Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
• The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient scrolls that were discovered in caves surrounding the site of Qumran, which is located on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. In 1947 a Bedouin boy wandered into a cave in the vicinity of the site of Qumran and reportedly found a row of tall cylindrical pottery jars, covered with bowl-shaped lids ins|de the jars were ancient scrolls. He alerted the tribe and the Bedouin then removed these scrolls from the cave.
• The cave that yielded the first scrolls is referred to as Cave 1 at Qumran Eventually the Bedouin removed seven complete or nearly complete scrolls from Cave 1. Because the scrolls were written on parchment, which is processed animal hide, they thought at first that they were simply pieces of old leather.
• The Bedouin took the seven scrolls and sold them to a cobbler, Kando, in the area of Bethlehem. Kando did not know that these were ancient scrolls, but he could see that there was writing on at least some of them. Although he could not read the writing, he thought that it resembled the script of his own church, the Syrian Orthodox Church. Kando took four of the scrolls and offered them for sale to the metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem at that time, Athanasius Yeshue Samuel.
• The other three scrolls Kando offered for sale to Eleazar Lipa Sukenik, a Jewish scholar and archaeologist based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Although we do not know this for sure, Sukenik may have been the first scholar to recognize that the artifacts were, indeed, authentic ancient scrolls dating to about the time of Jesus. Sukenik purchased the three scrolls from Kando.
• In the meantime, Athanasius Yeshue Samuel had purchased his four scrolls as an investment and tried, without success, to sell them for a profit in the markets of the Middle East. Eventually, he put them up for sale in the United States. In 1954, Samuel placed an ad in the Wall Street Journal, advertising his four scrolls for sale. It just so happened that Yigael Yadin, the son of Eleazar Sukenik, was in the United States at that time and arranged to purchase the four scrolls.
• Eventually, all seven scrolls from Cave 1 at Qumran came to be in the possession of the State of Israel. Subsequently, Israel erected a special building on the grounds of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, called the Shrine of the Book, to house and display the scrolls.
Excavation of Qumran
• In the early 1950s, an archaeological expedition was organized to Qumran. The goal of the expedition was to systematically explore all the caves in the area to see if there were any more scrolls left to be found and to excavate the site of Qumran itself. Qumran was a small ruin that was ringed by the caves that eventually yielded all the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• The expedition to Qumran was organized and led by a French biblical scholar and archaeologist named Roland de Vaux. De Vaux was affiliated with the Ecole biblique, the French school of biblical studies and archaeology in East Jerusalem.
• Eventually, scrolls were found in 11 caves surrounding Qumran, which are numbered as caves 1 through 11. Approximately half the scrolls were discovered by Bedouin, and the other half were discovered by archaeologists. Altogether, these 11 caves yielded the remains of approximately 1,000 different scrolls. These scrolls consist mainly of small fragments surviving from what were originally complete documents.
• The other component of de Vaux’s expedition was the excavation of the site of Qumran itself. He discovered a small settlement that dated to the 18th century B.C. and 1st century A.D., up until its destruction by the Romans in 68 A.D. The Dead Sea Scrolls represent a collection of literature belonging to members of a Jewish sect who lived at the site of Qumran.
• The site of Qumran itself is characterized by many features that distinguish it from other contemporary settlements. For example, it is clear that the inhabitants lived a communal lifestyle and held communal meals. It is also clear that the inhabitants of Qumran were concerned with maintaining a high degree of Jewish ritual purity. For example, the site has a large number of Jewish ritual baths, called miqva’ot.
Jewish Ritual Purity
• Jewish ritual purity is not well understood by most modern Westerners—including most modern Jews. The Torah describes certain categories of things and certain natural processes that cause ritual impurity. However, the causes of ritual impurity, according to biblical law, appear to us today to be quite random.
No one has ever been able to explain why it is that certain actions and functions cause ritual impurity versus others that do not. The system of ritual purity and impurity is difficult for us to understand today and remains quite controversial among scholars.
• For example, touching a lizard makes one ritually impure, as does touching mildew on the walls of a house and touching a human corpse. Certain natural processes of the human body also cause ritual impurity-for example, nocturnal emissions in men and childbirth and menses in women.
• For most Jews and for most types of ritual impurity, the way to purify oneself is immersion in a pool of what the Bible calls “living water.” Jews came to understand the phrase “living water” to refer to undrawn water-a river, stream, lake, or pond—as opposed to water in a pool that had been deliberately dug and filled.
• To obsenve these ritual purity laws, living on the shore of the Dead Sea, in an extremely arid climate, would have been a huge challenge for the Jews at Qumran. They devised an elaborate system to bring flood waters to fill up pools at the settlement.
• The large number of pools and their great size are a clear indication of the Jews’ concern with the maintenance of ritual purity and the observance of purity laws.In the Presence of God
• The kind of ritual purity described here applies primarily to those coming into contact with the presence of God. Basically, Jewish purity laws regulate the admission into God’s presence—the divine presence. According to biblical law, when one entered God’s presence, one had to be in a state of ritual purity.
• In ancient Judaism, the presence of God dwelt in his house—the Temple of Jerusalem. Therefore, all Jews, including Jesus and Paul, took for granted the fact that when they entered the Jerusalem Temple, they first had to be in a state of ritual purity. But otherwise, most Jews, on an everyday basis, did not have to worry about being in this state. In fact, most Jews were not concerned with ritual purity.
• There was, of course, one category of ancient Jew who had to be concerned with the observance of a high level of ritual purity on a more regular basis: the priests who served in the Temple of Jerusalem. These priests were in God’s presence more regularly than other Jews; they were the intermediaries between the Jewish people and the God of Israel.
• The members of the Qumran sect adopted a priestly lifestyle; they followed the laws, including the laws of purity, that applied to priests. The reason for this was that they believed that God’s presence dwelled in their midst and angels walked among them.
The System of Miqva’ot
• Jewish ritual purity laws applied only to Jews. Gentiles were completely outside the system of laws, because Gentiles were not allowed to enter the presence of the God of Israel in the Temple of Jerusalem.
• Jews dealing with any products going to the Temple of Jerusalem or its priests also had to be in a state of ritual purity. For example, if you grew agricultural produce that was sent to the priests in the Temple of Jerusalem, that produce had to be produced in a state of ritual purity.
• Interestingly, the system of ritual purity has nothing to do with cleanliness and hygiene in the modern sense of the words. In order to be used for ritual purification, water had to fulfill only the requirement of being “living water.” But that didn’t mean it had to be clean water.
• We actually see evidence of this at Qumran. There, a system of ritual baths were filled by flash-flood waters brought by a nearby riverbed. These pools were filled only once or twice a year, in the winter, on very rare occasions. Over the course of the rest of the year, the pools were used repeatedly by the members of the community for ritual immersion, as well as other purposes, including laundering clothes and drinking. In other words, the process of ritual immersion probably helped spread disease.
Suggested Reading
Magness, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, chapters 2-3, “The Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Exploration of Qumran” and “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Community at Qumran.”
-, The Archaeology of the Holy Land, chapter 6, “The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
Questions to Consider
1. Who discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, and where were they found?
2. What are the causes of ritual impurity according to biblical Jewish law, and what are the means of purification?
