With the war between Jews and Arabs threatening, in 1948 Mar Athanasius arranged for his treasure to be smuggled out of Jerusalem to Lebanon and later in January 1949 he took his Scrolls to the United States. Wishing to turn old inscribed leather into cash, but finding most libraries and museums too shy to buy them because archaeological finds were considered state property in most Middle Eastern countries, Mar Athanasius first sought publicity by allowing the Scrolls to be exhibited in various American museums, but at the end put this advertisement in the Wall Street Journal: ‘For sale: biblical manuscripts dating back to at least 200 BC, an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution’. An anonymous buyer, secretly acting for the State of Israel, acquired the four Scrolls for $250,000, a quarter of the archbishop’s original asking price, but still somewhat in excess of the sum of 24 Palestinian dinars Kando had been given to buy them from the Bedouin. So in 1954 all seven of the manuscripts and some fragments, removed from the cave by the Taamire goatherds, were reunited in Israeli Jerusalem, ultimately to be housed in the newly built Shrine of the Book. The seventh and as yet unopened Scroll, first designated as the Lamech document with the help of a detached fragment bearing the name of this antediluvian patriarch, was ultimately given the title of the Genesis Apocryphon, after Israeli technical experts had managed to unroll it.
2. Identifying the Manuscript Cave
Neither the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, nor the French École Biblique, the chief European archaeological institution in Arab Jerusalem, felt any urge to find out where the Scrolls came from. The initiative to do so came from a Belgian member of the United Nations Armistice Observer Corps, Captain Philip Lippens (whom I had the chance to meet and congratulate at the 1954 Journées Bibliques at Louvain). Bored by doing nothing, apparently he was looking for some excitement and persuaded Brigadier Norman Lash, a British senior officer of the Arab Legion of Jordan, to dispatch a small unit of soldiers in search of the mysterious cave out of which Muhammed edh-Dhib had lifted his seven Scrolls. They soon found the spot. Raised from their torpor by the news of the discovery of the cave, the head of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, the Englishman Lankester Harding, and the director of the École Biblique, the French Dominican Roland de Vaux, examined the cave and removed from it remains of pottery and hundreds of manuscript fragments, some of them detached from the Scrolls acquired by Mar Athanasius and Professor Sukenik. On the way to the cave, de Vaux and Harding noticed the ruins known as Khirbet Qumran, but assuming these to be the remains of a fourth-century CE rural fortress and as such unrelated to the Scrolls, they paid no attention to them. This was the first of a series of blunders. Khirbet Qumran, visited but never properly examined by earlier archaeologists, was to play a major role in the development of the Scrolls’ saga. A second blunder soon followed. In their formal report to the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres on 8 April 1949, de Vaux and Harding unhesitatingly stated that the pottery found in the cave was Hellenistic, and that this proved that all the manuscripts predated the beginning of the first century BCE. In their judgement, the history witnessed by the Scrolls belonged to the Hellenistic era, which terminated in Palestine in 63 BCE with the Roman conquest of Jerusalem by Pompey the Great.
However, the unchallenged reign of the archaeologists did not stretch beyond the publication of the first texts. In 1950, the three American scholars, Millar Burrows, John C. Trever and William H. Brownlee published with admirable speed a facsimile edition and transcription of the complete Isaiah Scroll and the Habakkuk Commentary, followed in the spring of 1951 by the Manual of Discipline. The release of the ancient texts was not held back until their editors were ready to issue them, furnished with translation, commentary and notes. The self-denial and scholarly generosity of the American trio deserves full admiration. Sukenik, who had already produced two preliminary Hebrew publications in 1948 and 1950, entitled Hidden Scrolls from the Judaean Desert I and II, also moved fast, but first illness and then death in 1953 prevented him from seeing his manuscripts properly published. His edition of the second Isaiah Scroll, the Thanksgiving Hymns and the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness appeared posthumously first in Hebrew in 1954 and then in English in 1955, equally without translation, commentary and notes. The best preserved sections of the Genesis Apocryphon followed in 1956 thanks to Nahman Avigad and Yigael Yadin. They included a facsimile reproduction and transliteration with facing English and modern Hebrew translations. A marvellous example of speed and scholarly devotion was set by these pioneers that future Scrolls editors, apart from those of the fragments from Cave 1 issued in 1955, were unwilling or perhaps unable to emulate.
The two Isaiah Scrolls and the scriptural section of the Habakkuk Commentary presented the dazed Scripture scholars from all four corners of the earth with biblical texts which were a millennium older than the Leningrad Codex which they had been accustomed to use (see chapter I, p. 11). They contained real variant readings, different from the traditional wording of the Bible, which was a hitherto unimaginable phenomenon. In their turn, the Habakkuk Commentary and the Manual of Discipline (later renamed Community Rule) opened up previously undreamed-of vistas into the life and history of an ancient Jewish religious community nearly contemporaneous with Jesus and the beginnings of the Church. Incidentally, the Scrolls also enabled experts to compare the chronological verdict of the archaeologists with the contents of the manuscripts themselves. Indeed, a leading French orientalist, André Dupont-Sommer of the Sorbonne, concluded against de Vaux’s pottery-based Hellenistic dating of the Scrolls (late second or early first century BCE) that the Habakkuk Commentary’s historical context extended into the Roman period, after 63 BCE. As a matter of fact, Dupont-Sommer was soon to launch the first Scrolls-based assault on the traditional explanation of the birth of the New Testament and Christianity. Others were to follow.
3. Ten More Caves Yield their Secrets
Cave 1 was just the start of the story. The Bedouin, roaming the desert and exploring the many holes in the cliffs both north and south of the original grotto of discovery, tumbled on further manuscript deposits: Cave 2, early in 1952, and Cave 6 later that year. They knew that de Vaux was a likely buyer of fragments and approached him one after another. During my four-week-long stay at the École Biblique in October 1952, I witnessed with my own eyes the way these oriental negotiations proceeded. The fragments were brought to the École in matchboxes. When the sellers realized that larger pieces of manuscript fetched a higher reward, they tried to stick them together with the edge of postage stamps, a method hardly more primitive than the use of Sellotape, of which some of the early western editors of de Vaux’s team were guilty.
Hoping to beat the Arabs at their game, the École Biblique, the Palestine Archaeological Museum and the American School of Oriental Research of Jerusalem ganged together to launch a joint survey of the cliffs in the neighbourhood of Qumran. They were at it from 10 to 29 March 1952 but, lacking the natural instinct of the Bedouin, they scored only one hit with written material: out of Cave 3 they proudly lifted the famous Copper Scroll in addition to a small number of tiny fragments. The Copper Scroll survived in two rolled-up sections, but these were so badly oxidized that they could not be opened. In consequence, the script embossed on the inner side of the copper sheets was not revealed until 1955 when an expert metallurgist, Professor H. Wright Baker of Manchester, invented an instrument which enabled him to cut the two scrolls into twenty-three vertical slices. But even before the hidden contents could be deciphered, a perspicacious German scholar, Karl Georg Kuhn, managed to deduce from a few broken-off bits that this document dealt with hiding places of silver and gold. Not surprisingly in 1960, the Copper Scroll triggered off a treasure hunt conducted by John Allegro, the chief maverick of de Vaux’s recruits. One of the London papers financed the expedition, which ended in a total fiasco.
The leaders of the search party paid no notice to cavities in the nearby marl terrace. They assumed, foolishly
as it turned out, that these were due to erosion by rainwater and did not even bother to inspect them. ‘In this we erred,’ was de Vaux’s marvellous understatement by which he swept under the carpet the implications of yet another colossal blunder. In reality, there were no less than six cavities in the marl terrace – Caves 4, 5, 7–10 – containing written material as well as pottery. On its own, Cave 4 yielded several tens of thousands of manuscript fragments, all of which were later picked up by the more businesslike Bedouin. Today, scholars believe that Cave 4 was either the library of a community or their manuscript storehouse in which the scrolls lay deposited on wooden shelves. The neighbouring Cave 7 was another curiosity in that it housed only Greek texts which were rare at Qumran. Unfortunately, most of the seventeen tiny papyrus fragments proved unidentifiable, but a few created a major storm when some twenty years later they were claimed by a Spanish Jesuit with the odd Irish name of José O’Callaghan and a few like-minded scholars to belong to the Gospel of Mark and other New Testament writings (see chapter IX, pp. 223–4).
The last significant scrolls’ find happened at the beginning of 1956 in Cave 11, about a mile north of the Qumran site. The Bedouin were once again lucky and put their hands on four scrolls and a good many assorted fragments. Among the manuscripts figured a substantial portion of the biblical Psalms, interspersed with non-biblical poems, some known, some unknown; part of the book of Leviticus written in the old Hebrew script; and sections of an Aramaic translation or Targum of the Book of Job. However, the crowning glory of them all was the Temple Scroll, measuring nearly 30 feet when unrolled, quite a bit longer than the big Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1, whose sixty-six chapters scarcely amount to 24 feet. The Temple Scroll, describing the architectural details and ceremonies of the Jerusalem sanctuary, was kept in Kando’s house in Bethlehem in a Bata shoebox concealed under the floor until the beginning of June 1967 when in the course of the Six Day war Yigael Yadin prevailed on the Israeli army to find this elusive manuscript. Yadin reports that it was purchased for the State of Israel with the help of a cheque for $75,000 signed by Mr Leonard Wolfson, now Lord Wolfson.
All counted, the eleven Qumran caves yielded twelve scrolls: Isaiah A and B, the Commentary of Habakkuk, the Community Rule, the Genesis Apocryphon, the Hymns Scroll and the War Scroll came from Cave 1; the Copper Scroll from Cave 3; the Palaeo-Hebrew Leviticus, the Psalms Scroll, the Job Targum and the Temple Scroll from Cave 11. Add to these the many thousands of fragments, representing over 900 separate original works, with a quarter of them biblical, and 50 per cent belonging to the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha and other known or unknown Jewish religious writings, while a special group, the final quarter of the total harvest, preserved the literature of a religious community, most likely the Essenes as I will try to show in chapter VIII.
Of the Apocrypha previously known from the Greek Bible, Qumran has revealed a Hebrew extract from the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) included in the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11. Largish fragments of seven columns of the same Hebrew ben Sira have also survived at Masada, predating the capture of the fortress by the Romans in 73/74 CE. Moreover, fragments of the Book of Tobit represent one Hebrew and three Aramaic manuscripts from Cave 4. Among the Pseudepigrapha, fragments of the Book of Jubilees, previously available in an incomplete Greek and a full Ethiopic translation, have been discovered in Hebrew in Qumran Caves 1, 2, 4 and 11, and Aramaic fragments of the Book of Enoch and the Testament of Levi come from Cave 4.
As far as languages are concerned, a handful of the texts are in Greek, about 20 per cent of the material is in Aramaic, and the rest, nearly four-fifths of the total, in Hebrew. They are mostly written on leather (specially prepared sheep or goat skin), some (14 per cent) on papyrus and a handful on potsherds to which we have to add two copper sheets. The scribes used vegetable ink kept in inkwells, three of which were found in a specific area of the building complex, and another at Ain Feshkha. All the manuscripts and fragments came from the caves. The only written documents yielded by the Qumran ruins themselves – two ostraca or inscribed potsherds – were accidentally discovered much later, in 1996, concealed in one of the boundary walls. Their significance is hotly argued about in scholarly circles (see chapter VII, pp. 169–170). Attempts to date the manuscripts have been made by means of palaeography (the study of ancient Hebrew handwriting) or through Carbon-14 tests. Palaeographical study of the Qumran scripts, in the absence of manuscripts contemporaneous with the scrolls or earlier than them, had to rely, in addition to the Nash papyrus, on inscriptions and ostraca. The result obtained placed the various specimens between circa 200 BCE and 70 CE. These findings were indirectly confirmed with the help of the leather and papyrus documents, many of them dated letters and contracts, found in caves in other areas of the Judaean desert and belonging to the first and second centuries CE (see Cross (1961), pp. 132–202). The first radiocarbon analysis was performed in 1951 on a piece of textile used for wrapping the Scrolls. The result arrived at was 33 CE (or 24 CE) plus or minus 200 years. Further, more advanced tests were made in the 1990s on tiny manuscript fragments, placing the bulk of the manuscripts to the last two centuries of the pre-Christian era and the rest to the first century CE, thus confirming the palaeographical dating (see Boniani et al. (1991) pp. 25–32; Jull et al. (1995), pp. 11–19).
4. The Excavations of the Ruins of Qumran (1951–6)
Having allowed nearly three years to elapse after his cursory glance at the ruins close to the first manuscript cave, and while scroll fragments found in other places (in the caves of Wadi Murabba‘at, for example) began to be peddled by the Bedouin in Jerusalem, in November 1951 Roland de Vaux decided to investigate the site of Qumran itself.
Khirbet Qumran was visited by archaeologists several times during the previous 100 years. In 1851 the renowned French scholar Louis-Félicien Caignart de Saulcy suggested that Qumran was the site of the biblical Gomorrha (the Arabs pronounce the place name as Goomran). Charles Clermont-Ganneau, one of the greatest Palestinian archaeologists of the nineteenth century, surveyed the area in 1874; he declared de Saulcy’s Gomorrha theory unsustainable and suggested after a brief inspection of the adjacent cemetery of some 1,000 graves that the bodies buried there were those of members of a pre-Islamic Arab tribe. Another cursory examination of the site followed in 1914 by the famous German Aramaist and Palestine scholar Gustaf Dalman. Judging from the architectural remains and from the aqueduct bringing water to the establishment, Dalman surmised that the ruins were those of a Roman fortress, a view repeated without further checking by Harding and de Vaux in 1949.
The first season of excavation at Qumran lasted from 24 November to 12 December 1951 and led to a complete reshuffling of de Vaux’s ideas. After slightly over two weeks of digging (the results of which I could observe at my first visit to Qumran in October 1952), he concluded that the site was occupied both in the first century BCE and the first century CE, and was abandoned during the great Jewish rebellion against Rome between 66 and 70 CE. Among other things, Roman coins from the first century CE necessitated this redating.
Nearly a year before my actual visit to Qumran, I had the good fortune of being briefed about the new status quo by de Vaux’s colleague, Dominique Barthélemy, who came to see me in Paris shortly before Christmas 1951. The detailed information I had received from him enabled me to reorient my doctoral thesis on the historical background of the Scrolls, taking into account de Vaux’s latest unpublished finds.
Reporting the results of the first season of excavations at Qumran, Roland de Vaux was obliged to eat humble pie and admit his multiple faux pas before the assembled French scholarly elite at the session of 4 April 1952 of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris. ‘Je me suis trompé [I have erred]… Je me suis trompé… Je me suis trompé…’, he confessed according to the minutes of the Académie. De Vaux made many valuable contributions to Qumran archaeology, but they were mixed with mistakes mainly attributable to haste.
By tha
t time, Father de Vaux also subscribed to the theory that the ancient inhabitants of the Qumran ruins belonged to the Jewish sect of the Essenes described by the first century CE writers Philo, Pliny and Josephus, a view first mooted by E. L. Sukenik, and vigorously argued from 1950 onwards by A. Dupont-Sommer. The issue will be discussed in detail in chapter VIII (pp. 191–202).
Not counting the survey of the caves in the cliff, four more seasons of archaeological exploration followed the 1951 initial excavation of the Khirbet Qumran ruins, all directed by de Vaux: 9 February to 3 April 1953 (second season); 15 February to 15 April 1954 (third season); 2 February to 6 April 1955 (fourth season); 18 February to 28 March 1956 (fifth and final season). A further dig was conducted 2 kilometres further south at the farm associated with the Qumran establishment, at Ain Feshkha, from 25 January to 21 March 1958. Fifty years after the digs, and nearly four decades after de Vaux’s death in 1971, the full publication of the archaeological report is still awaited.
The Story of the Scrolls Page 3
