THE DISCOVERY OF THE SCROLLS
The tale of Qumran goes back to a legend about a Bedouin sheepherder named Muḥammad Aḥmed el-Ḥāmed, who was nicknamed edh-Dhib, or “the Wolf.” The Bedouin are nomadic and seminomadic tribes of ethnic Arabs who typically occupy the Arabian Peninsula. In my interactions with them, I’ve found them to be suspicious of city life, warmly hospitable, and possessing a deep, proud sense of tradition and tribal customs.
There are several Bedouin families of various tribes located east of Jerusalem whose tents are visible as you descend down the Ma‘ale ’Adumim, the section of Highway 1 leading east of Jerusalem down toward the Dead Sea. There are also several Bedouin families who operate tours in Wadi Rum on the way from ‘Aqaba to Petra in Jordan. I took a Bedouin tour of Wadi Rum with my Iowa students one summer following a season excavating at Tel ‘Azeqah. We spent the day hiking the Jordanian desert, climbing on mind-blowing rock formations and through deep desert canyons, and in the evening we danced the night away in a Bedouin camp. We fell asleep under a blanket of stars in a traditional Bedouin enclosure on the warm desert floor with bellies full of lamb and roasted vegetables that had been cooked in an underground barbecue called a zarb. I kid you not; you must do this at least once in your life.
A Bedouin cook at Rum Stars Camp in Wadi Rum cooks dinner in a zarb, which uses the warmth of the desert sand to barbecue food.
Returning to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the story goes that some time in the winter of 1946 or early in 1947, Muḥammad the Wolf and some pals were out grazing his sheep on the lands just below the marl cliffs (the lime-rich mudstone that indicates the cliffs’ underwater history) that contain what is now Cave 1. On that fateful day, one adventuring member of Muḥammad the Wolf ’s flock wandered up into the cave. Climbing the precipitous scarp leading up to the cave, Muḥammad the Wolf threw a rock into the cave in an attempt to scare the wayward sheep out of the cave. He heard something shatter! Curious as to what he’d broken, Muḥammad the Wolf climbed up into the cave and discovered that he had accidentally shattered a ceramic jar, which had apparently been exposed, but yet (suspiciously) not been shattered (or even noticed) for two millennia—until now.
For this reason, some argue that parts of the story of the discovery of the scrolls were invented to cover up the fact that Bedouin regularly seek out (read: loot) caves, ancient settlements, and excavation sites in order to find archaeological artifacts that can be sold to antiquities dealers (both licensed and on the black market) for a profit. This still happens today, and perhaps more so now than in decades past.
At Tel ‘Azeqah, where I excavate with my Iowa students, we hire a guard to watch the site at night so that looters don’t steal the exposed in situ objects that are in the process of being excavated. One night, our guard never showed up, and that very evening looters came to our site and wrested from it a number of exposed vessels from a productive archaeological square. In the morning, we discovered small holes that pockmarked the square, the result of looters with metal detectors and hand spades looking for coins that can be harvested and sold on eBay or on the black market. This happens to every archaeological site every year. So the tale about a shepherd “accidentally” discovering a jar and scrolls in caves may have been concocted to disguise the fact that the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls were, to be blunt, looted.1
Subsequent rummaging led the Bedouin herdsmen to discover ten jars, several of which contained rolled-up pieces of leather. Muḥammad the Wolf took the scrolls to a Bethleḥem antiquities dealer named Ibrahim ‘Ijha, who returned them, fearing they were stolen from a synagogue.
Muḥammad the Wolf then took the scrolls to a Bethleḥem cobbler named Khalil Eskander Shahin, nicknamed “Kando,” who also dealt in antiquities on the side. Kando saw the Semitic writing on the scrolls and immediately purchased the scrolls from Muḥammad the Wolf.
Because of the prospective danger of possessing potentially illicit antiquities originating from desert Bedouin, Kando had a colleague sell the scrolls on his behalf, and soon four scrolls were purchased by the local leader of the Syrian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, also referred to as “Mar Samuel,” for £24 ($97 U.S. at the time). This buyer, Mar Samuel, could not read all the ancient characters, and so in November of 1947 he invited Hebrew University professor of archaeology Eleazar Sukenik to Jerusalem to examine and, he hoped, decipher the scrolls and confirm their authenticity and value, so that Mar Samuel could sell them, with the proceeds going to his church.
Sukenik was so taken with the scrolls and their significance that he purchased two of the remaining three scrolls (1QH, or Hodayot, also called the Hymns Scroll, and 1QM, or Milḥamah, the War Scroll) being shopped around by dealers on behalf of the newly formed State of Israel. Many Jews saw tremendous symbolism in the timing of the purchase of these newly discovered scrolls, as they were acquired on November 29, 1947—the very day that the United Nations voted in favor of UN Resolution 181(II), the Partition Plan for Palestine, which created the modern Jewish State of Israel.2
This is why, in addition to their scholarly value, the Dead Sea Scrolls have such national value to Israel; they are understood as symbolic refounding documents of the Jewish state. In the same way that the earliest Dead Sea Scrolls were composed during the last time an independent state of Israel existed (i.e., the Hasmonean period beginning in 141 BCE), so too does the discovery and reacquisition of the Dead Sea Scrolls represent to many the refounding of an independent Jewish state.
About a month after the UN voted to partition Palestine, Sukenik purchased the third remaining scroll, which was a second copy of the biblical book of Isaiah (1QIsab). Meanwhile, Mar Samuel feared that the war in Palestine would deter the highest bidders from Europe and America from purchasing his scrolls, so to maximize his profits he smuggled the scrolls to Beirut, Lebanon.3 Unsatisfied with the bids that were coming in for his scrolls in Beirut, Mar Samuel then smuggled the scrolls to the safety of Worcester, Massachusetts, and later to Washington D.C., where he put them on display in the Library of Congress to attract buyers.
Still unsatisfied with the offers, Mar Samuel did what you do when you wanted to sell something in the 1950s: he placed an ad in the paper. On June 1, 1954, an ad in the Wall Street Journal read:
The ad placed in the Wall Street Journal by Mar Samuel attempting to sell the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It is still debated today whether this ad in the paper was an act of lunacy or genius. As it turned out, Mar Samuel did end up attracting some attention for his scrolls. Eleazar Sukenik’s son, Yigael Yadin, a recently retired Israel Defense Forces general, had used his keen knowledge of the land of Israel to start a second career as an archaeologist. Yadin wanted Mar Samuel’s scrolls, but couldn’t simply make a bid on them, as once Mar Samuel realized that the newly formed Israeli government was in the market for his scrolls, the price would skyrocket.
Yadin used intermediaries who posed as representatives for a private collector to negotiate the purchase. He also employed his friend, Harry Orlinsky, who, under the name “Mr. Green,” authenticated the scrolls as worthy of the asking price. When the charade was complete, Yadin had purchased Mar Samuel’s four scrolls: 1QIsaa, or the Great Isaiah Scroll, a copy of the book of the prophet Isaiah; 1QpHab, or the Commentary on Habakkuk; 1QS, the Manual of Discipline, which is also known as the Community Rule; and what is today known as 1QapGen, or the Genesis Apocryphon, an Aramaic and highly elaborative rewrite of the primordial and patriarchal stories from Genesis. Yadin paid $250,000 for the scrolls, the lion’s share of which was proudly contributed by David Samuel Gottesman, a Jewish philanthropist, who would later be appointed as one of the trustees of the Shrine of the Book.
And that was just the beginning. It wasn’t long before everyone’s attention turned toward the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran, buried atop a plateau next to a cluster of the scroll caves. It is this small settlement of Qumran to which we turn next.
TH
E EXCAVATION OF QUMRAN
It didn’t take long before official excavations were begun at Khirbet Qumran to determine if anything could be learned from the site sitting in the midst of the caves that had preserved the scrolls. It is here, with the archaeology of Qumran, which sits atop a plateau on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, that some of the nastiest battles in the history of biblical scholarship have taken place. These battles are shaped by one central question: Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
The famous Cave 4 at Qumran, as seen from the visitor’s viewpoint south of the Khirbet Qumran settlement.
The leaders of the first excavation of Qumran—Gerald Lankester Harding, a British archaeologist and director of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan from 1936 to 1956, and Father Roland de Vaux, director of the French Dominican École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem—began excavating Qumran in December 1951 and excavated the site for five seasons. It didn’t take long for Harding and de Vaux to form an opinion about the remains of Qumran.
In 1956, following a theory advanced by Eleazar Sukenik prior to the excavations, de Vaux endorsed what has come to be known as the Qumran-Essene Hypothesis, which postulates that a littleknown group of Jewish sectarians living between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea called the Essenes built the settlement at Qumran and wrote the scrolls that had been hidden in the caves surrounding the site. De Vaux argued that the residents of Qumran were responsible for the scrolls following his discovery of two inkwells in a room he dubbed the “Scriptorium” and another inkwell in an adjacent room. Thus, de Vaux concluded that the settlement at Qumran was a sectarian Jewish settlement built by highly observant religious Jews in the second century BCE who practiced communal living and self-subsistence and wrote and copied scrolls for their own personal study and governance. He maintained that members of the sect hid the scrolls in the nearby caves when the Romans invaded in 66 CE. The Romans attacked Qumran and the residents never returned to collect their hidden scrolls, which lay dormant until their auspicious discovery in 1947 by Muḥammad the Wolf (and the hordes of archaeologists, spelunkers, searchers, and scavengers who followed).
A view of the Qumran plateau visitor’s lookout from inside Cave 4.
Other scholars since de Vaux, including myself, disagree with the Qumran-Essene Hypothesis. Some scholars argue that, although sectarian Jews may have lived at Qumran, they may not have been as “monastic” as the Dominican Father de Vaux may have believed them to be. Other scholars and I believe that the site was initially built for an entirely different purpose, namely, as a Hasmonean military fort or lookout post, which was abandoned and later reoccupied by a Jewish sectarian group who may or may not have been the Essenes and who did not necessarily write all of the scrolls, but were perhaps responsible for writing or copying a few of them.
Another group of scholars argues that Qumran had nothing whatsoever to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and because of this the site should be interpreted secularly, without any sectarian understandings tainting its interpretation. They argue various Jewish refugees fleeing the destruction of Jerusalem placed the scrolls in caves along the shore of the Dead Sea, and that whatever was going on at Qumran had no connection to the scrolls.
So essentially the question—and the academic squabble—comes down to this: Were the Dead Sea Scrolls composed, copied, or collected at Qumran? Or did Jews who had nothing to do with Qumran hide them in the various caves? This question has been debated so vociferously that one participant in the debate actually crossed the line into cybercriminal activity.
THE CURSE OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
The blood sport that is Qumran scholarship and what many dub the “curse of the Dead Sea Scrolls” continue. The scrolls were at the center of a recent criminal court case that landed the son of one scholar who has written about the scrolls in prison!
I was personally involved in the case of Dr. Raphael Golb, a lawyer and the son of a University of Chicago specialist in medieval Judaism, Norman Golb, who was the author of a book entitled Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? In the book, Norman Golb, like many scholars before him, made arguments that contested the prevailing Qumran-Essene Hypothesis.4 The book was dismissed by most Qumran and scrolls scholars at the time—a fact that Norman Golb, and later his son, did not appreciate.
With the rise of the Internet, Norman Golb’s son began using the alias “Charles Gadda” and a number of other aliases in an attempt to advocate anonymously on his father’s behalf. Using these aliases, Raphael Golb created blog sites that criticized scholars working with a traveling exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls making its way through U.S. museums. Each new blog would be accompanied by a massive anonymous e-mail campaign targeting museums hosting scrolls exhibitions and universities where faculty affiliated with the exhibitions taught. The e-mails, addressed to any number of administrators at these institutions, criticized the scholars for essentially being wrong about Qumran (because they did not accept Norman Golb’s theories) and chastised the museums for not inviting Norman Golb to speak at them.
E-mails obtained from Raphael Golb’s computer during the police investigation included messages from his father, Norman Golb, and his mother offering advice and instructions about what to say and how to avoid getting caught. One e-mail from Raphael Golb to his mother read, “By the way, if Dad has some comment on the latest Charles Gadda exchange, he can send it through your email, that way there would be no trace of it in his account.”5 A response from his mother read, “We can’t send via Dad’s email so we’ll send via mine.”6 And however trollish this behavior may seem, his lack of success in promoting his father’s theory led him to cross the line into criminal activity.7
During the anonymous e-mail campaign, Raphael Golb used an alias to target one of his father’s old academic rivals, NYU’s Lawrence Schiffman, and accused him (anonymously, of course) of plagiarizing Norman Golb. Raphael Golb then engaged in activities that the State of New York determined to be criminal and for which he was charged, arrested, and found guilty.8
Raphael Golb was arrested by the NYPD on the morning of March 5, 2009, and charged with fifty-one felony and misdemeanor counts of identity theft, forgery, criminal impersonation, aggravated harassment, and the unauthorized use of a computer in his campaign against a number of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars, including Dr. Schiffman and me.9 Having been in the process of creating a 3-D virtual reality reconstruction of Qumran as part of my UCLA dissertation (with which Dr. Golb and his son disagreed), I was asked to provide reconstructions and movies to a number of museums hosting scrolls exhibitions.
When Raphael Golb began targeting me personally in his Internet campaign, I used my tech skills to track the massive list of aliases, e-mail addresses, and IP addresses he had used in his campaign against scroll scholars. I handed my findings over to the NYPD, and on September 24, 2010, I was asked to testify against Raphael Golb during his trial, in which I was cross-examined (and yelled at a lot) by none other than civil rights defense attorney Ron Kuby (of The Big Lebowski fame).
On September 30, 2010, Raphael Golb was found guilty of two felony and twenty-eight misdemeanor counts. He was later sentenced to six months in prison and automatically disbarred from the New York State Bar Association. Some of these charges were later overturned on appeal and Golb’s prison sentence was reduced to two months in prison and three years probation for being found guilty on nineteen counts of identity theft and criminal impersonation. As of the publication of this book, Raphael Golb is still out of prison pending multiple additional appeals.
Raphael Golb was sentenced to prison for criminal acts he committed against another scholar, which stemmed from a debate over who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. That is how crazy Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship got at its ugly apex. It also shows that the scrolls are a topic of great importance to a number of people, not just because of the implications of the archaeological debate, but because of how the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls fundamentally altered our perception of the creation o
f the Bible, which we’ll explore next.
HOW THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS AFFECT THE BIBLE
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls caused shock waves throughout the world of biblical studies because they not only changed the way we read the Bible; they quite literally changed what the Bible says! The Dead Sea Scrolls are both powerful and controversial, because they provide hard evidence that the text of the Bible was changed early and often. Although many people touted the discovery of the scrolls as evidence of the reliability of the text of the Bible, because well over 90 percent of the text from the copies of biblical books discovered among the scrolls is similar to the text of the Bibles we have today, the fact that they are not 100 percent identical proves the point that the text of the Bible has changed over time.
The Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate to us that the texts that became the Bible were literary attempts to convey ideas about God and his activity in history, and the words used to convey these ideas could (and did) vary from manuscript to manuscript. And this is okay!
The important thing to remember is that these corrections and changes were not made by skeptics and those who hated Scripture, but by those who gave their lives to preserve it. These copyists were faithful Jews. Copyists and editors changed the text based on a variety of factors from personal preference to the correction of perceived errors, but ultimately all changes were made in order to make the Bible align with what the authors of the scrolls believed. The Dead Sea Scrolls’ revelation about the changing nature of early biblical texts does not challenge the faith of Jews and Christians who read the Bible as a record of God’s activity in history. The scrolls do, however, destroy any lingering fundamentalist notion that the text of the Bible we have today is “inerrant” or “unchanged” over time, as I’ll demonstrate shortly.
The Cities That Built the Bible Page 20
