Thoughts on Qumran

Wow! I just realized that it has been half a month since I've posted on the blog...which likely means that the very few readers who I had have given up all hope. Ah well...if you're still out there, here are some more musings.

So I'm reading an interesting primer on the Qumran manuscripts -- otherwise known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Since I am pretty sure I'm going to be teaching ancient Jewish history one of these days, I need to bone up on a lot of the material that has been buried in the dusty back of my brain.

Reading Hartmut Stegemann's book The Library of Qumran has revealed many interesting aspects of the history of these incredible documents. Just to bring everybody up to speed, to review: the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of manuscripts dating from between the last century before the Common Era until the Jewish Wars around 70 CE that were discovered in a cave in 1947. These scrolls were uncovered in a series of caves around an area called Qumran near the northeastern shore of the Dead Sea. The scrolls are remarkable for any number of reasons, but some of the main ones are 1) the are the oldest preserved manuscripts of several Biblical texts, 2) they demonstrate a remarkable consistency with said texts, 3) they also contain several extra-canonical texts that exist solely in the scrolls themselves, 4) there are a huge number of them, an almost unheard of case of accidental preservation, and 5) they seem to document the community that produced them, a somewhat unusual, quasi-monastic community usually referred to as "Essenes," (which, as it turns out, is simply a mutated Greek form of the Hebrew word "Hasidim," -- not our furry-hat wearing friends, but the ancient hasidim, referred to repeatedly in rabbinic texts).

It is this last bit that has spurred the most interest from scholars and pseudo-scholars. About the people (or rather, men) who produced these scrolls there is precious little original information (although many of the contemporary texts -- most famously Josephus -- make reference to them), and so they are subject to all kinds of crazy interpretations. Some read the as proto- (or original) Christians, some as a strange messianic Jewish sect. The most likely interpretation to my amateur eyes would be that they were in fact a pietistic Jewish group, who sought an intensely purified life outside of contact with the contaminating aspects of culture -- in other words, a kind of Jewish monastic movement.

In reading Stegemann, however, what captured my imagination was the one thing that makes this community famous today -- and that is the scrolls themselves. Stegemann's description of the end of the Qumran community is extremely evocative. Like most of the Jewish communities during the conquest of Palestine by the Roman Legions in the 60s, Qumran was destroyed in its entirety in 68 as Vespatian's army marched from Jericho to the Dead Sea and then down the coast. It was wiped out, the attempt by its residents to defend the city a failure.

But before the community was destroyed, the residents did an extraordinary thing: when they saw that the Romans were on the way, knew that they were unlikely to survive the encounter, they took all of the scrolls that they had produced (as Stegemann suggests, the primary occupation of the settlement was the production of these sacred scrolls, both for the use by the community itself and for sale -- yet again making it resonant with a monastic community), and carried them as quickly as they could to caves in the surrounding hills. Some of the most important scrolls they hid first and well, but as the day progressed and panic over their approaching doom increased, they hid the scrolls more and more haphazardly. In the end, the community was destroyed, but the work of hiding the scrolls bore fruit.

Now, what got me thinking was one question: why? Why did they go to all this trouble? What was their aim in taking the time -- time they perhaps could have fled, could have fortified the settlement, or any other number of things -- to hid hundreds of pieces of parchment and papyrus?

Did they think that a survivor could come back for them, and reconstruct the community? Did they think that they might succeed in holding off the Romans, and didn't want their most precious possessions damaged in the struggle? Or, on the contrary, did they foresee what was in fact their ultimate fate, and truly hide the scrolls for posterity?

I admit I'm stymied. But it is a fascinating -- and chilling -- thing to consider.

Coda: The scrolls today are spread somewhat far and wide, due to the wild west-like atmosphere that prevailed during the course of their discovery (it was, after all, literally during the 1947-48 conflict that the scrolls were discovered -- not exactly the best scenario for an orderly archeological excavation). A good number of them -- including some of the most complete -- are in the possession of the Israel Museum, and some displayed at the Shrine of the Book (pictured). They are really worth a look. I'm amazed at this moment when I reflect on the fact that I walk within about 100 meters of those things almost every day, as I make my way to the archives to dig up my own (admittedly, much smaller!) little historical mysteries.