DEAD SEA SCOLLS

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

A shepherd's 1947 find still fascinates Bible students and scholars.

by John Lemley

This article is based on the introduction of The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, Jr., and Edward Cook.

Nineteen forty-seven dawned upon a world exhausted, shattered, and saddened by the atrocities of World War II. Filled with weddings and babies of war-weary soldiers and sailors returned home, 1947 was also the year of the greatest archaeological discovery of the past century.

Early that year, a Bedouin shepherd searching for a lost goat tossed a rock into a hole in a dry cliff on the northwest corner of the Dead Sea. Surprised at the sound of breaking pottery, he peered in to see several jars with leather scrolls in them on the cave floor. He had discovered what we now call the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The ensuing months involved the scrolls in haggling, smuggling, hiding, and more searching of the area called Qumran and other nearby dry ravines known as wadis. On April 11, 1948, the discovery of these oldest known biblical manuscripts was announced to the press.

The Christian world was ecstatic! Soon they could have in their hands ". . . a complete manuscript of the Hebrew text of the book of Isaiah and fragments of most of the other biblical books, all of which are more than 1,000 years older than any of the other known manuscripts."' By 1956 scholars had identified the remains of about 870 separate scrolls found in eleven different caves at or near Qumran. The fourth cave alone contained an estimated 15,000 fragments.

After publishing the seven intact scrolls, the work of a team of foreign scholars assigned to translate and publish the treasure of these manuscripts bogged down in the early 1950s. Trying to determine which fragments went together was tedious and highly time-consuming. The Christian world's patience waned and controversy followed.

The scholarly community tired of the translation team's exclusive control of the project. Then copies of a concordance of all the words in the unreleased fragments were sent to a few academic libraries. Another library obtained photographs of the unreleased fragments. "After initially threatening legal action, in November 1991 the new editor-in chief of the official team ... announced that all scholars would have free and unconditional access to all the photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls." 2

Testing; theories

Now that all the manuscripts are available, many theories about what they "prove" have been formulated and are being confirmed, revised, or discarded. For example, Hebrew was neither a dead language nor a Jewish invention for the exclusive use of rabbis. The scrolls showed that Hebrew was the language of the common man and that 200 B.C. to A.D. 100 was a time of substantial literary productivity. The scrolls reveal religious diversity among the Jewish people of that era, including the various forms of Messiah they anticipated.

The scrolls' emphasis on the battle between light and darkness has strong carryovers into Christianity. They reveal that people were already familiar with John the Baptist's insistence on repentance (Matthew 3:2,8,9). The scrolls' frequent command to help the poor was an emphasis of the early Christian church (Galatians 2:10). These teachings suggest a Jewish origin, rather than a Greco-Roman one, for the beliefs and practices of the church's formative years.

Religious Content

The Dead Sea Scrolls are entirely religious in content. About a quarter of the find consisted of Old Testament manuscripts - all 39 books in our canon, except Esther.

"Even though the two copies of Isaiah ... were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscripts previously known (A.D. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of

the text. . . . The five percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling." 3

The extra-biblical scrolls can be divided into three categories: 1. Previously unknown stories about biblical figures, such as Enoch, Abraham, and Noah; writings attributed to Moses; additional psalms of David and prophecies of Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel.

2. The apocryphal books of Jubilees, 1 Enoch, Tobit, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.

3. Scrolls written by and for the first century community at Qumran: commentaries, doctrines, a calendar, and descriptions of messiahs and antichrists.

In May of this year a collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls began a five-month tour of the US. Perhaps some readers saw that exhibition. They will know better than others what is so compelling about writings dating from the time of Jesus.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have offered support and clarity to the faith and historical understanding of Christians, and will no doubt continue to do so in years to come.

Elder John and Lois Lemley attend CoG7 in Kalama, WA. They have four children and ten grandchildren.

1. Gerhard Pfandl, "Is the Bible historically reliable?" Ministry (September 2012), p.23

2. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, p.8

3. Gleason L. Archer, A Survey of the Old Testament, p.29

From the Nov/Dec. 2012  Bible Advocate - a publication of the Church of God, Seventh Day, Denver, CO.  USA.

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I HAVE A BOOK CALLED "SECRETS OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS" - 535 PAGES - BY RANDELL PRICE.

I'VE READ IT ONCE. FOR THE AVERAGE CHRISTIAN, NOT WORTH THE READ. THE DEAD SEA SCOLLS, APPART FROM SHOWING ISAIAH WAS COPIED CORRECTLY FROM THE HEBREW (HENCE OUR ENGLISH ISAIAH IN THE KJV BIBLE), THE SCROLLS DO NOTHING FOR CHRISTIANS. THE SCROLLS WERE FROM A SMALL JEWISH CULT THAT LIVED BY THEMSELVES AND HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH JESUS, AND JESUS NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM. 

FORGET ABOUT THE DEAD SEA SCOLLS - DO NOT SPEND YOUR TIME THINKING ABOUT THEM OR INVESTIGATING THEM. THEY ARE FROM A CULT THAT NEVER BECAME A PART OF THE TRUE CHURCH OF GOD IN THE FIRST CENTURY. THEY NEVER HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH PAUL, PETER, JAMES OR JOHN, OR ANY OTHER APOSTLE, AND THE APOSTLES AND TRUE CHURCH OF GOD HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM.

Keith Hunt