1995 Vermes DEAD SEA SCROLLS IN ENGLISH Qumran ESSENES

The Dead Sea Scrolls in English

Introduction

On the western shore of the Dead Sea, about eight miles south of Jericho, lies a complex of ruins known as Khirbet Qumran. It occupies one of the lowest parts of the earth, on the fringe of the hot and arid wastes of the Wilderness of Judaea, and is today, apart from occasional invasions by coachloads of tourists, lifeless, silent and empty. But from that place, members of an ancient Jewish religious community, whose centre it was, hurried out one day and in haste and secrecy climbed the nearby cliffs in order to hide away in eleven caves their precious scrolls. No one came back to retrieve them, and there they remained undisturbed for almost two thousand years.

The account of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as the manuscripts are inaccurately designated, and of almost half a century of Qumran research, is in itself a fascinating as well as an exasperating story. It has been told many a time, but the extraordinary events of September-November 1991 excuse, and even demand, yet another recounting.

A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF DEAD SEA SCROLLS RESEARCH

I. 1947-1967

News of an extraordinary discovery of seven ancient Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts began to spread in 1948 from Israeli and American sources.* The original chance find by a young Bedouin shepherd, Muhammad edh-Dhib, occurred during the last months of the British mandate in Palestine in the spring or summer of 1947, unless it was slightly earlier, in the winter of 1946.* In 1949, the cave where the scrolls lay hidden was identified, thanks to the efforts of a bored Belgian army officer of the United Nations Armistice Observer Corps, Captain Philippe Lippens, assisted by a unit of Jordan's Arab Legion, commanded by Major-General Lash. It was investigated by G. Lankester Harding, the English Director of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, and the French Dominican archaeologist and biblical scholar, Father Roland de Vaux. They retrieved hundreds of leather fragments, some large but most of them minute, in addition to the seven scrolls found in the same cave.

Three of the rolls, an incomplete Isaiah manuscript, a scroll of Hymns and one describing the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness, were purchased in 1947 by the Hebrew University's Professor of Jewish Archaeology, E. L. Sukenik, who proceeded at full speed towards their publication. The other four were entrusted for study and eventual publication by their owner, the Arab metropolitan archbishop Mar Athanasius, head of the Syrian Orthodox monastery of St Mark in Jerusalem, to the resident staff of the American School for Oriental Research in Jerusalem, Millar Burrows, W. H. Brownlee and J. C. Trever. These three took charge of a complete Isaiah manuscript, the Commentary on Habakkuk and the Manual of Discipline, later renamed Community Rule. Finally, after the splitting of British mandatary Palestine into Israel and Jordan, at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise in Jordanian Jerusalem two young researchers, the French Dominique Barthelemy and the Pole J. T. Milik, were commissioned by de Vaux and Harding in late 1951 to edit the fragments collected in Cave 1.

Between 1951 and 1956, ten further caves were discovered, most of them by Bedouin in the first instance. Two yielded substantial quantities of material. Thousands and thousands of fragments were found in Cave 4 and several scrolls, including the longest, the Temple Scroll, in Cave 11. The previously neglected ruins of a nearby settlement were also excavated by Harding and de Vaux, and the view soon prevailed that the texts, the caves and the Qumran site were interconnected, and that consequently the study of the script and contents of the manuscripts should be accompanied by archaeological research.

Progress was surprisingly quick despite the fact that in those halcyon days, apart from the small Nash papyrus, containing the Ten Commandments, found in Egypt and now in the Cambridge University Library, no Hebrew documents dating to Late Antiquity were extant to provide terms of comparison. In 1948 and 1949, Sukenik published two preliminary surveys, in Hebrew, Hidden Scrolls from the Judaean Desert (1948, 1949), and concluded that the religious community involved was the ascetic sect of the Essenes, well known from the first century ce writings of Philo, Josephus and Pliny the Elder, a thesis worked out in great detail from 1951 onwards by Andre Dupont-Sommer in Paris.* The first Qumran scrolls to reach the public, and the archaeological setting in which they were discovered, echoed three striking Essene characteristics. The Community Rule, a basic code of sectarian existence, reflects Essene common ownership and celibate life, and the geographical location of Qumran tallies with Pliny's Essene settlement on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea, south of Jericho. The principal novelty provided by the manuscripts consists of cryptic allusions to the historical origins of the community, launched by a priest called the Teacher of Righteousness, who was persecuted by a Jewish ruler, designated as the Wicked Priest. The Teacher and his followers were compelled to withdraw into the desert, where they awaited the impending manifestation of God's triumph over evil and darkness in the end of days, which had already begun.

An almost unanimous agreement soon emerged, dating the discovery, on the basis of palaeography and archaeology, to the last centuries of the Second Temple, i.e. second century BCE to first century ce. For a short while there was controversy between de Vaux, who decreed that the pottery and all the finds belonged to the Hellenistic era (i.e. pre-63 BCE), and Dupont-Sommer, who argued for an early Roman (post-63) date. But the finding of further caves and the excavation of the ruins of Qumran brought about, on 4 April 1952, de Vaux's dramatic retraction before the French Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. His revised archaeological synthesis, presented in the 1959 Schweich Lectures of the British Academy, while admittedly incomplete, is still the best comprehensive statement available today . . .