Monday, March 23, 2009

Thoughts About the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Redemption

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been the subject of much discussion and speculation since their discovery in 1947. For decades after their discovery, access to them was tightly controlled by a group of scholars that was predominantly Christian. This has always puzzled me. I watched a BBC documentary on You Tube in which an Israeli scholar examined a part of the Dead Sea Scrolls with a fond and tender familiarity. When she examined and discussed a fragment from the scrolls, it is almost as though she were discussing her ancestors, which she really was..

One of the Dead Sea Scrolls was a book of Isaiah which was essentially identical those read today. Other archaeologists have discovered phylacteries that were the same as those used by Jewish men during weekday prayers today. The latest hypothesis to come from Jews studying the Dead Sea Scrolls is that the Essenes may have never existed. Israel National News reports as follows.

An Israeli scholar on Jewish mysticism, Rachel Elior, has challenged the long-accepted theory that the Essenes sect authored the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls. She claims the supposed sect never existed and blames Jewish Roman historian Flavius Josephus for falsely recording the existence of the Essenes.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered approximately 60 years ago and include segments of the Bible as well as reports on communal living and a disastrous war. Scholars have described the Essenes as celibates who lived near the Qumran caves where a Bedouin shepherd found the scrolls. Elior, a scholar at Hebrew University, wrote in a book to be published next month that it is unreasonable to assume that observant Jews, as the Essenes are described, would not observe the Biblical commandment to “be fruitful and multiply.”

She maintained that if the Essenes indeed existed and drifted from accepted Jewish practice, they would have earned a place in other texts.

One theory is that the people who deposited the Dead Sea Scrolls were priestly members of the Sadducees, a Jewish sect that denied the Talmud and the oral law elucidating the Torah and that they had been banned from serving in the Temple.

Fortunately, microfilms have been made of the scrolls from Qumran. Now, Jewish scholars who had been shut out can employ study them, and contribute to the public's understanding of the time after the destruction of the Temple and the life of Jesus.

We are living in a time when Jewish classical commentaries are being translated into English as never before. Even though Christians differ with Jews on some passages relating to the messianic era, it is amazing how much Jewish biblical scholarship seems to be largely undiscovered in the Christian and non Jewish world.

I could complain about the vast realms of Jewish biblical scholarship that receives scant attention. I could complain about anti semitism, and I might be right. But I feel that a Greater Hand is at work here. When the world is ready, they will find that there are a lot of answers right in front of them.

When did people discover that the earth could be tenderly sifted to yield its secrets? I have always been fascinated by people who could make sense of a pottery shard or nails in a rotted beam. Years ago I saw the results of an archaeological dig in Norway. The people working on the dig painstakingly separated the layers of debris into different generations, each covering the one beneath it. There is something uniquely human about projecting human introspection onto the earth's crust.

I hope that there will be more discoveries like the one in Qumran. I fear that there are people who are so opposed to a Jewish presence in the Holy Land that they would destroy evidence that would come into their hands. this has already happened on the Temple Mount, where Muslim authorities doing constriction have pulverised artifacts with earth moving machinery. Something tells me that this disgraceful effort to make the earth itself bear false witness will come to naught.

Despite the dreadful mess we humans have made of our planet, we still have an amazing array of potentially redeeming qualities, from mercy to introspection, from wonder to regret. We dig not only for oil and gold. Many dig for truth as well.

Who would have imagined that the Berlin Wall would be torn down, that the mighty Soviet Union would crumble? There have been miracles before. I believe that more are to come. The main thing is not to be spectators. We must dig. We must build. We must have faith that the tomorrow that G-d has given us can be good.

Dead Sea Scrolls Documentary Part One

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