Dead Sea Scrolls Broke 19 Centuries of Silence

It was an age of ferment and terror. Mighty empires--first the Greeks, then the Romans--controlled what today we call the Middle East. War and intrigue scourged the land as imperial rulers sought to control the residents of Judea and subdue their rebellions.

Out of the depths of their despair, the Jews of that era developed a new religious ideology--a belief that the world was approaching the end of days, a time when God would rescue his people, destroy their oppressors and establish the rule of a righteous prince of peace.

In remote corners of the land, small groups sought desert refuges where they could live by their faith as they awaited the apocalypse. One such place was Qumran, on a barren patch of land tucked between a line of cliffs and the shores of the Dead Sea.

There a community of deep religious intensity lived, worked and recorded its thoughts and traditions. Exactly who these people were remains unknown. Some scholars believe that they were allied with a Jewish sect known to historians as Essenes. Others believe that they were a renegade group of priests from the Jerusalem temple who had left in anger over temple practices that they considered corrupt. Some believe that the group was all male and celibate, others that families were included.

All agree, however, that in AD 68, during the Judean revolt against Rome, Qumran was destroyed. All memory of the place and its people disappeared. They would not reappear for almost 19 centuries.

In 1947, young Bedouin shepherds, reportedly searching for a lost goat, wandered into a cave near the ruins of what was Qumran, found ancient pottery jars and, looking inside, discovered seven leather scrolls.

In time, archeologists would discover about 80,000 writings in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek--some complete scrolls, but most only tiny fragments--in the Qumran caves. The world waited in wonder as the works were slowly translated.

Inevitably, perhaps, the scrolls became the subject of some very modern controversies. Scholarly efforts to translate the writings began in the early 1950s under the auspices of the government of Jordan. But by 1960, as scholars aged, the work had slowed to a crawl. Israel assumed control of the work when it conquered Jerusalem, where the scrolls were housed, in the 1967 Six Day War but left the original team of scholars largely alone.

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By the mid-1980s, scholars outside the scroll cartel, as it was derisively called, had become increasingly restless, fearing that they might never see the work finished. Then, in 1991, the Huntington Library in San Marino changed everything, announcing that it had in its vaults a set of photographs covering the entire body of scroll fragments and that the library would release microfilm copies of them. That move, in turn, prompted the Israeli Antiquities Authority to end all restrictions on scholarly access to the scrolls, leading to a deluge of new scholarship.

During the years of waiting before the scrolls were fully revealed, many extravagant hopes and fears were attached to them. Perhaps among the fragments would be some contemporaneous proof of the events of the New Testament, some speculated. Perhaps a piece of parchment would contain a description of John the Baptist. Maybe Jesus himself would figure in one of the writings. Others feared the opposite--an ancient document that would undermine the faith.

The reality was less dramatic, but no less wondrous. The ancient writings included more or less complete texts of almost every book of the Hebrew Bible--versions whose closeness to the modern texts demonstrate the amazing fidelity with which generations of scribes copied the Scriptures. The collected works also included hundreds of other documents, some in only fragmentary form, that provide direct evidence of the life and faith of the Jewish world in the closing centuries of the pre-Christian era. Indeed, some scholars believe that the scrolls may have been part of the library of the Jerusalem temple itself, hidden in the desert to protect the writings from pagan attack.

The documents are testimony to a world in which religious ideas were very much in flux. The religion of the Jews was in the midst of transformation from a system centered on the ritual sacrifice of animals in the Jerusalem temple to a new focus on prayer, personal piety and study--a focus that allowed Judaism to survive once the Romans destroyed the temple in AD 70.

At the same time, another strain of Judaism, one that eagerly anticipated the arrival of a Messiah, provided the environment in which early Christianity developed.

The scrolls give us a mental bridge to that formative era, one that allows us to travel back and perceive the formation of ideas that continue to shape Western civilization. As we approach the end of a millennium, the Dead Sea Scrolls cast us back to the time when the very concept of millennium was born.