There were a lot of news stories about this subject last week, and I did not see a diary here. I thought some might want greater understanding of what happened, so here it is.
I have been around here for a long time and some people know who I am and the area in which I do my work of research and teaching. I do not do direct, primary research on the “Dead Sea Scrolls,” but they are within the orbit of my research. More precisely, I am not involved in the work of curating, identifying, and deciphering them, but I use the results of those who do this work in my own research on the history and theology of ancient Israelite literature.
The term “Dead Sea Scrolls” is popular and sexy, but can be misleading. Several large caches of ancient manuscripts were found in caves near the Dead Sea in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. At the time, this was in the territory of the nation called Jordan. There have been other discoveries in the broader region since then, none as large as these on their own. It is probably better to refer to all of these collectively as the “Scrolls from the Judean Desert.” One of the reasons this term works well is that the likely time period for when these scrolls were placed in the locations where they were found was the first century of the Common Era, when this territory was part of the Roman province of Judea. I used to use the phrase “hidden in the caves,” but do not any more. This implies that we know the motives of those who put them there, but we don’t. The likely time of their placement was one of great disruption, that included the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Roman army in the year 70 C. E. The scrolls were placed in the caves, but we do not know if the reason was to hide them. Some of the scrolls were 200 or more years old when they were put there, so there is one hypothesis that they were too worn to be usable, so they were being prepared for burial, as was a common custom for sacred books in those days. The Roman army would have come right through that area at least once, pursuing the Jewish persons who took refuge at Masada, which is not far away on the shore of the Dead Sea, so hiding them is also a reasonable possibility. Because of this uncertainty, I prefer to say simply that they were “placed in the caves.”
The content of the scrolls is difficult to explain, because it consists of different types of literature. I will use my three-bucket scheme here:
1. Some of the scrolls are manuscripts of books that became part of the Bible. For example, the most famous scroll corresponds the biblical book called Isaiah. It is a nearly complete scroll, and is housed in the museum in Jerusalem known as the Shrine of the Book. The scrolls in this category, most of which are fragmentary, constitute our oldest manuscripts of these books. If all of the biblical fragments are combined, it is possible to produce about one-third of what is now the Tanak of Judaism or the Old Testament of Christianity.
2. Some of the scrolls are manuscripts of literary works from Second Temple Judaism that did not end up in the limited collections that we refer to as the Bible in its various forms, such as the Genesis Apocryphon or the Testament of Levi. In some cases these are the only available manuscripts of such books. Two of the most important works in this regard are the ones known as 1 Enoch and Jubilees. Both of these works are included within the Old Testament of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but this is the only place they have been preserved. Therefore, the only complete versions of these books are the Ethiopic language. It is possible, therefore, to consider them in category 1 above, but their representation in canonical collections is very limited. The most important thing about finding them there is that the significance of these two books within Second Temple Judaism was uncertain. But the evidence of a dozen or more manuscripts of each among the Dead Sea Scrolls assures us that they were very important parts of the literary world of Second Temple Judaism.
3. Several large scrolls appear to have been composed by the community that likely placed the scrolls in the caves, and they explain the beliefs and practices of that community. These include the Community Rule and The War Scroll. The most popular hypothesis about the origin of the scrolls of the scrolls is that they were produced by the group that the first century historian, Josephus describes as the Essenes. Further, many of the scrolls, including these sectarian ones, were written at the site known as Qumran, an apparent communal settlement very close to the main cluster of caves. There is no hard evidence supporting this Essene-Qumran hypothesis, but many see enough circumstantial evidence to use it as a working assumption.
The famous “finding” story of the Dead Sea Scrolls has not been documented. A shepherd boy was passing time by throwing rocks into the cave, heard breaking pottery, and climbed in to investigate. He sold the scrolls, most made of leather, to a shoemaker who started using them to make sandals before somebody realized what they were. Bits and pieces of this might be true for some of the scrolls, but it is more important to recognize that the “provenance” of many is uncertain. “Provenance” is a technical term in archaeology that has two important aspects. First, exactly where and when was an object found? In modern, legitimate archaeology detailed records are produced for any significant find. The gold standard is for an object to be found “in-situ,” that is in the location where it was last used and left behind centuries ago. The layer of a dig in which an object is found can be the most important clue as to its age. Second, if an object has been transported, sold, and bought, then customs documents and bills of sale should be able to establish a clear chain of evidence. This would insure, for example that an artifact has never been involved in acts of looting or smuggling. The desire for any object displayed in a museum is that it has a “clean provenance,” verifying its authenticity While the very large intact scrolls have a fairly certain identity, the same cannot be said for small fragments. The famous Isaiah scroll, for example has been analyzed in many ways, and has been determined to be a little more than 2000 years old. It would be nearly impossible to fake. Where would one get a blank scroll of that age on which to write a forgery. Small fragments on the other hand would not be difficult to fake. Antiquities dealers have trimmed blank pieces of 2000 year-old parchment and papyrus from the edges of less important ancient documents, and these pieces are readily available. Writing a few words onto these scraps would not take a great amount of work for someone who has practiced it. The ink would not be 2000 years old, but researchers are very reluctant to test ink because it involves destroying some of the actual writing.
The Dead Sea Scrolls collection at the Museum of the Bible consists of only small fragments, the kind that could be forged easily. Last week, the Museum of the Bible acknowledged that five of its sixteen artifacts are modern forgeries. This does not mean that the other eleven have been verified as authentic. Over the years a number of similar forgeries have been identified. To me it seems likely that a large batch of such forgeries were produced fairly early in the history of the scrolls, perhaps in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and they have been making their way through multiple hands in the antiquities trade for some decades now. Here is an example of the kind of hype they can generate and and outlandish claims they can be used to make.
Weston Fields, guest curator for the Dead Sea Scrolls & the Bible exhibition and executive director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, said that while the ancient scroll fragments do not "prove" the Bible is true, they prove, more or less, that the Bible Christians use today, including 66 books from Genesis to Revelation, is the Bible God intended Christians to have, even thousands of years after He first inspired its writing.
Such an illicit trade finds especially easy targets among conservative Christian collectors who desire to prove something about the significance of the Bible and establish a significant collection that will gain notoriety. The Green family falls into this category, and has been spending a lot of money on biblical artifacts. The MOB story is not yet finished.
What the scrolls help prove is, in some ways, the opposite of what the Green family and similar collectors wish and claim. Around the turn of the eras the writings that are now in the Bible were among among a much larger assortment of sacred books within Second Temple Judaism. The concept of a limited “biblical canon” came along two or three centuries later, and would not have made sense to the persons who collected the scrolls and put them in caves. The idea of limiting the scope probably came along with the development of the codex, which created the possibility of putting a collection the size of the TANAK or the Christian Bible all into a single object, a large book.
Here are some important stories:
Salon
Haaretz
Smithsonian
The Atlantic
I am glad to respond to specific questions in the comments.