Not quite 2000 years ago, a group of Jewish faithful living in the desert outside Jerusalem hurriedly placed their life’s work into earthenware jars, hid them in caves and, more likely than not, died at the hands of Roman invaders. They were scribes–a community committed to purity and to producing replications of the Word of Yahweh–and would not have been equipped to fight. So when the Romans sacked Jerusalem in 70 AD and laid waste to the Temple, the Essene community at Qumran fared little better. For their scrolls, it was another story.

Fast forward a bit to 1947. A Bedouin goatherd and his flock roam the hills outside Jerusalem looking for food. At some point during his search he wanders into a shady cave. He’s looking for a moment’s reprieve from the desert heat, but instead finds potsherds and fragments of ancient documents. The Dead Sea Scrolls have returned to the memory of human kind from their long time of hiding.

Bottom line: a bored goatherd walks into a cave and makes one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time. The scrolls, which contain portions of every book of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) except Esther, instantly become the oldest copy of these writings in existence. The Leningrad Codex, which was the oldest existing Bible previous to the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, dates to around 1010. Which means the scrolls predate our oldest Biblical materials by 1000 years, and the interesting result is that the scrolls match our relatively modern translations remarkably well.

The scrolls are a simple enough business. Fragments of parchment covered in carefully ruled, infinitesimal first century Hebrew and Aramaic. They’ve been painstakingly placed between two layers of fine netting, surrounded by a line of minute stitches, and displayed in hushed rooms and in low light. In some ways, they are merely documents, and they are covered in words I could only hope to begin to read after many years of study. I crane my head over the glass case and imagine a Jewish scribe bending over this very same piece of work as he carefully copies the Word of God as it is read aloud to him and the other scribes in the dusty candle-lit room. These words were important enough for a community of people to spend their lives copying them with care, and to spend their last moments protecting them in the safety of nearby caves. And at some point, the existence of the scrolls passed out of human memory, and the Word of God was content to wait to be found in good time, until it could be read again. The Word of God is being read again by a very different world than that of the first century Essenes of Qumran, but a world no less in need of it.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 10:48 pm and is filed under From the nation of Indig. 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.