As many of you know, the Dead Sea Biblical scrolls were discovered back in the early part of this century. They were found in several caves on the hillside above the Dead Sea itself, placed in large earthen jars. They seem to have been hidden in these caves sometime during the First Century CE in order to keep them from being discovered by the Roman occupying soldiers.
It took many years and a certain amount of intrigue for the scrolls to find their way into the hands of Biblical scholars who could preserve and translate them. Indeed, they have been under constant scrutiny all through the past fifty odd years they have been in the hands of scholars. Most of the scrolls are of the Old Testament biblical books familiar to Western cultures, while others pertain to the Qumran religious community near where and by whom they were hidden.
The people founding this community had separated themselves from the Jewish nation as such which they believed had departed from the true nation of Israel under the Roman occupation. They were in the desert awaiting the arrival of God’s new and true reign to come from heaven. It is thought by some scholars that John the Baptist, or even Jesus himself, may have had some connection with this community. The scrolls were in extremely fragmented condition when found.
I have two points of special interest to share with you about this special place. One is simply the fact that I had the opportunity to visit this area back in 1966, and to actually crawl into one of the caves in which the scrolls had found. It was a truly amazing experience to climb up to the caves and to actually crawl inside one of them. I was spending a week in Jerusalem and an American scholar studying there (Dr. James Robinson) volunteered to take me to the ruins/caves.
When the Romans came after the original Qumran community to destroy it, many of its members, along with some of the Traditional Jewish people from Jerusalem seemed to have committed suicide by jumping off the cliff. The ruined buildings and various water pools have stood there in the desert ever since. It is a very rocky, arid, and deserted area where no one tries to live or farm anymore. It stands right beside the Dead Sea itself, in which there is no form of life.
The second point of interest I can share with you concerns the translation of the Dead Sea scrolls themselves. First, some background. An Oxford scholar named Strugnell, who was teaching at Duke while I was there, had initially been given the responsibility to oversee the compilation of the scrolls into a single text. Unfortunately, and for reasons not fully understood, the project of producing an actual text never seems to have gotten off the ground. He and his team simply never were able, or chose not, to produce a usable copy of the Dead Sea scrolls.
Now, here is where things get interesting. As I understand it Professor Strugnell was only able to put together an analytic concordance of all the terms used in the scrolls, but no actually translation as of yet. The concordance documented every word used in the scrolls according to exactly where they appeared, allowing copies to be printed. I do believe that the Professor was eventually found derelict in his duties and was removed from his position.
However, as I understand it, two scholarly Catholic priests reasoned that since they had a complete concordance of the manuscripts, they could feed the information about where each word appeared, chapter and verse, into a computer and have the computer collate all the material, each instance of each word, and print out the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, sort of “in reverse.” And so they did! They were in this way able to bypass Professor Strugnell’s assignment and produce the actual Dead Sea Scrolls themselves.