Two thousand years old. That’s hard to wrap a mind around.
Two thousand dollars still represents a lot of money to most people. But 2,000 years?
The Springdale Rotary Club presented 2,000 years of history to its members with a display of artifacts from cuneiform writing to a microfiche piece containing the Bible carried into space. “From caves to cosmos,” said Robert Duke, an associate professor of biblical studies at Azusa (Calif.) Pacific University and a Rotarian, who spoke Monday.
Representatives of the university brought pieces of an exhibit called “Treasures of the Bible and Holy Lands: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Beyond.” Among the collection were fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls — no bigger than a scrap of wrapping paper left behind after unwrapping Christmas presents, two out of three dark and unreadable. But they were 2,000 years old!
“The caves were sealed for 2,000 years, and a shepherd boy — as boys will do — threw stones into the cave and heard the crashing of jars,” Duke explained.
“Before the discovery in 1947, no one cared about the remains until they found the scrolls,” he continued. “When the Bedouins realized they were worth a lot of money, it became a race to see who could collect the most documents — the archaeologists or the Bedouins. The Bedouins won.”
In turn, Bedouins sold their artifacts to antiquities dealers who sold them to private individuals and groups. The artifacts shown here in Springdale came from the Bedouins, Duke said.
The exact content of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been available to the public for study only in the last 25 years.
After the discovery and recovery of the documents, they remained mysterious as an elite group of scientists worked to preserve the pieces and play a match-game by comparing handwriting on the pieces, Duke said.
In the early 1990s, the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., opened a microfiche collection of the scrolls. “It took an amazing amount of patience and time,” Duke said.
Azusa Pacific was able to buy pieces of the scrolls for study, and faculty took several steps in their research: transcription of the Hebrew; translation to English; text-critical analysis, which compared it to all other known manuscripts; and a summary report in which scientists presented their thinking on the importance of this piece. The carbon dating of the scrolls placed them from the 2nd and 3rd centuries B.C. — which matches the paleontological age — making the pieces the earliest readings of their type, Duke said.
“Our ‘homework’ for the manuscripts was to see if variants exist between the scroll pieces and other versions we know exist,” Duke said. A common discrepancy was use of a proper name versus a pronoun. Or the person who “was writing them by the light of an oil lamp” inverted letters or even read the wrong word when he was transcribing, Duke said.
Duke and other scientists surmise the scrolls were created and left — or even hidden — in the hills above Qumran by a Jewish sect known as the Essenes.
“The Essenes are a group that literally abandoned Jerusalem, it seems, in protest … against the way the temple was being run,” reads a commentary on the website of the PBS newscast “Frontline,” written by L. Michael White, a religious studies professor at the University of Texas. “So here’s a group that went out in the desert to prepare the way of the Lord, following the commands, as they saw it, of the prophet Isaiah. And they go to the desert to get away from what they see to be the worldliness of Jerusalem and the worldliness of the temple.”
The Essene Jews believed they were the heirs of God’s chosen children, guardians of divine teaching. Their isolation grew as protection from evilness they believed lived in the world. The caves at Qumran might have been a place of spiritual retreat, Duke suggested. Or, scholars think, the Romans burned the town in A.D. 68, and the scrolls might have been hidden the caves for safekeeping.
“The third major type of material found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, though, in some ways, is the most interesting insight into the life of the community that lived there,” White wrote. “This material includes their own sectarian writings — that is, their rules of life … their prayer book. Included then, is the book of the rule of the community or sometimes called ‘The Manual of Discipline,’ which talks about how one goes about getting into the community. The rules for someone who wants to be pure and a part of the elect community.”
Duke got the opportunity to study in Jerusalem and even participate in an excavation at the Qumran caves. At that point, historians were curious if the items found in the caves were linked to the remains of the excavated community of Qumran below.
“We found Roman sandal nails from the settlement to the caves,” Duke said. “So those connect the sites. The community existed because the caves existed, and the scrolls existed because the community existed.”
LAURINDA JOENKS IS A FEATURES REPORTER AT THE MORNING NEWS AND HAS LIVED IN SPRINGDALE SINCE 1990.