Summary: Visiting the archaeological site of the ruins of Qumran is like being transported back to the time of Jesus. The examination of the history and controversies involved with the Dead Sea scrolls is continued in this second half of a 2-part series.
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever. – Isaiah 40:8 (KJV)
Dead Sea Scrolls Online
In 2011 the Israeli Museum, in cooperation with the Internet firm Google, made the complete scrolls available online. In its possession, among others, are the large Isaiah scroll and the Habakkuk Commentary from Cave 1. The digitization cost Google 5 million U.S. dollars. Since 2012, high resolution digital photographs of thousands of fragments have also been made available. The unbelievably expensive project is partly financed by the American-Jewish Leon Levy Foundation with 10 million dollars.
At first, there were over 4,000 scans of photographs made by the coworkers of the international scroll teams in the 1950s. To these were added over 1,000 photos, which were made for the digitization project in a photo laboratory built for the project. In 2014 a further 10,000, and last December another 17,000 digital photos were downloaded. Now the Qumran texts can be studied in this freely open digital virtual library.
Upon the invitation of Pnina Shor, the chief conservator of the Qumran scrolls, I was recently allowed to visit the strictly private laboratory of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Only five conservators from Russia are allowed to work on the fragile documents.
At the beginning of the research work, the fragments were taped together and pressed between glass plates. This is not beneficial for the fragments, according to present knowledge. Thus, the tiny fragments were painstakingly cleaned and treated so they will last for the next centuries. The women who have been doing this work for almost 20 years deserve our highest respect. In this way the valuable fragments of the Bible will be preserved for the future.
The scrolls from Cave 1 (2 Isaiah scrolls, War Scroll, the Habakkuk Commentary, Songs of Praise Scroll, Manual of Discipline, Genesis Apocryphon), as well as the Temple Scroll from Cave 11, were bought by Hebrew University, i.e. the state of Israel, and published shortly afterward. They are today in a specially built museum, the Shrine of the Book, in full view of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and are one of the magnets that draw people there.
The museum is made in the form of a clay jar lid and is all in white. This color symbolically portrays the owners of the scrolls, who call themselves “sons of light.” Opposite this is a gigantic black stone, which symbolizes the “sons of darkness.” The whole thing is an architectural implementation of the War Scroll, which speaks of the end-times battle of the sons of light against the sons of darkness.
The legal situation is complicated with the scrolls found after the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. Qumran, as well as the northern part of the Dead Sea, was now in the Jordan-occupied part of the Holy Land. Thus, the findings were in the Jordanian Antiquities Department, which assembled the aforementioned international scrolls team and had the Rockefeller Museum (not far from the Garden Tomb) work on the scrolls. Only in 1967 did these fragments fall into the hands of Israelis through the Six-Day War.
Correcting Wrong Theories
The finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls is the greatest archaeological sensation of our century. They represent the oldest of the existing Jewish literature and illuminate the time in which Jesus lived. Thus, the research today can reconstruct the time in which Jesus Christ lived far more accurately. You have to realize how Jewish the roots of the Christian faith are, but also how accurately the Biblical texts have been passed down over the centuries. Secret information about Jesus, Paul or the early church is nowhere to be found in any of the Qumran texts. Yet the theological significance of the Qumran texts for the understanding of the New Testament is enormous.
An example of this is: it was usually supposed that the Messiah was not described as the “Son of God” in early Judaism, while this is often the case in the New Testament. This is the Gentile-Greek influence. Here the discovery of the Qumran text 4Q246 (fragment 246 from Qumran Cave 4) demanded a change in that way of thinking, for the most important text passage of this Aramaic commentary on the Book of Daniel from 150 BC says, “Son of God shall he be called, and Son of the Most High.” This reminds us strongly of the words of the angel to Mary, “He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest…therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:32-35).
Therefore, Professor Rainer Riesner rightly concludes: “The Qumran fragment 4Q246 shows that at an important point in Luke’s history of the birth of Jesus, the language is not Gentile-Greek but Palestinian-Jewish.” Theological knowledge existed at the latest in the 2nd century BC that the Messiah must be the Son of God, just as the New Testament and our Lord Jesus testifies.
A second example is: with the background of the Qumran texts, we see how radical and sensational Jesus’ message was even at that time. When the Lord Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that we must love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), this was contrary to the opinion of the pious people of Qumran, who even made an oath once a year to hate the “sons of darkness” (Manual of Discipline).
And when the Lord Jesus makes it clear that the “Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27), this shows the large gap from the Essenes, who were not even allowed to empty their bowels on the Sabbath. A comparison between the Qumran scrolls and the New Testament shows how new and liberating Jesus’ message of the saving love of God was for His time and still is today.
Who Lived in Qumran?
Since the beginning of the research, the issue of who lived in Qumran has been passionately discussed. The majority of the experts see in Qumran a settlement of the Essenes, one of the Jewish religious groups which are described in the ancient sources of Philo, Josephus and Plinius. A German TV channel named Terra X, particularly popularized the thesis that Qumran was merely an agricultural settlement and that the scrolls came from the library of Jerusalem. The texts and the settlement had nothing to do with the Essenes.
The findings showed a completely different picture, however. The ceramic findings in Qumran and the ceramics from the caves are identical, and Caves 7-9 can only be reached by going through the settlement of Qumran. Caves 4a, 4b and 5 lie on the dry plateau directly opposite the settlement. The inhabitants of Qumran must have been the possessors of the concealed texts, therefore.
Many of the Qumran texts are very critical of the temple cult. It is striking that the pro-Hasmonean books of the Maccabees are missing. The choice of the place in the desert is from Isaiah 40:3, which is quoted twice in the Manual of Discipline, “In the desert prepare the way of the Lord!” In 1996 a clay shard was discovered with writing on it with the term jachad (= “commune”), an expression known from the Qumran texts. In Qumran text 4Q477, a member of the jachad was scolded by a supervisor.
The Manual of Discipline (1QS) offers rules and a punishment catalog for the living together of a community. The high concentration of ritual baths, which every visitor saw first, and many buried depots with animal bones, which were impure according to the Temple Scroll, show that the inhabitants had a marked interest in religious purity. All this goes best with what we know of the Essenes.
In 68 AD Qumran was destroyed by the Romans, and the scrolls were hidden in the caves by the inhabitants shortly before the Romans came. This is why no scrolls were found at the excavations in Qumran. Today, there are a number of alternative answers to the question of who lived in Qumran.
Through the examination of the ink on a fragment of the Songs of Praise Scroll (1GH), the alternative theory 2009 was finally refuted. In the ancient world the ink had to be mixed with water directly before using it. The chemical examination of the trace elements showed such a high concentration of bromine as you would only find in the water of the Dead Sea. So, the Songs of Praise Scroll must have been written in Qumran. Moreover, the linen which was used to seal the clay jars was impregnated with bitumen from the Dead Sea.
Not all the texts were written in Qumran, however. The writing that dated back to the time before 100 BC (such as the large Isaiah scroll, for instance) must have “master copies” that were brought with them at the founding of the Qumran settlement. Fragments were apparently also found in Qumran itself, as professor James Charlesworth of Princeton University confirmed. In interviews that he had with the Bedouins who had participated in the excavations in the 1950s, they had told him that the daily wage of $1 was paid. The scroll fragments discovered in Qumran had not been given to excavations leaders but sold for $20 and more.
Thus, the best interpretation so far for the settlement is that Qumran was the center and that in the writings one can see the heritage of the Essenes. Professor Rainer Riesner also shares this view, and especially Professor Claus-Hunno Hunzinger, the only German researcher on the scroll team. The new theories were merely a minority opinion in the scientific debate, even if programs like Terra X paint another picture.
Conclusion
Anyone who views the ruins of Qumran on the Dead Sea today is very enthusiastic about the excavation, because the archaeological site transports visitors directly back to the time of the Lord Jesus. “The stones are beginning to cry out,” and one can understand ancient Jewish life in the ruins, for instance, by looking at the ritual washbasin in which the Essenes had to wash daily. The valuable scrolls in the Shrine of the Book are admired every year by thousands of museum visitors. This sensational archaeological finding reminds us impressively of the word of the prophet Isaiah in 40:8, “the grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever.”
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TOP PHOTO: Ruins of Qumran. (credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
NOTE: Not every view expressed by scholars contributing Thinker articles necessarily reflects the views of Patterns of Evidence. We include perspectives from various sides of debates on biblical matters so that readers can become familiar with the different arguments involved. – Keep Thinking!
