Each day, hundred of visitors arrive at a small science museum in Mobile, Ala., to view what many consider the archaeological find of the 20th century.
Each day, hundred of visitors arrive at a small
science museum in Mobile, Ala., to view what many consider the
archaeological find of the 20th century.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 and are
the oldest biblical fragments ever unearthed. Since the early days of
2005, various fragments of the scrolls have been on display at Gulf
Coast Exploreum in Mobile.
Each day, hundreds of visitors linger at one clear plastic display case in particular.
It is the world’s oldest copy of the Ten
Commandments, its tiny black text exquisitely inked onto the crinkled
surface of a brown animal skin.
Nearby is a 3-foot-wide document whose six columns
of precise text contain all or parts of Psalm 135 and three other
psalms.
And just a few feet away are other scroll fragments – portions of the
books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Isaiah and
Jeremiah.
Some of the fragments are barely larger than the
palm of a hand – dark brown, inscribed with Hebrew text in words little
bigger than a grain of rice.
On larger manuscripts like the Psalm Scroll, one
easily can pick out the distinctive four-letter Tetragrammaton – YHWH –
the Hebrew symbol for Yahweh, or God.
Exhibit organizers say it is the largest collection
of biblical Dead Sea Scroll fragments ever assembled in the United
States.
The scrolls were written about the time Jesus lived
and only about 100 miles from the Galilean landscape where he preached.
Museum visitor Sally Gedosch of Gulf Shores, Ala.,
said she found herself trying to imagine the hands that produced the
scrolls in the Judean desert 2,000 years ago.
“It’s just fascinating to think about it,” she said.
“I’m trying to imagine what it must have been like, but I just can’t.”
The display of the scrolls and related items is scheduled to end April 24.
On display with the scroll fragments are pottery,
coins and related artifacts that tell the story of the Essenes, a small
community of ascetic Jews who lived apart on the scorched and arid
northwest shore of the Dead Sea and who are widely believed to have
created the scrolls.
The exhibit also displays a collection of rare
Bibles, a page from a 15th-century Gutenberg Bible and Roman glass.
The scrolls came to light in 1947, when a young
Bedouin shepherd threw a stone into a dark cave above the Dead Sea and
heard the distinctive clink of pottery breaking. He recovered the first
of the scrolls.
Systematic exploration yielded more than 900
documents in 11 caves. Some had been stored in jars; others lay intact
or in fragments on dusty cave floors, preserved by the arid climate.
The find dazzled scholars. The scrolls contained portions of all the
books of the Bible except Esther. But mostly, they consisted of
nonbiblical apocalyptic literature and secular documents. Some
explained the rules for living in the community that produced them.
Although a few scholars dispute that the Essenes
created the scrolls, the consensus attributing the manuscripts to the
sect is a broad one. From about 130 B.C. to A.D. 68, the Essenes lived
lives of severe discipline and ritual purity in a community called
Qumran in the Judean wilderness. They studied Scripture and prepared
for a world-shaking clash between the “sons of darkness” and the “sons
of light.”
In a sense, they were the Branch Davidians of their
day, not unlike the followers of David Koresh outside Waco, Texas, in
the early 1990s, said James Bowley, a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar at
Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss.
It is not a long leap to imagine the New Testament
wilderness prophet John the Baptist as an Essene, Bowley said.
But the evidence is mixed.
“Certainly possible and not unlikely … (but) not close to a certainty,” Bowley said.
“At the very least, what is most probable and
totally reasonable is that John, being at the same time and in the same
region, knew of the community and of at least some of their ideas.”
Although the scrolls were written in about the same
period that Jesus lived nearby, scholars believe there is no reference
to him. Nor is there any indication that the Essenes were aware of what
must have been a small but growing band of Christ’s followers, Bowley
said.
Although the Exploreum’s marketers accurately have
pitched the exhibit to their Bible Belt audience as “the oldest
surviving texts of the Bible,” the scrolls actually reflect the Bible’s
complicated, organic development, Bowley said. It is a story far
removed from the image of a collection of books that appeared long ago
and never varied from their original forms.
Indeed, the Hebrew Bible – the Christian Old
Testament – did not exist when the scrolls were produced. Not until
about the second century would a consensus emerge on which books would
be discarded and which should be included in an authoritative
collection of this sacred literature.
One Dead Sea Scroll, the Book of Jubilees, seems to
have been terribly important to the Essenes, Bowley said. By contrast,
there is only a tiny scrap of the Book of Chronicles, reflecting their
own theological emphasis. Yet, today, Jubilees is out of the Bible and
Chronicles is in.
“Different Jewish communities had different
collections of scrolls,” Bowley explained. “The Essenes would have had
many that other communities would have, plus some others.”
Indeed, individual biblical compositions and other
Jewish writings developed through time and went through various stages
and editions before arriving at the contemporary form, Bowley said.
“People writing different versions of Jeremiah are
Jews of the same period, with the same concept of God,” Bowley noted.
“While the versions might have some differences in terms of order or
arrangement, does that change our basic concept of God? No. It doesn’t
change the theology.”
Scholars previously had identified at least three early versions of many books of the Hebrew Bible.
Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Emanuel Tov found that
about one-third of the scrolls follow one tradition, about one-tenth
follow another and a little more than half are “nonaligned” – or
faithful to none of the previously known three, Bowley said.
In some ways, the knowledge gleaned from the Dead
Sea Scrolls has found its way into the Bibles on today’s bookshelf.
For instance, scholars long have known that Psalm
145 engages in word play, in that each verse begins with a successive
letter of the Hebrew alphabet. But they also knew the psalm was
incomplete. One of the letters – and thus one of the verses – was
missing, Bowley said.
The copy of Psalm 145 in the Dead Sea Scrolls
provided the answer in verse 13, which begins, “Your kingdom is an
everlasting kingdom …”
“Look in your Bible, and you’ll see that verse is
twice as long as the others,” Bowley noted. “Critics think that small
section of the poem fell out of the ancient manuscript tradition, and
now it’s been restored. It comes from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
(For information regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls
exhibit, visit www.scrollsmobile.com or call 877-377-7469 toll-free)