumran
depend upon the authoritative statement of the archaeological
evidence by de Vaux in his Schweich Lectures of 1959 at the British
Academy. In his Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, the starting
point for all discussions on the subject, de Vaux divided the
occupation of Khirbet Qumran into three phases.
22

Israelite Phase

8th and 7th centuries BCE

Communal Phase
Period Ia

135–100 BCE

Period Ib

100–31 BCE

Abandonment of the site

31–4 BCE

Period II

4 BCE-68 CE

Period III
Second Revolt Phase

68–73 CE
132–135 BCE

Israelite Phase

De Vaux suggested that the settlement can be identified with one
of the six cities mentioned in Joshua 15:61–2, the ‘city of salt’
(‘ir-hammelah). Other scholars preferred to identify the site with
another city, Secacah, which is mentioned in the same passage of
Joshua and also in the Copper Scroll of Cave 3. The Israelite phase
probably came to a violent end, as evidenced by the layer of ash,
when the Kingdom of Judah fell in 586 BCE, but there is little
corroboration for this dating.

Communal Phase
After several hundred years, the site was reoccupied by another
group which de Vaux identified with the Essenes. He divided this
communal phase into three periods.
23

The archaeological site and caves

The earliest phase of human settlement at Khirbet Qumran is dated
to the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, corresponding to the final period of
the Israelite monarchy. The chronology is based upon sherds found
in a layer of ash, the relatively lower position of the walls, the
presence of a stamped inscription reading lammelk ‘belonging to
the king’, and comparisons with other Israelite strongholds of Iron
Age II. At this time, Qumran consisted of a rectangular building
with a large courtyard and a row of rooms along its eastern wall. The
round cistern, the only one at the site, also dates from this phase.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

5. The archaeological site of Khirbet Qumran

Period Ia (135–100 BCE)
During this period, modest modifications to the Israelite building
were made, most notably the addition of two rectangular cisterns
and a few rooms. De Vaux had difficulty in dating this period,
since no coins were found. He surmised that it may have been
constructed during the reign of John Hyrcanus I, 135–104 BCE,
simply because coins of Alexander Jannaeus, 103–76 BCE, were
found in the next level of Period Ib. Therefore, Period Ia must have
been earlier. Jodi Magness has recently argued that Period Ia never
existed because no coins were found at the level and the potsherds
recovered do not adequately distinguish the destruction levels. She
believed that the architectural augmentation assigned by de Vaux to
Period Ia actually belonged to Period Ib.

24

Period Ib (100–31 BCE)
According to de Vaux, during this period the Qumran site acquired
its definitive form. The Israelite building was greatly expanded by
the addition of a two-storey complex of buildings and rooms,
including a tower, kitchen, assembly room, courtyards, refectory,
dining room, pantry, stables and potter’s kilns. Note that de Vaux’s
labels are not strictly descriptive. Many of the terms he uses,
‘assembly rooms’, ‘pantry’, etc, are interpretations of the functions
of the rooms. The water system was enlarged by the addition of
cisterns and decantation basins.

Period II (4 BCE–68 CE)
Based on an analysis of the hoards of coins that were found at this
level, de Vaux suggested that the site was reoccupied at the reign of
Herod Archelaus in 4 BCE-6 CE. Most of the site was cleared and
repaired and the debris discarded on the northern slopes of the
ravine, but some rooms, like the lower floor of the tower, were left in
their damaged state. Secondary modifications were carried out on
the buildings, for instance, in adapting a courtyard into a covered
space. The water system was also slightly adjusted, leaving existing
25

The archaeological site and caves

There was also a layer of ash and a large cistern whose steps have
split. De Vaux interpreted these features as evidence of the effects of
an earthquake in 31 BCE and a subsequent fire. In other words,
Period Ib began in 100 BCE and was continuously occupied until 31
BCE. The earthquake prompted the inhabitants to abandon the site
for approximately 30 years before returning to reoccupy it after 4
BCE, the beginning of Period II. Magness again has advanced a
different chronology. By reassigning the hoard of coins of Period II
to Period Ib, she suggested that the site was not abandoned for a
long time after the earthquake. The inhabitants immediately
reoccupied the site, leaving irreparable structures in their damaged
state. For her, the layer of ash indicated that there was a brief break
in the occupation at 9/8 BCE when Qumran suffered a violent
destruction.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

conduits blocked up and creating other channels for drainage. A
feature of this period is the presence of workshops: the potter’s kiln
continued to be used; a large furnace was built just south of the
round cistern; and a mill was set up. However, some of the most
interesting finds at this level were fragments of a mud-brick
structure covered with smooth plaster which was reconstructed by
archaeologists into three tables and two inkwells, one bronze, the
other earthenware. These originally belonged to the upper storey
above the large assembly hall and fell through to the ground floor.
De Vaux suggested that there must have been a room above that
served as a writing room, a scriptorium similar to ones found in
monasteries of the Middle Ages. This interpretation has been
controversial: some argued that scribes in the ancient world did not
write on tables but on palettes set on their laps and knees; others
accused de Vaux of describing a Jewish settlement in Christian
terminology. The period came to a violent end with evidence of
damage, a layer of powdery black substance of the burnt roofs and
iron arrow heads. The last coins of this period were Jewish and de
Vaux concluded that it must have been destroyed during the First
Jewish Revolt, specifying the third year of the rebellion (68/69 CE)
as the probable date.

Period III (68–73 CE)
De Vaux believed that the communal phase of Khirbet Qumran
came to an end with an attack by the Romans as part of the
subjugation of Judaea. Coins of Caesarea and nearby Dora, where
the Roman soldiers were stationed in 67/68 CE, were found at the
site. For de Vaux this was evidence that there followed a brief
Roman period when a small military garrison was posted there to
patrol the seashore until the fall of Masada in 73 CE. Only the
eastern complex of buildings was occupied at this time. There were
extensive modifications of a military nature to the site, such as the
doubling of the thickness of the walls of the tower and the
strengthening of the north wall. There was also radical
transformation of the living accommodations as there was no
longer any need for places of collective assembly or any use of
26

workshops. The potter’s kiln now became storage for lime. The
damaged water system would have required extensive repair and
maintenance, so the Roman soldiers kept only one large, intact
cistern outside of the building complex for their use. This phase of
occupation ended when the last zealots of Masada succumbed to
the siege of the Roman Governor of Palestine, Flavius Silva.

Second Revolt Phase

The cemetery
Related to the occupational phases of Khirbet Qumran is the
cemetery, separated from the site by an empty space of 50 metres,
which lies to the east of the ruins. It is believed that this was the
cemetery of the Qumran community. This vast cemetery contains
some 1,100 graves and is divided into three areas. Each tomb is
covered by a heap of rocks that forms a rectangular mound. The
tombs are arranged and ordered into rows and are oriented in a
north-south direction. Only one tomb is oriented in an east-west
direction. De Vaux and his team excavated 26 of these from a
random sampling of the tombs in the different sectors. Each of the
loculi or cavities of the tombs has been dug to a depth of between
1.2 and 2m. Where the gender and age of the original bodies can be
identified from the skeletons, they were all male and around forty
27

The archaeological site and caves

The buildings of Qumran were abandoned for 59 years, but were
reused briefly and for the last time during the Second Jewish Revolt
against Rome in 132–135 CE. De Vaux described the occupants as
‘insurgents’, but from the Jewish point of view they would have been
fighters for independence and freedom. In any case, no actual
building work took place. The coins found in a room on the ground
floor of the tower belonged to the last years of the war. De Vaux
deduced that the occupants must have been insurgents who, being
hunted down by the Roman army, took refuge at Qumran as they
did in other parts of the Judaean Desert, such as the caves to the
south by Wadi Murabba‘at.

6. Maps of the Dead Sea area, locating Khirbet Qumran, the caves, and
cemetery

years of age. In what de Vaux described as the extension of the
cemetery, an examination of the exhumations revealed that four of
the six skeletons were those belonging to women and one of a child.
A few ornaments, beads and earrings were found beside two of the
female skeletons.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

In 1966, S. H. Steckoll excavated a tomb in the main part of the
cemetery that yielded a man who died at around 65 years of age. A
further excavation of eight further tombs in the following year by
the same archaeologist yielded skeletons of 5 males, 2 women, one
of whom had a two year old baby buried beside her, and a little girl.
But these findings have never been published.
A recent survey of the cemetery by members of several institutions
from Israel and America has corrected several errors in de Vaux’s
report. The site has six, rather than three different, areas: a north
and south section to the main cemetery; a north, middle and south
finger (or extension); and a north hill. Using both surface survey
counting and ground penetrating radar, the team found a total of
1138 graves and not just one, but fifty-four tombs oriented in an
east-west direction. These latter are probably secondary Bedouin
burials of the last few centuries.
De Vaux had identified the western section of the cemetery as the
most important, noting that only men were buried there; he called
this ‘the main cemetery’. Women and children were buried only in
the extension or eastern section. The recent survey of the tombs,
however, concluded that it is precisely this eastern section that is
the most important, since a zinc coffin was found there. Zinc, being
a rare metal in the ancient world, indicates that an important
person must have been buried there. If this is so, then the middle
finger of the eastern section was primary not secondary as de Vaux
had suggested. The archaeologists who surveyed the cemetery
further bolstered their interpretation by reconstructing the remains
of two walls as part of an original square building. This place, it is
suggested, served as the mourning enclosure of the Qumran
30

community. It was here that burial ceremonies were conducted and
prayers of the dead and eulogies of the funeral procession were
given. This recent survey of the cemetery has indirectly called into
question de Vaux’s marginalization of women and the married
Essenes in his interpretation of the now questionable ‘extension’ of
the cemetery. The married Essenes, and not merely the celibate
males, were integral to the Qumran community.

31

The archaeological site and caves

In his presentation of the occupation at Khirbet Qumran and
cemetery, de Vaux focused on the communal phase of periods I and
II. For him, the Israelite, Roman and Second Revolt phases were
either a preamble or secondary episodes in the history of the site.
He believed that it was during the middle of the second century
BCE that a group of men came to Khirbet Qumran and installed
themselves there. This group of men, as we will discuss
subsequently, is the Qumran community of the Essenes. Before
doing so, however, we need to take a look at the scrolls themselves.

Chapter 3
On scrolls and fragments

Estimates of the number of scrolls found in the caves vary
between 800 and 900 manuscripts. This variance is not due to
the innumeracy of those of us who edit the scrolls, but the nature
of the corpus that we work with. There is not a single, complete
scroll. The Great Isaiah Scroll, containing all sixty-six chapters
of the prophecy of Isaiah, comes closest to being a whole
manuscript with only small damaged sections. The Habakkuk
Pesher, a sectarian biblical interpretation, and the Rule of
the Community from Cave 1, a text prescribing communal
discipline, have also suffered relatively little deterioration over
the years.
The remaining are fragments of original scrolls. Some of them
include substantial portions of the originally undamaged text (e.g.
the Temple Scroll); others one or more columns of writings. At the
one extreme are ‘scrolls’ that are nothing more than individual, tiny
pieces or fragments. There are some 25,000 fragments and the
figure cannot be more precise, because the counting depends upon
the definition of a fragment. Stephen Reed, who catalogued all the
scrolls, rightly posed the question: What is a ‘fragment’? Is it an
intact piece of papyrus or parchment when first recorded by the
editors? What happens when there is subsequent deterioration?
Will a fragment, once intact, now be counted as two or more
pieces?
32

On scrolls and fragments

7. An important scroll interpreting the biblical prophecy of Habakkuk

There is a further complication that impacts on the counting of the
scrolls and this is what may be called the ‘jigsaw question’. Scholars
have often compared the editing of the scrolls to the assembling of a
jigsaw puzzle. In fact, the ‘jigsaw question’ is much more
complicated: we do not have all the pieces of any one jigsaw puzzle;
we do not know how many jigsaw puzzles there were originally; and
we do not have, for many fragments, a picture on the box for
guidance.
33

8. A scroll describing the order and discipline of the community

Let me illustrate the difficulty of identification and assemblage with
an example. Suppose you came across the following tiny fragments
in English:
]very thing that creepeth up[
]s kind: and Go[

And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and the cattle
after their kind and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after
his kind: and God saw that it was good.

That was easy because you have the biblical exemplar with which
you are familiar. What if you came across three other fragments?
]lows Christ[ ]of festival[ ]Jewish holy days[

This is clearly much more difficult. You might suppose that it is
from the New Testament, since ‘Christ’ is mentioned and maybe
from a pericope in the passion narratives during the Jewish festival
of Passover. If so, you would have been badly mistaken as these are
fragments of sentences from Chapter 1 of this book:
almost always follows Christmas or Easter. Of course, this should
not be surprising, since the scrolls are religious documents and are
35

On scrolls and fragments

Those of you who are familiar with the Authorized Version or King
James Version of the English Old Testament may be able to identify
them as fragments from Genesis and even from the first Chapter.
The key word of this identification is likely to have been ‘creepeth’.
It would have been more difficult to identify them had the
fragments been drawn from a modern translation that used a less
distinct English verb like ‘move along the ground’ (New
International Version). The original Genesis 1:25 of the Authorized
Version reads as follows. I have italicized what is preserved in the
fragments:

of particular interest during the annual cycle of festivals, but it is the
Christian, and not Jewish, holy days that are followed.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The reality of editing these tiny fragments is even more complicated
than the second example, because the fragments could belong not
just to one, but two or three different, original texts. An editor, who
is assigned the task of editing them and after careful study, may
decide that the fragments originally belonged to two unrelated
texts. There would be further editorial challenges if the fragments
were once part of two distinct texts of similar literary genre. The
three fragments now become separated and are counted as two
‘scrolls’. The term ‘scroll’ can mean a literal rolled up manuscript or
a short-hand for ‘fragments of an original scroll.’ It is precisely this
‘jigsaw question’ that leaves the counting of the scrolls imprecise.

Editing the scrolls
Faced with these difficulties, the editors of the scrolls separated
individual fragments into groups according to language, content
and handwriting. So, for instance, if there were fifteen fragments
and eight of them contained Hebrew words from the book of
Deuteronomy, then they would be separated from the other seven
fragments that may contain Aramaic or Greek writing. Moreover, if
two fragments have a physical ‘join’ where one edge fits into the
edge of another fragment, then the two are clearly part of the same
original scroll. Note that depending upon what stage of the editorial
process they were catalogued these could be counted as one or two
fragments. Also, copyright protection is not conferred on fragments
that have physical ‘joins’; only the arrangement of discontinuous
fragments can benefit from legal protection. In any case, these
fragments are assembled on to photographic plates that contain
other pieces that are related to each by their script and physical
remains.
However, there could be more than one copy of the book of
Deuteronomy in Hebrew in the collection of fragments. In this
36

One other difficulty is that copyists learned how to write in schools
and scribal traditions and the handwriting of several scribes may
be fairly similar, as in the case of the biblical interpretations of
Isaiah, Hosea and Psalms, though the individuality of the pen
strokes can be detected by a careful study of the personal styles.

Dating of the scrolls
The study of ancient handwriting, called palaeography, can help in
another way. From the very beginning, numerous questions have
been asked about the authenticity and antiquity of the scrolls, their
discovery in the caves, and relationship to Khirbet Qumran. Some
scholars thought that the scrolls were forgeries or had been planted
there by the Bedouins; others pronounced them as JudaeoChristian documents. De Vaux responded to these criticisms by
pointing out that his team of archaeologists and workmen, and not
just the Bedouins, found scrolls or written fragments in each of the
11 caves. They were genuine discoveries and not hoaxes or ‘plants’.
They were ancient manuscripts, and not Judaeo-Christian texts, as
37

On scrolls and fragments

case, editors would gather together those Hebrew fragments of
Deuteronomy that were written by the same scribal hand. The
scrolls, like all ancient manuscripts, were copied out by hand and
the same scribal handwriting can serve as a useful organizing
principle for editing discontinuous fragments. However, an
ancient scribe did not copy just one scroll in his lifetime, so the
recognition of the same handwriting in two fragments does not
necessarily mean that they originally belonged to the same text.
This is not just a theoretical possibility, as the same scribal hand
that copied the Rule of the Community, a text called Testimonia
and the third copy of Samuel from Cave 4 also corrected the text
of the Great Isaiah Scroll. Conversely, a long text, like the
Habakkuk Pesher, was copied by more than one scribe, so the
identification of two different handwritings in the fragments does
not necessarily mean that they originally belonged to two different
scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

established by palaeographical dating of two great authorities,
Eliezer L. Sukenik and W. F. Albright.
The scrolls are not internally dated and a method of dating by
palaeography or the study of ancient hand writing was developed.
The most widely followed typological scheme is that of Frank Cross.
Accordingly, the scrolls can be dated to three periods: archaic (250–
150 BCE), Hasmonaean (150–30 BCE) and Herodian (30 BCE–70
CE). A date, within an accuracy of 25 years, was fixed by aligning an
individual scribal hand along this typological and chronological
continuum. The reliability of this method depended upon the
quality of the internal and external evidence used. Some scholars
have cautioned against Cross’s method of dating, especially in the
assignment of absolute dates to the evidence of the Herodian period
and the degree of accuracy of its dating. After all, did scribes not
have working lives of more than 25 years? Nonetheless, Cross’s
palaeographical typology continues to be widely followed by editors
and scholars.
More recently, the palaeographical dating has been supplemented
by two radiocarbon 14 tests that were conducted in 1990 and 1991.
Basically, the method dates any organic material, like skin and
papyrus, by estimating the half-lives of the degradation of the
radiocarbon isotope (C-14) found in it. In the past, radiocarbon
tests required large amounts of sample and it was unsuitable for the
testing of the scrolls. With the refinement of the method, a
procedure known as the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, it was now
possible to subject the scrolls to radiocarbon test with a minimum
amount of destruction. The results of the two tests have confirmed
that the scrolls are 2,000 year old manuscripts.

Referencing the scrolls
Individual scrolls are referred to in three ways: by name, as for
instance, the Genesis Apocryphon or the War Scroll; by its sigla,
such as 4Q285: 4 = Cave 4; Q = Qumran; and 285 = the inventory
38

number; or by a short descriptive title, 4QJerb : Jer = Jeremiah and
superscript b is the second copy of the biblical book from the cave.
Scrolls can also be designated by the PAM (= Palestine
Archaeological Museum, now renamed the Rockefeller Museum) or
SB (= Shrine of the Book) number, but this usage is restricted to
editors. Almost all of the scrolls have these three cataloguing
references, the Rule of the Community, the Habakkuk Pesher, the
Genesis Apocryphon and the Great Isaiah Scroll being notable
exceptions that lack inventory numbers.

On scrolls and fragments

39

Chapter 4
New light on the
Hebrew Bible

The corpus of scrolls can be divided into those that reflect the
viewpoint of a sect and those that belonged to Judaism generally. Of
the non-sectarian texts, the greatest number belongs to books of the
Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. There are no copies of the New
Testament, unless one considers the tiny Greek fragments from
Cave 7 to be vestiges of these books. The scrolls are copies rather
than autographs or original compositions.
The Old Testament is a Christian designation for the Jewish
Hebrew Bible. The Protestant Old Testament canon (literally ‘rule’
and meaning ‘authoritative list of writings’) has the same books as
the Hebrew Bible, but they are ordered and counted differently.
Jewish tradition categorizes the 24 books into the three categories
of the Torah (5 books), the Prophets (or Nevi’im; 8 books) and the
Writings (or Kethuvim; 11 books), and the entire collection is
known by the acronym Tanak. The Protestant canon totals 39
books, the different enumeration resulting from the counting of
1–2 Samuel, 1–2 Kings, 1–2 Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, and each
of the twelve minor prophet books as separate books. Moreover,
there are four categories of books in the Protestant canon: the
Pentateuch, Historical Books or Former Prophets, Poetry/Wisdom
and Prophets.
Copies of Old Testament or Hebrew Bible books account for about a
40

quarter of all the scrolls, 209 copies according to one tally. They
attest to every single book in the Protestant and Jewish canons,
except for Esther. Nehemiah is likewise unattested among the
scrolls, but since Ezra-Nehemiah is counted as one book in Jewish
tradition and there is a tiny fragment of Ezra, some consider that
not only Ezra but also Nehemiah was preserved in the corpus.

Qumran biblical texts

The Old Testament (OT) or Tanak was written in Hebrew and
Aramaic. This collection of books was not written by one man, nor
did it drop down from heaven as assumed by fundamentalists. It is
not a magical book, but a collection of authoritative texts of
apparently divine origin that went through a human process of
writing and editing. Each book or portion of a book has its own
compositional and textual transmission history. Thus, for instance,
the prophecy of the son of Amoz is divided by scholars into Isaiah
(1–39), Second Isaiah (40–55) and Trito-Isaiah (56–66), originating
from different times and written and edited by named and
unnamed people and scribes.
The dating of the biblical books varies according to the considered
opinion of scholars. Those who are more conservative tend to date
the books earlier, those of a liberal persuasion later. Whether
conservative or liberal, Christian, Jewish or secular, almost all
regard the time of Ezra in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE as vitally
41

New light on the Hebrew Bible

The biblical texts from Qumran shed light on the transmission of
the biblical texts at a critical juncture of history between 250 BCE
and 100 CE. They tell us what the Bible was like before its
standardization. Did Jesus or Paul have the same Old Testament as
we do? Have you ever tried to compare a quotation in the New
Testament with its Old Testament source and found that they do
not say quite the same thing? The Qumran biblical scrolls allow us
an unprecedented glimpse into the fluidity of the biblical text before
its fixation and a scrutiny of the ‘canon’ or authoritative texts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

important. According to biblical tradition, Ezra was a priest and
scribe who was devoted to the study of the law (Ezra 7.6, 10); he
received a document from the Persian king Artaxerxes II Mennon
(404–359 BCE) allowing him to return to the province of Yehud or
Judah with the exiles and the Temple gold and silver; he was
commissioned to teach the law of the Israelite God (Ezra 7.12–26);
he read the law of Moses and his aids helped the people read ‘clearly’
by giving the sense (Neh 8). There are legendary elements in this
depiction of Ezra, but broadly speaking it does indicate a renewal of
the study of the law in the Persian period. Revisionists would date
the biblical texts later to the Hellenistic period, but the majority of
scholars still consider the Persian period as the time when most of
the scriptures, in one form or another, were composed and edited.
In the Persian period the Hebrew language was now becoming
increasingly unfamiliar and Jews, whose vernacular had become
Aramaic, needed translations to help them understand the Mosaic
Law written in the holy tongue. Aramaic is a northwest semitic
language originally spoken by the Aramaeans; it became the official
language of the Persian Empire. The Hollywood blockbuster, The
Passion of the Christ, portrayed Jesus speaking in a form of Aramaic
(and Latin!). The Hebrew Bible reflects this linguistic transition
with passages written in Aramaic (Jeremiah 10.11, Ezra 4.8–6.18,
7.12–26 and Daniel 2.4b-7.28) as well as in Hebrew.
One other important linguistic development is the further shift of
the Jewish vernacular to Greek. In the Hellenistic period, Greek
culture and language came to dominate the Near East and
Alexandrian Jews translated into Greek the five books of Moses as
well as the remaining prophecies and writings. A tale recounts how
Ptolemy II (285–246 BCE) requested a copy of the Jewish Torah to
be translated from Hebrew to Greek and to be deposited in his great
library in Alexandria. Seventy-two elders were dispatched from
Jerusalem and they accomplished their task in seventy two days.
Even though this account from the Letter to Aristeas is far-fetched
and there is variation in Jewish sources on precisely how many
42

translators and days were involved the Greek translation was
designated ‘seventy’, LXX or Septuagint. Sometimes scholars also
use the term ‘Old Greek’ to signify the earliest recoverable form of
the Septuagint.

Antiquity of the biblical texts
Before the discovery of the Qumran scrolls, scholars had to be
satisfied with studying Hebrew biblical manuscripts that date to the
mediaeval period. The Nash Papyrus, dating to the first and second
century BCE, was the only extant exception, although it was not a
biblical text as such but a liturgical anthology of quotations from
Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. The Masoretic Text, as the
mediaeval text was called, is the textus receptus or received text.
English translations available today are based on the Masoretic
Text and most modern ones are translated from the Leningrad
Codex of the St. Petersburg Library in Russia (dating to ca. 1000)
(Figure 9).
The Qumran biblical scrolls attest to the antiquity of the biblical
books. They are approximately one thousand years older than the
43

New light on the Hebrew Bible

The Septuagint has its own textual history; it was not translated
altogether at one time. Moreover, questions have been raised about
the source text or the Vorlage (German for ‘what lies before [the
translator]’). The source text was surely a Hebrew biblical text and
many of the translations corresponded to the Masoretic Text texttype, but in certain books, such as the prophecy of Jeremiah, doubts
were cast about the Masoretic Text Vorlage, since the Greek version
was 14% shorter than the Hebrew and represented a different
arrangement of the pericopes, such as ‘the oracles against foreign
nations’. The Qumran biblical scrolls attest to both the Masoretic
and Septuagintal text-types of the prophecy of Jeremiah in 4QJerc
and 4QJerb, d respectively. In the course of history, the Jewish Greek
scriptures were adopted as the authoritative version of the Old
Testament; they remain so today in the Orthodox Church.

9. The Leningrad Codex, a mediaeval copy of the Hebrew Bible from the
St Petersburg Library

Masoretic Text, dating to between 250 BCE and 100 CE. They are
much closer in time to the composition of the biblical books. This
one thousand year period is also significant because it stretches
back to a time when the biblical texts remained fluid. By about
100 CE all the biblical texts had unified into the proto-Masoretic
Text or proto-Rabbinic text-type and the textual variation was
limited to orthographical differences. Some scholars describe this
terminus as the time of the fixation of the biblical text; others
would prefer to see it as a selection of the Masoretic Text as the
authoritative text over against other text-types. In any case, by
about 100 CE all the biblical manuscripts found in various
locations in the Judaean Desert, not only at Qumran, are
Masoretic Texts.

‘Text-type’ is an important concept that refers to the version of a
particular document or literary composition. Let us say that you are
composing a report or essay on your portable computer; you work
on it for a while and save it on to your hard disk in order to continue
it at a later time. A good practice is to save the document in
successive versions in order to minimize loss in the event of a crash
or corruption of a particular file. Thus, you first save the file as
‘sampledocument.doc’ and having worked on it further save it as
another file called ‘sampledocument2.doc’ and so on. If
‘sampledocument2.doc’ becomes corrupt, then you can return to
‘sampledocument.doc’, having lost only the incremental amount
between the two. Moreover, you can revert to original formulations
and calculations with this electronic paper trail. Each one of these
files will share a common core, but will also be a slightly different
version. If one were to ask which was ‘the original’ text, then the
answer surely depends upon what we mean by the term. The initial
commission of your thoughts to writing would be preserved in
‘sampledocument.doc’. However, if by ‘original’ you mean the copy
that you sent off or submitted, then it would be the final or official
version of the file.
45

New light on the Hebrew Bible

Multiplicity of text-types

The Dead Sea Scrolls

In ancient times, ‘manuscripts’, as the word suggests, were written
and copied out by hand. The production of literary works involved
the compositional and copying stages, with the Qumran scrolls
attesting to the latter. As we know from our own experience of
copying, such a process is susceptible to expansions, contractions
and all manner of scribal errors. For instance, our eyes could skip
from one line to another or from one phrase to another that is either
identical or similar. We could misspell a word or mis-form a letter.
All these human errors contribute to the creation of different texttypes. Other changes are intentional revisions of a text for
ideological and religious reasons or mechanical ones, such as the
stereotype or consistent rendering of one word by another in the
target language.
Before the discovery of the scrolls, there were three previously
known text-types of the Hebrew Bible: the Masoretic Text, the
Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint. The second of these
refers to the Torah of the Samaritan community who consider
themselves descendants of the ancient Northern Kingdom of Israel.
The origins of the Samaritan community is a question of much
debate; some sources hold that they were foreigners (2 Kgs
17.24–34), the indigenous people of Samaria (Ezra 4.4) or a sect
that broke away from Judaism in the Hellenistic period (Josephus
Jewish Antiquities 11.340–345). The Samaritans regard the real
sanctuary of God to be situated on Mount Gerizim and not in
Jerusalem. They still reside today on that holy mountain in Israel
and practise their own traditions. Their version of the Torah is
characterized by expansionist and ideological readings. Strictly
speaking the Samaritan Pentateuch refers only to the first five
books, but the text-type is applied to the rest of the Hebrew Bible
by analogy.
In the years following the discovery of the scrolls, Frank Cross
proposed a local text theory that identified geographical areas with
the three text-types. Accordingly, the Masoretic Text was
representative of the Babylonian, the Samaritan of the Palestinian
46

and the Septuagint of the Egyptian location. Cross classified all the
Qumran biblical scrolls according to one of the three text-types. For
instance, 4QSama was considered a non-Masoretic Text much
closer to the Vorlage of the Old Greek. Yet this text also has affinities
with the Masoretic Text, the so-called proto-Lucianic text (a
revision of the Greek translation), Chronicles and Josephus’s text of
Samuel.

It is now widely recognized that the Qumran biblical scrolls attest
to a greater number of text-types than was previously thought.
The Masoretic Text is surely an important text-type; it may even
be argued that it was the dominant text-type, but there were
several others that cannot be discounted. Some scholars, usually
of the more conservative position, continue to hold the Masoretic
Text as the text of the Hebrew Bible and all other text-types as
translational, interpretative or recensional derivatives, even
though they do not exhibit any of the relevant textual
characteristics. This ‘Masoretic Text fundamentalism’, as it is
called, prejudges the new evidence of the Qumran scrolls with
unwarranted convictions.
47

New light on the Hebrew Bible

It became evident that the Qumran biblical texts could not be so
pigeon-holed. A rival view was advanced by Emanuel Tov which
posited a multiplicity of biblical text-types. Tov preferred to call
them textual ‘groups’, but the more common designation is ‘texttypes’. There were not just three text-types, but at least five or more
groups of texts. Tov provided the following statistical data on the
textual characteristics of the Qumran biblical scrolls: 35% were
proto-Masoretic Text; 15% were pre-Samaritan; 5% were
Septuagintal; 35% were non-aligned; 20% were texts written in the
Qumran practice. Note that the total of 110% is due to the double
counting of some of the texts in categories 1, 4, and 5, and category 4
is a ‘catch all’ for non-aligned and independent texts. Moreover,
category 5 is a controversial group based upon the scribal practice
of the Qumran community; not everyone agrees that this is a
text-type.

Some variant readings

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Let us take a brief look at four examples of how the Qumran biblical
texts contribute to variant readings in specific passages from the
Hebrew Bible.

10. A copy of Samuel that preserves the missing paragraph of 1 Samuel
10–11

The Nahash Episode of 4QSamuela
This is the best known of the variants that have appeared in the
Qumran scrolls. At the beginning of 1 Samuel 11, there is an
account of Nahash the Ammonite besieging the Israelite town of
Jabesh-gilead. In the books of Samuel, scholars have identified
two literary strands, an early source that considered the
establishment of the kingship as divinely ordained and a late
source that was anti-monarchy. The Revised Standard Version of
the end of chapter 10 and the beginning of chapter 11 read as
follows:
27

But some worthless fellows said, ‘‘How can this man [ie Saul] save

us?’’ And they despised him, and brought him no present. But he
held his peace. 11:1 Then Nahash the Ammonite went up and
besieged Jabesh gilead; and all the men of Jabesh said to Nahash,
‘‘Make a treaty with us, and we will serve you.’’ 2 But Nahash the
48

Ammonite said to them, ‘‘On this condition I will make a treaty with
you, that I gouge out all your right eyes, and thus put disgrace upon
all Israel.’’ 3 The elders of Jabesh said to him, ‘‘Give us seven days
respite that we may send messengers through all the territory of
Israel. Then, if there is no one to save us, we will give ourselves up to
you.’’

The first copy of Samuel from Cave 4 provides a paragraph (in
italics) that is missing in the Masoretic Text.
27

But some worthless fellows said, ‘‘How can this man save us?’’

They despised him and brought him no present. But he held his
peace. Now Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had been grievously
oppressing the Gadites and the Reubenites. He would gouge out the
right eye of each of them and would not grant Israel a deliverer. No
one was left of the Israelites across the Jordan whose right eye
Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had not gouged out. But there were
seven thousand men who had escaped from the Ammonites and had
49

New light on the Hebrew Bible

The transition between the two chapters is jarring. Chapter 10
depicts the prophet Samuel’s reluctant assent to the wishes of the
people and his appointment of Saul as the first king of Israel (v. 19).
At v. 27, it was clear that not everyone agreed with the elevation of
Saul as it reported that some, disparaged as ‘worthless fellows’,
despised him. In 11.1 the narrative switched rather abruptly to an
account of Nahash the Ammonite laying siege on Jabesh-gilead in
the transjordan. We are not told who Nahash was and why he
decided to surround the town and cut off its supplies. We do not
know why the terms of the treaty are so harsh; some biblical
commentators see this requirement of gouging out the right eye as
evidence of Nahash’s barbarity. Rather sportingly, so the narrative
goes, Nahash allowed a seven days respite, as the elders had
requested, to find a deliverer. Saul, the newly anointed king,
responded to the cry for help, raised up a military force and
slaughtered the Ammonites (11.11), thus proving himself to be an
able leader.

entered Jabesh-gilead.

NRS

11:1 About a month later, Nahash the

Ammonite went up and besieged Jabesh-gilead . . . .

The Dead Sea Scrolls

It explains that Nahash was the king of the Ammonites; whenever a
foreign king is introduced for the first time in the books of Samuel
and Kings, his full title is given (e.g., Agag the king of the
Amalekites in 1 Sam 15.8 or Ben Hadad king of Aram in 2 Kgs
6.24). It provides the reason for Nahash’s otherwise unprovoked
attack on the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead, namely that they were
harbouring 7,000 fugitives from the tribes of Gad and Reuben.
Nahash stipulated the condition of the treaty with the same horrific
form of mutilation that he meted out against his arch-enemies.
Gouging out eyes and dismemberment, repugnant to our
sensibilities, were standard punishments on rebels, enemies and
violators of treaties in the Ancient Near East.
It is likely that these lines dropped out of the Masoretic Text by
the scribal error of the eye skipping from one paragraph break to
another, both reading ‘Nahash’. In the account of Nahash and
Jabesh-gilead in Jewish Antiquities 6.68, it is evident that
Josephus had a text that contained this missing paragraph. Some
scholars are so convinced that this originally belonged to the
biblical text that they have reinserted the paragraph into the
English translation of 1 Samuel. The letters ‘NRS’ in superscript
just before verse 11.1 indicate that I have cut and pasted this in
from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible published in
1990.

11. A fragment of 4QGen-Exoda of Genesis 22 naming Mount Moriah as
‘Elohim Yireh’
50

Mount Moriah in Genesis 22.14
The above example is considered unusual or exceptional in
including a whole missing paragraph. However, even the variant of
a single word can be highly significant, depending upon what it is.
Consider the name of the mountain on which Isaac was nearly
sacrificed which according to the Masoretic Text is named ‘Yahweh
(or pronounced Adonai) Yireh’, often translated as ‘the Lord will
provide or see to it’.

There are certain cases in which man can be convinced that it
cannot be God whose voice he thinks he hears; when the voice
commands him to do what is opposed to the moral law . . .

The

myth of the sacrifice of Abraham can serve as an example: Abraham,
at God’s command, was going to slaughter his own son – the poor
child in his ignorance even carried the wood. Abraham should have
said to this supposed divine voice: that I am not to kill my beloved
son is quite certain; that you who appear to me as God, I am not
certain, nor can I ever be, even if the voice thunders from the sky’
(in ‘The Disputes between the Philosophical and Theological
Faculties’).

In the Genesis narrative, Abraham bound Isaac, thus the name
‘aqedah’ or binding, and was about to slaughter him when an angel
of the Lord stopped him in the 11th hour. Caravaggio’s painting of
the Aqedah hanging in the Uffizi Museum, Florence, portrays the
expression of utter terror in Isaac’s face and the ambivalent
51

New light on the Hebrew Bible

The Aqedah or binding of Isaac, as it is called, is one of the most
moving accounts of human drama in the Hebrew Bible. Abraham’s
wife, Sarah, had been childless until God opened her womb, made
her conceive and give birth to Isaac (Genesis 21). At the beginning
of chapter 22 and for reasons unknown God tested Abraham and
commanded him to take his only beloved son Isaac to the land of
Moriah and to offer him there as a holocaust or whole burnt
offering. The theological problem posed by such a command for
moderns was articulated by Immanuel Kant:

The Dead Sea Scrolls

determination in Abraham’s eyes. In the biblical story Abraham was
commended for his faithfulness as a ‘fearer of God (elohim)’ (v. 12)
and a ram was sacrificed in his son’s stead. The climax of this
episode is the naming of the place by Abraham as ‘Yahweh Yireh’
with an explanatory gloss that to this day ‘on the mountain of
Yahweh he may be seen’ (or RSV ‘it shall be provided’). 2 Chronicles
3 interpreted the place to be the Temple site stating that Solomon
had built the house of God on Mount Moriah where the Lord
appeared to David his father (v. 1). The tradition remains today with
Mount Moriah being identified with the Temple esplanade and the
very rock on which Isaac was to be sacrificed housed under the
Dome of the Rock. It was also on this rock, according to Muslim
tradition, that Muhammad ascended to heaven on his nightly
journeys (Quran, sura 17).
In 4QGen-Exoda (4Q1), the name of the place is given as ‘Elohim
Yireh’ or ‘God will provide’ (figure 22); the latter half of the verse is
unfortunately mutilated. This reading uses the more generic name
of ‘Elohim’ or God rather than ‘Yahweh’, the personal name of the
God of Israel. All the main witnesses attest to ‘Yahweh’, agreeing
with ‘the angel of Yahweh’ in vv. 11 and 15. It is possible that the
original name of the place was ‘Elohim Yireh’, corresponding to
‘God (elohim) will provide’ in v. 8 and ‘a fearer of God (elohim) are
you’ v. 12, and it was adapted by J or the Yahwist (the Pentateuch is
compiled according to several documents) to reflect his theology.

Goliath’s height
According to 1 Samuel 17, the Philistines had a champion who
caused great fear in King Saul and the people of Israel. The
Masoretic Text reported that he was a giant of six cubits and a span
or ca. 3 metres (or 9 foot 9 inches) (v. 4). The main witnesses of the
Septuagint and 4QSama , however, provide measurements of a man
who though he was tall, was not of gigantic proportions at four
cubits and a span or ca. 2m (or 6 foot 9 inches) (figure 21). Many
professional basketball players would be taller than Goliath!

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New light on the Hebrew Bible

12. David and Goliath in battle

‘Those who wait upon the Lord’ (Isaiah 40.31)
One of the well loved verses in Isaiah is the assurance that the
author of ‘Second Isaiah’ gives to the Israelite exiles of a renewal of
their strength. The passage was celebrated in the re-creation of the
life of Eric Liddell, the Scottish missionary, in the academy award
winning film Chariots of Fire. Liddell, the rugby and sprinting
star, who refused to compromise his Christian principles by
running on the Sabbath in the 1924 Olympic Games, read out in
church this passage from Isaiah prior to his race. The translation is
best known in the Authorized Version or King James Version
rendering:

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31

But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they

shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be
weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

Had Liddell been reading the Great Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1,
however, the comparison between his running and the flying of
eagles would have been spoilt as 1QIsaa col. 34 ends with ‘they shall
walk, but not fly’.

Variants in ancient sources

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The textual diversity of the biblical text is also reflected in ancient
biblical interpretations both at Qumran and elsewhere. Here are
two examples.

1QpHab
IQpHab is a sectarian biblical commentary characterized by a
verse-by-verse explication of the first two chapters of the prophecy
of Habakkuk. The commentary follows the general pattern of
biblical quotation, introductory formula and comment. In column
11, lines 9–15, the pesherist or sectarian commentator interpreted
Habakkuk 2.16 in the following way.
You have filled yourself with ignominy more than with glory. Drink
also, and stagger! The cup of the Lord’s right hand shall come round
to you and shame shall come on your glory (Habakkuk 2.16).
Interpreted (pishro = pesher + suffix), this concerns the Priest whose
ignominy was greater than his glory. For he did not circumcise the
foreskin of his heart, and he walked in the ways of drunkenness that
he might quench his thirst. But the cup of the wrath of God shall
confuse him, multiplying his . . . and the pain of . . . .

The biblical quotation of Habakkuk 2.16 in this section of 1QpHab
varies from the same verse found in the Masoretic Text; the
difference lies in the second verb. The following is a more literal
translation of the phrases than the one given above:
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1QpHab

Drink also you and stagger

and
Masoretic Text Drink also you and be uncircumcised

1 Peter
I Peter in the New Testament is a letter of encouragement written to
Gentile Christians in the second half of the first century CE. It
quotes several passages from the Old Testament to support its
message, one of which is Isaiah 40.6–8 which is cited in Peter
1.24–25:
All flesh is as grass,
and all its glory as the flower of the field,
the grass withers and the flower falls off,
but the word of the Lord remains for ever.

1 Peter quoted Isa 40.6–8 from the shorter, Septuagint text. The
Masoretic Text is longer with an additional verse 7 that reads: ‘grass
withers, a flower fades, because the spirit of the Lord breathes upon
it. Surely ‘‘grass’’ is ‘‘the people’’ ’. The difference between the two
can be explained by the scribal error of parablepsis, the eye skipping
from the beginning of v. 7 to the subsequent v. 9 (both starting with
‘grass withers’). In the Great Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1, the first
scribe copied the shorter version of Isa 40.6–8; a second scribe
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New light on the Hebrew Bible

There are two readings, one about inebriation and tottering while
the other is an odd linking of drinking with the preservation of
one’s foreskin. In the original Hebrew texts there is a lexical play
on the verbs used. When we read the biblical quotation and
sectarian comment together it is clear that while he cited one
version of Habakkuk 2.16 (also reflected in the Septuagint), the
pesherist also did know the other Masoretic Text reading: he
condemned the ‘wicked priest’ for not having circumcised ‘the
foreskin of his heart’.

corrected the passage by inserting the missing verse 7 between the
lines and down the side of the margins.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The canon of the Qumran community
The Qumran scrolls have shed light on the canon of authoritative
scriptures in the Second Temple period, although this topic has yet
to be fully explored. The issue of canon is related to, but also distinct
from, the issue of textual diversity. The canonical question refers to
what books were considered authoritative, whereas the issue of
textual diversity refers to which version of a book was considered
canonical. Thus the Jewish and Protestant canons accept the
Masoretic Text version of Jeremiah as authoritative, whereas the
Orthodox Church the Septuagint of the same prophecy which, as we
have mentioned, is not only shorter but also arranges its pericopes
differently. The Qumran community, if their ‘library’ holding is
anything to go by, seems to have tolerated both versions of
Jeremiah.
We do not know whether the Qumran community held to a fixed list
of authoritative scriptures or what biblical books would have been
included in it if they did. Did it hold to a bipartite or tripartite
division of the Hebrew Bible? Much recent discussion on the canon
has centered on a reference in 4QMMT, section C, line 10, ‘the book
of Moses, the books of the prophets and in David.’ Apparently, this
phrase evidences the recognition of the tripartite division of the
Hebrew Bible into the Torah, Prophets and Psalms (or Writings).
Such a reference, it seems to me, must be accompanied by a
complementary examination of the terms rather than supposing
that we know what they mean. What did the Qumran community
understand by the ‘torah of Moses’, ‘the books of the prophets’ and
‘in David’?
My investigation of this reading in the context of the sectarian
community’s own understanding of authoritative scriptures
concluded that ‘the book of Moses’ was likely to have been a
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reference to the Torah or Pentateuch; ‘the prophetical books’
signified a loose collection of prophetical writings rather than the
eight books from Joshua to the Twelve Minor Prophets; and ‘in
David’ was not a reference to the Psalms or the Writings, but the
‘deeds of David’. When the sectarian community refers to the
Psalms, it uses the titles ‘the songs of David’ or ‘the book of Psalms’,
and not ‘in David’. There is no evidence of a collection of ‘Writings’
in the Qumran scrolls.

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New light on the Hebrew Bible

The scrolls have illuminated an important period of history prior to
the fixation of the biblical text to the Masoretic Text. Before
approximately 100 CE, there was a greater diversity of biblical texts
than was previously recognized. This diversity should not be
exaggerated. The text-type that was to become the received text of
the Masoretic Text was well represented among the Qumran
biblical scrolls, but it was certainly not the only text that was
available or read by the sectarian and other communities in the late
Second Temple period.

Chapter 5
Who owned the scrolls?

The manuscripts are commonly called the Qumran scrolls, because
it is believed that they belonged to the community of Essenes who
settled at Khirbet Qumran. The Qumran-Essene hypothesis, as it is
known, is still the model for explaining the origins of the Dead Sea
scrolls, but it is not without its problems. Over the years, alternative
views have been proposed to challenge one or more aspects of the
theory. Nonetheless the Qumran-Essene hypothesis remains the
most plausible.

The Qumran-Essene theory
From the outset it is important to realize that there are three
distinct groups of evidence: the scrolls found in the eleven caves, the
archaeological site of Khirbet Qumran, and the description of the
community of the Essenes in ancient historical sources. The
identification of the scrolls as belonging to members that lived at
Qumran who moreover formed the sectarian community of the
Essenes is a scholarly construct that can be challenged.
We must again start our discussion with Roland de Vaux’s
presentation in Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls. According to
him the communal phase of Periods Ia, Ib and II corresponded to
the occupation of the archaeological site by the Essenes. Initially
only a few Essenes settled there, but by 100 BCE the community
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had enlarged as new members joined the fledgling group. This
community existed more or less continuously, apart from a thirty
year hiatus after the earthquake and fire, for the next two hundred
years. We have already discussed the problems connected with de
Vaux’s identification of Period Ia and the abandonment of the site.
What we want to do here is to ask the question, How did he know
that Essenes lived there?

The Essenes: practice and belief

They followed some peculiar habits and practices that made them
distinctive among ancient Jews. They abstained from anointing
themselves with oil, a common practice in ancient Judaism. They
wore white garments and immersed themselves in a daily
purificatory bath before meal times and after their toilet. Though
these ritual baths have some superficial similarities to Christian
practice, the religious meaning attached to them is quite different
from baptism. They were done for purity reasons and not for the
remission of sins. The Essenes avoided excretions on the Sabbath
and during the rest of the w