Dead Sea Scrolls – Between Legend and Reality
Dead Sea Scrolls. Until that fateful day, he was just another anonymous shepherd. But that morning in 1946, when he was leaving for another day of work in the Judean Desert, he did not know that he was going play a role an unparalleled historical and archaeological discovery!
He found the first three scrolls in the Qumran caves, when the pursuit of a cantankerous goat led him into the cave and to the momentous discovery – clay urns, with ancient manuscripts hidden inside.
Mohammed ed-Dib, the simple shepherd, had no idea what he held in his hands. He decided to make good use of the parchment as fuel for his fires. He tried to sell some of them to a shoe maker, and eventually sold them all to a man who understood their value and asked to be taken to the cave where they were found.
The scrolls changed hands from person to person until, in 1947, they made their way to Professor Sukenik of the Hebrew University. That prompted a fascinating journey involving Bedouin, archeological missions from around the world, and Israeli archaeologists, to locate and excavate additional scrolls.
What made the Dead Sea Scrolls one of the most important archaeological discoveries?
The first scrolls found in Qumran caves were just the tip of the iceberg.
In additional searches in the area a total of 900 scrolls were discovered!!! To the pleasant surprise of the researchers, most of the scrolls were well preserved, and it was very easy to see the letters on the parchment.Then, as a team of experts convened and worked to decode the scrolls, they understood the magnitude of the discovery – the scrolls found in Qumran were the oldest textual historical documents ever found anywhere in the world.
According to the researchers, the scrolls had been amazingly preserved for 2000 years, due to their being stored in clay urns in the dry air of the Judean Desert and Dead Sea region.
So is this all true? A recent finding slightly contradicts this claim, but we will discuss that later…
Dead Sea Scrolls – What is written in them??
The scrolls contain excerpts from books from the Second Temple period.
Some contain books from the Old Testament and some contain external texts such as various books of prophecy and commentaries on the Old Testament.
The most noteworthy of all the scrolls are the Book of Isaiah, which is the oldest and most well preserved; the “Copper Scroll”, which lists the contents of a treasure hidden in the earth (which to date has not been found); and the Temple Scroll, which contains instructions for constructing and working in the Temple. That is also the longest scroll discovered, measuring a length of about 8 meters.
But the mystery has just begun – who wrote the scrolls and are they in fact related to the Dead Sea?
The answers will appear in the following article : Qumran scrolls
If you would like to study the subject in depth, visit the following link: The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library.
