What they found in the caves: let's go to the Scrolls - Dead Sea Scrolls

As a biblical scholar, I can testify that the Dead Sea Scrolls are of the utmost importance to our understanding of the origins of Christianity. But even I was somewhat taken back by the significance attached to the Scrolls in a recent supermarket tabloid: "A nuclear disaster will leave millions dead or homeless and America will find itself going to war in 1992, according to predictions gleaned from the mysterious Dead Sea Scrolls .... the scrolls include eye-popping predictions for top celebrities like Kevin Costner and Madonna" (Sun, February 18, 1992).

How did the Dead Sea Scrolls, the fragmentary literary remains of the "Qumran" community and the object of so much arcane scholarship, end up in the supermarket check-out aisle? It's a long story, which I will get to later. But this most recent outbreak of interest in the Scrolls can be traced to the mid-1980s, when Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, realized that scrolls from Qumran cave 4--where the community had deposited its library before the destruction of its center by the Romans (A.D. 68)--were being withheld from the public by members of the international team of scholars who were sitting on texts entrusted to them for publication thirty years earlier. This small clique had delayed publication because they wanted to write lengthy commentaries on each text. They were preserving their own turf. Shanks brought the matter to the attention of the public-at-large and began a campaign against such team-tactics. But let's go back to the beginning.

When the scrolls of Qumran Cave 1 were discovered in 1947, they were said to be "the greatest manuscript discovery in modem times." So William Foxwell Albright, renowned Palestinian archaeologist of Johns Hopkins University, hailed them. He did not then know what was yet to come. Within the following decade, ten other Qumran caves yielded written materials, dating from the end of the third century B.C. up to shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem (A.D. 70), and they confirmed his original assessment.

In Cave 1 were discovered seven major scrolls and some seventy other fragmentary Hebrew and Aramaic texts. The major scrolls included two copies of Isaiah, the Manual of Discipline, the War Scroll, Thanksgiving Psalms, a commentary on Habakkuk, and the Genesis Apocryphon. Cave 2 yielded eighteen fragmentary Old Testament texts and fifteen nonbiblical fragments of sectarian writings. From Cave 3 came three fragmentary biblical texts, eleven nonbiblical writings, and a copper plaque recording buried treasures. In Cave 5 were found eight fragmentary Old Testament texts and eighteen nonbiblical writings. Cave 6 yielded seven biblical texts and twenty-four nonbiblical fragments, again of sectarian character. Cave 7 produced a surprise: nineteen Greek fragments, two of biblical writings, and seventeen of contested identification. In Cave 8 were discovered four fragmentary Old Testament texts and one nonbiblical hymn. From Cave 9 came a tiny Hebrew papyrus, and from Cave 10 an ostracon inscribed with a Hebrew name. In all, Caves 1-3, 5-10 yielded 212 documents.

In 1956 Bedouin discovered Cave 11 and rather thoroughly cleaned it out. It yielded twenty-three manuscripts, including a Psalms Scroll, the sectarian Temple Scroll, and others.

Cave 4 (4Q) had been discovered by Bedouin in 1952; they began to clean it out but were eventually stopped by Jordanian authorities so that archaeologists could control the excavation. This cave proved to be most important. From 4Q has come not one complete scroll, but, according to the official report, "at least 15,000 fragments," a highly conservative figure. These fragments were brought to the "scrollery" of the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem; others were bought from the Bedouin. Then began the giant jigsaw puzzle. An international and intercredal team of seven scholars was set up to work on the puzzle and prepare the texts for publication in the Clarendon series, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert [DJD].

By June 1960, 511 4Q texts had been identified; today that number has reached 575. When added to 212 from the minor caves and 23 from Cave 11, the total number of Qumran texts is about 810. About 40 percent of these have seen publication. All the 212 texts from Caves 1-3, 5-10 have been published; most of the 23 texts from Cave 11 have appeared, and the remaining few are to appear shortly.

But 4Q has been the major problem, partly because of their jigsaw puzzle nature. Polish scholar Jozef T. Milik and British scholar John M. Allegro published fifty-nine texts in the definitive DJD series, and the Frenchman Maurice Baillet published thirty-nine others. Milik and other members of the team have issued preliminary studies of other 4Q texts. Harvard graduate students have been given 4Q texts for their dissertations, of which about two dozen have been issued in some form. Yet one still awaits the publication of roughly 70 percent of 4Q texts. The delay in the publication of such important documents has created the recent brouhaha about the Scrolls.

Matters came to a head a year ago when, as the New York Times (September 5, 1991) headlined it, "Computer Hacker Bootlegs Version of Dead Sea Scrolls." Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin G. Abegg, of Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, had reconstructed 4Q texts from a preliminary concordance of nonbiblical texts. That concordance was begun by me in 1957-58, working as an assistant to the team in the scrollery; the task of putting the words of nonbiblical texts on cards was continued by Raymond E. Brown and Willard G. Oxtoby. In the mid-1980s the cards were photographed and bound into several volumes. A copy of it came to Hebrew Union College, where Wacholder and Abegg used it to reconstruct the texts of as-yet-unpublished 4Q documents. Then the Biblical Archaeology Society of Washington, D.C., published the first fascicle of Wacholder and Abegg's reconstructed texts, A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls.

In September 1991, William A. Moffett, director of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, announced that he would make available to scholars photographs of unpublished texts, of which the library had copies. Though that decision caused a storm of protest--from the scholars to whom the materials had been entrusted and from the Israel Antiquities Authority--nothing could be done about it. Eventually the Israel Antiquities Authority modified its position and permitted scholars access to photographs under its control. In November 1991 the Biblical Archaeology Society published a two-volume Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. Robert H. Eisenman and James M. Robinson), containing 1,787 photographs of 4Q texts. Thus the majority of those documents became available to anyone who could read and decipher them. One might have thought that with this the brouhaha would have died, but no.

In early November 1991, Eisenman claimed that he had discovered among texts made available by the Huntington Library one (4Q285) that "describes a |leader of the community' being |put to death' and mentions |piercings' or |wounds'... [and] uses messiah-related terms such as |the staff,' |the Branch of David' and the |Root of Jesse"' (the Washington Post, September 8, 1991). A press release at that time from the State University of California, Long Beach, where Eiseman teaches, said that "The text is of the most far-reaching significance because it shows that whatever group was responsible for these writings was operating in the same general scriptural and messianic framework of early Christianity." As might have been expected, there is no mention in the text of a "messiah," and the crucial line in it reads, not "they put to death the leader of the community," but "the prince of the congregation will put [or has put] him to death" ("him" being unknown because of the broken state of the fragment). Moreover, it is far from certain that "the Branch of David" (a messianic title used in other Qumran texts), follows as an appositive of "the prince of the congregation," an authority figure otherwise known in Qumran texts, but not as a messiah. Yet even if this text did refer to a messiah, it would simply fit in with other Qumran writings that mention the expectation of "a prophet and the messiahs of Aaron and Israel," a well-known tenet of Qumran eschatology. That it has anything "to do with Christian origins in Palestine" is a figment of Eisenman's imagination.

Then came the humdinger, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (Summit Books, 1992), by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. Inspired by Eisenman's opposition to what he has called the "consensus" among interpreters who hold that the Scrolls have nothing directly to do with Christianity, the authors claim that the real culprit behind the delay in publishing the 4Q texts was the Vatican, which feared that the Scrolls contained material detrimental to Catholic faith and was seeking to suppress such information. Their accusation that the Biblical Commission and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger were dictating policy to the Catholic members of the international team is ridiculous--sheer humbug! The "deception" in all of this is the Baigent-Leigh book itself. (See my article, America, February 15, 1992.)

Last June, HarperSan Francisco published Barbara Thiering's latest book, Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a masterpiece of sensationalism (Jesus crucified at Qumran, secretly revived at the Dead Sea, and wed to a woman bishop in A.D. 50)--sheer hokum! It is a classic example of what authors will do to make a buck out of a topic so titillating.

Such a respected journalist as Richard N. Ostling (or his editors) could not resist headlining his article in Time (September 21, 1992) "Is Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls?" Yet even Ostling had to admit "that none of the Dead Sea Scrolls mentions Jesus by name" and the Qumran "writings ... clearly reflect the Jewish situation in the second century before Christ." That the Scrolls might somehow "foreshadow Jesus" (Ostling's thesis) surprises no one acquainted with them. But that 4Q521 refers "to the coming messiah," says that he "will |heal the wounded, resurrect the dead [and] preach glad tidings to the poor,"' and thus resembles "the words of Jesus in the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4)" is another matter. The subject of the preceding sentences in lines 3-5 is not "the messiah," but "the Lord" (adonay). The Lord may send a messenger who will do such things, which are described in phrases echoing Isaiah (61: 1; 35:5-6; 29:18-19--not messianic passages). That the Qumran community used these phrases in reference to an expected messiah is admissible, but that does not mean that this Qumran text refers to Jesus the Messiah. In short, while you don't expect much from tabloids like the Sun, it's remarkable to find such dubious hypotheses retailed by the responsible press.

The significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls is hard to underestimate. In unexpected ways they have contributed to our knowledge in four areas related to the Bible: ancient Palestinian languages (Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew), the history of ancient Judaism, the transmission of the Old Testament text, and the Jewish background of Christianity.

1. A gap that long existed in our knowledge about the languages of Palestine in the first centuries B.C. and A.D. has now been filled. We have learned much about the trilingualism of the people of that time and place. The Scrolls have also revealed literary activity in Aramaic and Hebrew in the period between the final redaction of the Hebrew Scriptures (ca. 165 B.C.) and the beginning of rabbinic literature (ca. A.D. 200). This is particularly noteworthy for Aramaic. Qumran writings now clearly manifest considerable Aramaic literary creativity: Genesis Apocryphon, Enochic literature, Targum of Job, and other texts of lesser moment.

2. The Scrolls have contributed to our knowledge of ancient Palestinian Judaism. Whether one accepts or not the identification of the Qumran community as Essene, these documents have supplied us with firsthand information about a form of life, a theology, and a mode of biblical interpretation in use among Palestinian Jews from roughly 150 B.C. to A.D. 68. Jewish to the hilt, these pre-Christian Palestinians led an ascetic communal life, with at least some of them celibate. The Scrolls dispel the tendency, once, to refer to the Judaism of this period, especially in its pharisaic-prerabbinic form, as "normative." They give striking support to the account of Josephus about the different "sects" among Palestinian Jews, that is, to the pluriformity of Judaism in his day.

Initially, scholars thought that the Qumran community was Essene. Either such Essenes emerged from the Hasidim ("Pious Ones"), who at first associated with the Maccabees (1 Macc. 2:42), but broke with them when they became more politically oriented and the high priesthood was usurped by one of their kings. Or the Essenes emerged from Jews who had returned from Babylon in the second century, having heard about the success of the Maccabean movement and the restoration of theocracy in the land. Having emigrated from Babylon, they did not find things in "Israel" as ideal or as traditional as expected; so they broke with the Jerusalem priesthood and its tainted Temple-service to withdraw to a desert retreat to establish there "a trustworthy house in Israel."

This Essene identification of the Qumran community has recently been questioned because of text 4QMMT, miqsat ma ase hattorah, which is still officially unpublished. A samizdat form reveals how it stresses the legal prescriptions which the Qumran Jews insisted on against some opponents. On the basis of this text some have claimed that the community was Sadducee rather than Essene. That identification, however, raises more problems than it solves; the best solution is still the Essene identification.

3. The Scrolls have also taught us much about the history of the transmission of Old Testament texts. Forms of the Hebrew Scriptures found in the Qumran Scrolls now take us back more than a thousand years before the time of the oldest manuscripts known prior to 1947. They attest to the fidelity with which scribes copied the biblical text over the centuries. Isaiah scroll A from Cave 1 preserves all sixty-six chapters, save for a few words lost in some columns, and is dated to 100 B.C. It contributed only thirteen paltry text-changes to the translation of Isaiah in the RSV of 1952. Among the 127 biblical texts of 4Q every book of the Hebrew canon is represented save Esther.

But the texts have also brought to light unsuspected recensions of some biblical books. Fragments of 1-2 Samuel and Jeremiah have revealed forms of these books that differ from the medieval Masoretic text-tradition. One text supplies a shorter Hebrew form of Jeremiah, previously known in the Greek Septuagint. Another text contains the repetitious and expanded form of Exodus previously known in the Samaritan Pentateuch.

4. Perhaps most important of all is the impact that the Scrolls have made on the study of the Palestinian Jewish matrix of Christianity. So far no mention is made in any Qumran document of Christians, of Jesus, or even of John the Baptist, partly because the texts come from pre-Christian centuries, or from the early part of the first Christian century.

In 1972 the Spaniard Jose O'Callaghan startled the scholarly world by claiming to have identified tiny Greek fragments of Cave 7 as New Testament texts, in particular 7Q5 as Mark 6:52-53. Yet apart from two German writers who have supported O'Callaghan, such an identification of these scraps has fallen on deaf scholarly ears. They are so tiny and contain so few letters that they could be fragments of almost anything. Again, Australian Barbara Thiering has tried to interpret the Qumran texts as speaking covertly of John the Baptist, Jesus, and Christians. For her John would be the Teacher of Righteousness, Jesus the Wicked Priest. But her contentions ride roughshod over archaeological evidence connected with the texts and their palaeographic and radiocarbon dating. Similarly, Robert H. Eisenman has long been ignoring these recognized methods of dating and maintaining "the controversial theory that the Scrolls were written by a Jewish sect that was somehow connected to the movement that spawned Christianity" (the New York Times, November 8,1991). Despite such maverick claims, scholars today recognize that the Scrolls have shed light in unexpected ways on the Palestinian matrix of many things in the New Testament. This should surprise no one, for Jesus of Nazareth was a Palestinian Jew, and the Scrolls furnish firsthand evidence about the milieu in which Christianity came into being.

A Qumran collection of beatitudes shows that the way the Matthean and Lucan Jesus uttered the beatitudes in a group (Matt. 5:3-11; Luke 6:20-22) follows a well-established Jewish pattern. Again, the title "Son of God" is used of Jesus in New Testament writings. It occurs, of course, in the Old Testament: for angels, the people of Israel collectively, the king on the Davidic throne, and even for an individual upright Jew. But now this title has turned up in a striking form in a first-century B.C. Aramaic fragment (4Q246). Because the text is broken, the person of whom the title is used is unknown: "[X] shall be great upon the earth, 10 King! All (peoples) shall] make [peace], and all shall serve [him. He shall be called the son of] the [G]reat [God], and by his name shall he be named. He shall be hailed the Son of God, and they shall call him Son of the Most High." This text[s] provide the background for Luke 1:32-35, the words of Gabriel to Mary in the infancy narrative.

These four areas, therefore, underscore why the Scrolls merit scholarly attention. But I doubt whether the Sun, or Madonna, for that matter, will be interested in such things. And as for some of those who go by the name of scholars, they might just as well publish in the Sin.

Joseph P. Clancy

The Resurrection of the Words

Quiet-voiced ironists still rule the day. They deconstruct the texts we trusted in. Those words must end their dancing, come what may. Their fine contraptions catch no flies. A grey Mirror is all the spider self can spin. Quiet-voiced ironists rule the day: There's no there there to celebrate, they say. Just as we're on the brink of giving in Our words insist on dancing, come what may. They proclaim a world. They bid us to obey The loves that call us, and the voice within, Though quiet-voiced ironists may rule the day. Julian of Norwich heard that Voice gainsay Despair. She could not doubt its origin. It set her words to dancing, come what may. "The worst has already happened," she heard Him say, "And that has been repaired." Faith's where poems begin. When quiet-voiced ironists rule the day, The Word will go on dancing, come what may.

JOSEPH A. FITZMYER, S.J., is professor emeritus of biblical studies, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C, and author of The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study Scholars Press, 1990) and of Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls (Paulist, 1992).

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