Topic 10 of 33 - Your Place in the Learning Journey
The Dead Sea Scrolls
In the spring of 1947, a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad edh-Dhib threw a stone into a cave near the Dead Sea and heard pottery break. What he had found would prove to be the most significant archaeological discovery in biblical studies in the 20th century: the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of roughly 900 manuscripts hidden in eleven caves near the site of Qumran, probably by a Jewish community that fled when Roman armies approached in 68 CE.
The scrolls contain three categories of material. First, manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible - every book except Esther is represented, with the Great Isaiah Scroll being the most complete and spectacular example. These manuscripts predate the previously oldest Hebrew Bible manuscripts by roughly a thousand years and have confirmed with remarkable accuracy the fidelity of the medieval Masoretic text while also revealing that multiple Hebrew text traditions existed in the Second Temple period. Second, sectarian documents - rules, hymns, biblical commentaries, and theological texts produced by the community itself, giving us a window into a Jewish sect otherwise known only from hostile outside descriptions. Third, previously unknown Jewish writings that were not included in any biblical canon.
The community that produced the scrolls is widely identified with the Essenes, a Jewish sect described by Josephus, Philo, and Pliny the Elder. They appear to have been a priestly group that withdrew from Jerusalem in protest against what they regarded as the corrupt Hasmonean high priesthood, settled in the desert, and awaited the imminent end of the age in which God would destroy the wicked and vindicate the righteous. Their biblical commentaries use a method called pesher interpretation - reading prophetic texts as coded references to their own community and time - a method visible also in the New Testament.
The scrolls have transformed our understanding of Second Temple Judaism and of the New Testament's background. They show that ideas previously thought to be distinctively Christian - a new covenant, a community of the spirit, a teacher of righteousness, imminent eschatological expectation - were already present in at least some Jewish circles before Jesus. They illuminate the diversity of Jewish thought in the period and remind us that early Christianity emerged from a Judaism far more varied and creative than later polemics on either side suggested.