Dead Sea Scroll Introduction

During the years 1946-47 a few Bedouin tribesman found documents in a cave in the vicinity of the Wadi Qumran (north-west area of the Dead Sea – Today’s Good News).  The pix from this site are great, and the map section places the scrolls location quite nicely.  The rest of the site is somehow of a christian nature, even though the Dead Sea Scrolls are certainly from the 1^st century BCE.  We know the scrolls production date due to the topics of particular interest to the authors of the Scrolls.  Nothing of Jewish history is recorded in these Scrolls after ~63 BCE.  The accuracy of the information in the Scrolls up to 63BCE is uncanny, if the Scrolls had been written closer to the present era (0 AD), why would the authors not mention any of the events of that time?

It is clear from the location of the Wadi and Khirbet Qumran and from the politically charged documents in the Dead Sea Scrolls that the authors were not an insulated group like the Essenes (Jewish Encyclopedia).  First, the distance from the Qumran site to Jerusalem was 16 miles (telusplanet.net), compare that to Jesus traveling from Capernaum to Jerusalem (from this map you can see that it is over 90 miles).  So 16 miles outside of Jerusalem is not a place of insulation.  But even more interesting is that the Essenes were a sect of Pharisees where as the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls favored the Sadducees (Edward Cook’s blog).  Since Edward Cook is one of the authors of the New Model (on the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls) his blog is of great interest in determining who the authors of the Dead Sea Scroll were.

Most of the Scrolls are fragmentary, but due to duplication among the scrolls, at least the gist is available.  Can you imagine the amount of work it has taken to put these fragments together?  And yes, continually corrections are made to the organization of the scrolls.  But many are in good shape.  I will start with the Damascus Document.  This document has survived from other sources.  This extra source is from a Cairo Synagogue storeroom.  Solomon Schechter found these additional copies in 1896-1897.  Previously they have been called the “Fragments of a Zadokite Work” (1910) and The “Zadokite Document” (1954) re-edited by Chaim Rabin.  Both of these links come from the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit of the Cambridge University Library.

The most recent title is that of the Damascus Documents, given by Millar Burrows.  This particular document was written between 100 and 75BCE.   It seems contented to the Book of Jubilees, the Charter of a Jewish Sectarian Association, the Temple Scroll, and the Secret of the Way Things Are.  All four are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  As a result these will be the first five documents that I will cover over many posts.

This entry was posted on March 1, 2009, 7:34 am at 07:34 and is filed under Dead Sea Scroll, Introduction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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