Lecture 14 -- Discovery and Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Summary Outline

Here is a wonderful example of correspondence between our literary
sources, both Dead Sea [Scrolls] and outside literary sources, which
describe communal meals being held by the members of this community and
the archaeological evidence where we clearly see evidence of communal
meals practiced by this community.

In our last lecture, we talked about the major groups or sects that developed
in the Late Second Temple period in Judea, focusing especially on the
Pharisees and Sadducees. In this lecture and the next three, we’ll discuss
a group that many scholars identify with the Essenes, that is, the community
that lived at Qumran and deposited scrolls in the nearby caves.

Qumran is located on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, south of Jericho
and east of Jerusalem. In 1946-1947, Bedouins discovered in caves at
Qumran pottery jars, some of which contained ancient parchment scrolls.
These scrolls made their way onto the antiquities market, and soon scholars
realized that scrolls had been found near the site of Qumran. It had already
been surveyed, but a new expedition was conducted in the 1950s to excavate
the site and explore the caves nearby for more scrolls.

Eventually, the remains of more than 900 different scrolls were found in
11 caves. These remains were mostly fragmentary. One cave yielded more
than 500 different scrolls, strewn on the floor of the cave, where they had
disintegrated into thousands of small fragments. Scholars literally spent
decades sifting by hand through these fragments, Dying to determine which
pieces belonged together. This task is now done, and all of the Dead Sea
scrolls have been fully accessible to the public for well over a decade.

The excavation of the site of Qumran itself revealed a settlement that had
been established around 100 B.C. and was destroyed by earthquake in 31
B.C., by tire in 9 B.C. or a little later, and finally, by the Romans in A.D.
68. This Hasmonean site is very small and evidences no private dwellings.
Instead, all of the rooms in the settlement were used either for communal
purposes or as workshops. If most or all of the members of this community
lived nearby in huts or tents, then the population could reasonably be
estimated at 100 to 150.

This complex included a two-story Watchtower, what was probably a
scriptorium of sorts, a communal dining room, many workshops, an extensive
Water system, and a large cemetery nearby. The place was visually modest:
Walls are made of mostly uncut fieldstone, floors are either dirt or rough
flagstone, and there is no interior decoration, no stucco.

In our next lecture, we will look at some of the other interesting features at
Qumran, including peculiar animal bone deposits, the potter’s workshop, the
water system and pools, and the large adjacent cemetery.

Questions to Consider
1. Why did conspiracy theories arise about the Dead Sea Scrolls soon after
their discovery? A
2. One of the questions frequently posed in the popular media is: Who
Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? Does the identification of a room at Qumran
as a “scriptorium” help us answer this question?


Lecture 14-Transcript
Discovery and Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls

In our last lecture, we talked about the major groups or sects that developed in
the late Second Temple period in Judea focusing especially on the Pharisees
and Sadducees. What I would like to do now and in our next couple of
lectures is talk about a group that many scholars identify with the Essenes,
that is the community that lived at Qumran and deposited the scrolls in the
nearby caves.

What we are going to start out by doing is talking about the initial discovery
of the Dead Sea scrolls, and the exploration of the site of Qumran. We are
then going to go around the site of Qumran and look at some the major
features that make the site so unique, and then we will talk about what the
Dead Sea scrolls are and how they relate to the site of Qumran and what they
tell us about this particular group.

First of all, where is the site of Qumran located? It is located on the north-
west shore of the Dead Sea, to the south of Jericho and to the east of
Jerusalem. To give you a sense of scale, today it is about a half an hour
drive from Jerusalem down to Qumran. The area around Qumran consists of
rugged cliffs that go steeply down to the shore of the Dead Sea. Qumran is
located, by the way, in an area that many people refer to as the West Bank.
That is the territory that was under the rule of the government of Jordan from
the time the state of Israel was established in 1948 and up until the 6-day war
in 1967 and since then, of course, it has been under Israeli control.

What is the story of the initial discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls? There are
many different versions of the story, and I am going to give you just a very
simplified version which is that one day a Bedouin boy wandered into a
cave in the vicinity of site of Qumran. This occurred in the winter/spring
of l946/ 1947. Vlfhen the Bedouin wandered into this cave, which We call
Cave 1 at Qumran, he reportedly saw a row of tall cylindrical pottery jars
covered with bowl-shaped lids. The Bedouin boy called to other members of
his tribe. They came and opened up the jars; found that most of the jars were
empty, but at least a couple of the jars contained ancient scrolls, which the
Bedouin removed from the cave apparently on several different occasions.
Eventually the Bedouin removed seven complete or nearly complete scrolls
from Cave 1 at Qumran.

The Bedouin, of course, did not know that these were ancient scrolls. In fact
because the scrolls were Written on parchment, which is processed animal
hide, it looked to them like pieces of old shoe leather and so they did the
logical thing; they took these scrolls and offered them for sale to a man who
worked as a cobbler, a shoemaker in the area of Bethlehem. That man’s name
was Kando. Kando pLu‘chased the seven scrolls from the Bedouin. Kando
also did not know that these were ancient scrolls, but he could see that there
was writing on some of them. He could not read the writing, but he thought
that maybe the writing was ancient Syriac. You see, Kando was a member of
the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem.

He took four of the scrolls and offered them for sale to the Patriarch of the
Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem at that time, a man named Athanasius
Yeshua Samuel. Athanasius Yeshua Samuel purchased those four scrolls
from Kando for the sum of 24 British pounds sterling, which was equivalent
to approximately 100 U.S. dollars at that time. The other three scrolls that
Kando had he offered for sale to somebody else, a man named Eleazar Lipa
Sukenik. Who was Eleazar Lipa Sukenik? He was an Israeli biblical scholar
and archaeologist based at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem. On November
29, 1947, coincidentally by the way the very same day that the U.N. voted
in favor of the establishment of the state of Israel, Sukenik traveled to
Bethlehem to see the three scrolls that Kando was offering for sale, and
Sukenik arranged to purchase them. I should add parenthetically here that
Sukenik was apparently the first scholar to recognize what these scrolls were,
because you have to realize that the Dead Sea scrolls had surfaced at this
point on the antiquities market, these scrolls from Cave 1, without anybody
knowing where they had been found, where they came from, what their date
was, or whether they were even authentic ancient scrolls. Sukenik was the
first to realize that these were authentic ancient scrolls dating to about the
time of Jesus, and he arranged to purchase those three scrolls from Kando.

In the meantime at the Athanasius Yeshua Samuel had purchased his four
scrolls as an investment hoping to turn around and make a profit off of
reselling them. He tried for a number of years to resell his four scrolls without
any success on the markets in the Middle East, and eventually gave up and
brought them to the United States and put them for sale in the U.S. On June
1, 1954, Athanasius Yeshua Samuel placed an ad in the Wall Street Journal
advertising his four scrolls for sale, and the ad actually says, “The Four Dead
Sea Scrolls, biblical manuscripts dating back to at least 200 B.C. are for sale.
This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an
individual or group.”

It just so happened that when the ad appeared in the Wall Street Journal,
Sukenik’ son Yigael Yadin was inthe United States on a fundraising mission.
Yigael Yadin, of course, eventually became a very famous archaeologist later
excavating among other things, the site of Masada and eventually served
as Chief of Staff of the Israeli army. Well, it just so happened that when
Athanasius Yeshua Samuel placed his ad in the Wall Street Journal, Yadin
was in the U.S. on a fundraising mission, someone brought to his attention
the ad in the Wall Street Journal, and through the aid of middle man, Yadin
was able to arrange for purchase of those four scrolls. By the way Athanasius
Yeshua Samuel received $250,000 for the four scrolls so he actually did
make a nice profit off of his investment.

So eventually all seven scrolls from Cave l came to be in the possession of
the state of Israel and subsequently the state of Israel built a special building
on the grounds of the Israel museum in Jerusalem called the Shrine of the
Book to house and display the seven scrolls from Cave l. If you ever been to
Jerusalem and visited the Shrine of the Book, those are the scrolls that you
saw on display there.

Because the scrolls from Cave l had been deposited in jars, they were in a
good state of preservation and were either complete or nearly complete, and
therefore were relatively easy to read, and so for all intents and purposes
by the middle of the 19505, all seven scrolls from Cave l had been fully
published. The subsequent controversies surrounding delays in the
publication of the Dead Sea scrolls have nothing to do therefore with the
scrolls from Cave l at Qumran. They have to do with scrolls from other
caves at Qumran as we are going to see.

By the late 1940s, scholars realized that these scrolls had come from
somewhere in the area of the Dead Sea, and they had pinpointed the
location as being in the area of the site of Qumran. Qumran was a small
archaeological ruin that was known. It had already been surveyed and visited
by various people, but nobody paid any attention to Qumran until scholars
realized that scrolls were being found in the caves around this site. So by the
late 1940s, early 1950s, scholars realized that the scrolls had been found in
the vicinity of the site of Qumran and an archaeological expedition was then
organized to Qumran. By the time this expedition was organized and took
place, we are now in the 1950s, and what has happened in terms of the larger
political background? Well the British mandate of Palestine ended, Palestine
was partitioned, the state of Israel was established, and now Qumran lay in
the territory that was under the rule of the government of Jordan.

When the expedition of Qumran was conducted in the 1950s, it was
conducted under the auspices of the government of Jordan, and, by the way,
the political situation at the time explains why there were no Israeli or Jewish
scholars involved in the original publication team of the Dead Sea scrolls. It
goes back to the political situation at the time of the original discovery.

Instead the expedition to Qumran was organized and led by a French biblical
scholar named Roland de Vaux, who was affiliated with the French school
of biblical studies and archaeology in Jerusalem, the Ecole biblique et
archéologique. From 1951 to 1956, De Vaux led an exhibition to Qumran
that had two main components. Number one to systematically explore all
of the caves in the vicinity of Qtunran to see if whether there were anymore
scrolls to be found, and number two to excavate the site of Qumran itself

What did De Vaux find in terms of scrolls in caves? Eventually scrolls
were found in ll caves surrounding the site of Qumran which we number
Caves l through ll. All together, these 11 caves yielded the remains of
over 900 different scrolls, but in most cases what we have here are not 900
complete scrolls but small fragments surviving from what had once been
complete scrolls.

Archeologists found about half the caves and Bedouin found the other half of
the caves. But the Bedouin the best caves, and one of the caves that Bedouin
found--and it is interesting that they found it and not the archaeologist
because it was literally right under the noses of the archaeologists as they
digging-was Cave 4. Cave 4, which actually is two caves, 4 A and 4 B,
yielded over 500 different scrolls, but unlike in Cave l where the scrolls had
been deposited in jars; in Cave 4 the scrolls were lying strewn on the floor of
the cave and they had disintegrated into thousands of little fragments.

The subsequent controversy surrounding delays in the publication of the
Dead Sea scrolls have nothing to do with scholarly conspiracies or Vatican
conspiracies or any other kind of conspiracies but really have to do with
the fragmentary nature of these scrolls and especially the massive fragments
from Cave 4 where scholars literally spent decades sifting by hand through
these little fragments trying to figure out which pieces belong together,
which kinds of documents they belong to, and all of this in an era before the
advent of the computer. I should add parenthetically that as of now all the
of Dead Sea scrolls are fully published, and all of the Dead Sea scrolls have
been fully accessible to the public for well over a decade, so nobody can
claim any longer that there are still secrets hidden in the Dead Sea scrolls or
conspiracies to hide information in the Dead Sea scrolls.

The other component of De Vaux’s expedition to Qumran was to excavate
the site of Qumran itself, and we are looking at a photograph of the site of
Qumran, which is a small ruin that sits on a natural terrace overlooking the
Dead Sea, and specifically we are looking here from west to east, and as we
look across the Dead Sea what we see on the other side are the mountains
of Moab, that is the mountains in Jordan. What did De Vaux lind when he
excavated this small ruin? He found a settlement that was established roughly
around 100 B.C. That means that the settlement at Qumran was established
during the Hasmonean period.

This settlement then existed until the year 31 B.C. when it was destroyed by
an earthquake. We will actually look at evidence of the earthquake damage
and De Vaux was able to pinpoint the date of the earthquake precisely to
the year 31 B.C. because the ancient Jewish historian Josephus tells us that
a strong earthquake hit the area of Jericho in the Year 31, and De Vaux was
able to match that up with the archaeological remains.

After the earthquake, the community cleaned up the settlement, rebuilt the
buildings, and continued to live there until another destruction. Somewhere
around the year 9 or 8 B.C. or maybe a little later when the site is burned
down by a fire, a fire that apparently was set by a human enemy so somebody
came and destroyed the settlement, after that, there is a short period of
abandonment maybe lasting only one winter season, the community comes
back, cleans up the site and continues to live there until the year 68 A.D.
when the settlement is destroyed by the Romans at the time of the first Jewish
revolt against the Romans.

In terms of chronology, what we are looking at is a settlement that is
established roughly around 100 B.C. and exists until the year 68 A.D., so
a settlement that is established during the Hasmonean period, continues to
exist through the period when the Romans come in and take over, through
the reign of Herod and his successors, and up until the first Jewish revolt
against the Romans in the year 68 A.D.

What did De Vaux’s excavations uncover in terms of the settlement at
Qumran? We are looking at a plan of the settlement, which is a settlement
that is remarkable in many ways. It is really quite unlike anything else that
we have. One of the things that is interesting about this settlement is that it is
very small and compact in size, and we will see that when we look at some
pictures of it. Another interesting thing about this settlement is that there
are no private houses in the settlement, no private dwellings. Instead all of
the rooms in the settlement were used either for communal purposes, for
example communal dining rooms, or as workshops.

I know what you are thinking. If there are no private houses in the settlement,
where did the people live, i.e., where did the people sleep? As we look at the
settlement, we will see that some of the rooms in the settlement originally
were two stories high. It may be that some of those second story rooms where
used as bedrooms. If you think that all of the members of this community
lived, slept, only inside the settlement, there is so little space for bedrooms
at the second-story level that you would have to estimate a very small
population, maybe 10 to 15 people, but if you think as I think following De
Vaux that most if not all of the members of this community lived, that is
slept, not inside the settlement but outside of it, in tents, in huts, and in some
of the caves around the outside of the settlement, then you can reasonably
estimate a larger population of somewhere around 100 to 150 people.
A small compact settlement, rooms used for communal ptuposes or
Workshops, what are some of the rooms that We are going to looking at in
particular? We are going to look at a structure in the middle of the north
side of the settlement that was a two-story high Watchtower. Why put a
Watchtower in the middle of the north side of the settlement? It’s very
logical, because just like today in antiquity most people coming to Qumran
would have come from the direction of the north, that is from the direction
of Jerusalem in Jericho, so you put a Watchtower there on your north side.
You can post guards, and by the way, that Watchtower could be isolated by
drawbridges all around it so you can also take refuge in the Watchtower if
you are being threatened by an enemy.

From the Watchtower, We will then look at a room that is right in the middle
of the settlement, a room that De Vaux identified as scriptorium or writing
room, and we Will talk about Why he identified it in that way. We Will look at
the largest room in the settlement which is located on the south side. De Vaux
identified this room as an assembly hall because it is the largest room, and he
identified also as a communal dining room, because in the room adjacent to
it he found a pantry of dishes, and We will look also at the pantry.

We will look at one of the many Workshops that dot the settlements
specifically the potter’s Workshop. We will look at the extensive Water system
that runs through the settlement, with many pools for storing water. We will
look at a large cemetery on the plateau to the east of the settlement, and then
We will talk about what the Dead Sea scrolls are and how they relate to all of
these archaeological remains.

Let us start first of all with the tower. Here is a view of the tower as it looks
today and you can see that there is now a modern wooden staircase that
goes up to the second story level. When people come to Qumran today, you
can climb up those steps and go to the original second story level of the
tower, and it is a great thing to do because when you stand up there, you
find yourself looking out over the settlement of Qumran. I always like to say
that I love to take people to visit Qumran because whenever they get there,
they are always disappointed, and they are always disappointed for a couple
of reasons. Number one, most people who visit Qumran do it as part of a
day trip from Jerusalem down to the Dead Sea. First thing in the morning
they leave Jerusalem and go south to Masada and visit Herod’s palaces on
Masada, which visually are spectacular, and then start heading back north
up along the shore of the Dead Sea, stopping in and getting maybe lunch and
for a swim in the Dead Sea, and then hitting Qumran late in the afternoon
on the way back up to Jerusalem. First of all, people have been to Masada
and been overwhelmed by that, and you get to Qumran and this is it, and
most people of course are super-psyched to see Qumran because pretty much
everybody has heard about the Dead Sea scrolls and want to see where they
were found.

You get to Qumran, you climb up to the top of the tower, you look over the
settlement, and what do you see in front of you? You see this very small,
compact, and visually very modest settlement. Notice that walls are made
of rubble, that is Held stones that were not cut or maybe roughly cut for
the corners. Notice that the floors are either dirt floors or rough flagstone
pavement. There is no interior decoration. There are no wall paintings. There
are no mosaics. There is no stucco, so a very small plain and unimpressive
looking settlement.

As we stand on top of the tower and we look down below us, we can see
some of the rooms that we talked about in our plan before. Specifically,
immediately below us, we can see the room that De Vaux identified as the
scriptorium, or writing room, which I am going to come back to in just a
minute. We can see the dining room/assembly hall, the communal dining
room and assembly hall that the southern end of the site which is sort of
off at an angle here, and opening onto it, the pantry with the dishes. The
potter’s workshop is not visible, it would be up in a corner, and the cemetery
is completely off to the left or to the east of the site in our view here. When
you stand at the southern end of the settlement just outside of the buildings
and look down below you, you can see Cave 4. One of the remarkable things
about Qumran is how close Cave 4 with all of its 500 different scrolls is to
the settlement itself; very close by.

Let us now talk about the scriptorium. In the middle of the settlement is this
room that De Vaux identified as a scriptorium or writing room. Why did he
identify it as a scriptorium? It is because of the furniture that he found in
this room. The furniture, which I am going to show you in a minute, comes
not from the room as you see now but actually comes originally from a
second story level. In other words the scriptorium is one of the rooms in the
settlement that originally was two stories high. The furniture that I am going
to show you was originally at the second story level.

When the settlement was destroyed by the Roman in 68, it burned, and the
second story level collapsed, fell down onto the ground, and De Vaux then
picked up the pieces of furniture, had them picked up, had them put back
together and what did he tind? He found long, narrow tables and benches
make of mud brick and covered with plaster. The reason why De Vaux
identified this room as a scriptorium or writing room is because in addition
to the furniture, he found these things mixed in with the debris. These are
inkwells. The picture of the inkwells makes them look very large but they
are small. They are little things. Mixed in with the debris, he found inkwells,
and because of the inkwells De Vaux identified this room as a scriptorium.

Sounds perfectly logical, and you might then think that the scribes sat on
the benches and wrote at the tables they way that we do today. De Vaux’s
identification of this room as a scriptorium has been the subject of a lot
debate because the furniture probably did not work that way, and here is
the problem. The custom of sitting at a table to write the way that we write
today is a custom that developed later in history. It developed specifically
in medieval monasteries with Monks sitting and copying things at tables.
Typically in the ancient world when scribes wrote, they squatted with the
material in their laps. Scholars have objected to De Vaux’s identification of
this room as a scriptorium on the grounds that the scribes would not have
sat on the benches and written at the tables the way we might think they
would have.

Some scholars then have suggested well maybe the furniture worked a little
bit differently. Maybe the scribes sat on the tables, rested their feet on the
benches and Wrote with the material in their laps like that. The problem with
that is the tables are concave underneath. They are only made of mud brick.

If you sit on them they are going to crack and collapse under your weight,
so that explanation really is not satisfactory either. Some scholars have
suggested, well maybe De Vaux was wrong, maybe this room was not used
as a scriptorium, maybe it was used for some other purpose. Maybe, some
scholars have suggested, this room was used as a dining room, a triclinium,
where you reclined to dine on the benches and ate at the tables.
The problem with that is the benches are so narrow, they are only 40 cm wide,
that if you try to recline and dine on them, you are going to roll off; so that
does not work either. So what exactly was this room? I think that De Vaux
was right in identifying it as a scriptorium. First of all, there are the inkwells.
Inkwells are extremely rare finds on archaeological excavations in Israel. I
personally have sorted through thousands and thousands and thousands of
buckets of pottery from various excavations around Israel and I have only
found until now one example of an inkwell, so they are very, very rare finds.

The fact that De Vaux found inkvvells mixed in with the debris suggests that
they was some writing going on in this room, and not only that, let us think
for a minute about what they were writing. They were not writing books,
codices. They were writing scrolls, and to write a scroll what you have to do
is to take the individual pieces of processed animal hide, parchment, and line
them up side by side to make a scroll. These long, narrow tables would be
ideally suited for the preparation of the scroll. So I think that De Vaux was
right, and if that is the case, then we can reasonably suggest that some of the
Dead Sea scrolls might have been Written or copied in this room.

I deliberately say some of the Dead Sea scrolls and not all of the Dead Sea
scrolls because there is no doubt that some of the Dead Sea scrolls were
brought to Qtunran from somewhere else. How do we know that? We know
that because some of the Dead Sea scrolls antedate the establishment of the
settlement. Some of the Dead Sea scrolls were written before the settlement
was established, so clearly some of the scrolls had to have brought to Qumran
from other places, but it may be that some of the scrolls were written or
copied at Qumran, and in this case the best candidate for where that activity
was taking place is this room which De Vaux identified as a scriptorium.

Here is a picture of the dining room/assembly hall and the pantry as they
looked today. De Vaux identified this room as a communal dining room
because of the pantry of dishes found next to it, and as an assembly hall
because it is the largest room in the settlement. The pantry today of course
is empty of the dishes that it originally had contained, but at the time of
excavations what De Vaux found in this room were stacks of dishes,
specifically stacks of over a 1,000 pottery dishes.

There are a couple of interesting things about the pottery dishes that De
Vaux found in the pantry. First of all, they are lying stacked on the iloor in
neat piles but broken. Here is some of the evidence of the earthquake of 31.
Originally those dishes were stacked on wooden shelves lining the walls of
this room. When the earthquake of 31 hit, what happened? The shelves sort
of started to tremble then boom fell on to the floor. The dishes fell, broke,
could not be fixed, and so after the earthquake, what they did was to wall off
this part of the room and simply left the broken dishes like that, and that is
how the archaeologists fotmd them.

The other interesting thing about these dishes to notice is that they are all
what we call open shapes: plates, cups, bowls. So we do not see cooking
pots, we do not see storage jars, and what is interesting about this is that
these open shapes-plates, cups, bowls-are precisely the kinds of dishes
that you would use to dine off of, to set your table with. The presence of
so many dishes stacked in the pantry suggested to De Vaux that communal
meals must have been held in the room adjacent to this, and so De Vaux
identified that large room not only as an assembly hall but also as a communal
dining room.

One of the very interesting things about this is that we learn from the
literature of this sect that one of the central aspects of their lifestyle was
having communal meals. Everybody who was a full member of this sect
participated in communal meals, so what we see here is a wonderful example
of correspondence between our literary sources, both Dead Sea and outside
literary sources, which refer to or describe communal meals being held by the
members of this community or members of this sect, and the archaeological
evidence where we clearly see evidence of communal meals practiced by
this community.

We have now started on our archaeological tour of Qumran, looking at the
tower, looking at the scriptorium or writing room, looking at the communal
dining room and pantry of dishes. In our next lecture, we are going to continue
our tour of the site of Qumran, and We are going to look at some of the other
interesting features including peculiar animal bone deposits, including one of
the workshops, the potter’s workshop. We are going to talk about the Water
system and pools at Qumran, and the large adjacent cemetery.