The Library of Qumran: On the Essenes, Qumran, John the Baptist, and Jesus
302
The Library of Qumran: On the Essenes, Qumran, John the Baptist, and Jesus
302Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802861672 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 04/29/1998 |
| Pages: | 302 |
| Sales rank: | 762,420 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.58(d) |
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THE LIBRARY OF QUMRAN
On the Essenes, Qumran, John the Baptist, and JesusBy Hartmut Stegemann
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 1993 Verlag Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau, GermanyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6167-2
Chapter One
Discoveries
At the northwest end of the Dead Sea, 12 kilometers south of Jericho and 32 kilometers north of the En Gedi oasis, lies a solitary set of ruins. Larger heaps of rubble, such as might represent an entire ancient city, are called tells by the Arabs, while smaller heaps, the ruins of only a few buildings, are called khirbeh.
From antiquity, the Bedouin have called this place in the vicinity of the Dead Sea Khirbet Qumran. The name Qumran may mean "moon hill," since the bright hilltop against the brownish-red countryside, as viewed from the Dead Sea, may once have reminded folk of the pale disk of the moon sinking behind the horizon. It may, however, simply mean "humpback hill," which would likewise appropriately designate the particular form of this pile of ruins. The pronunciation of the place name is koom-RAHN.
The area of the landscape on which Khirbet Qumran lies consists of one of the steep rock precipices of a low range of mountains forming a terrace on the threshold of the Judean Desert. It is a thick layer of marl that once arose from the deposits at the bottom of the Dead Sea. For scores of millennia, however, the surface of the Dead Sea has lain some 50 meters below this terrace and today is more than 400 meters below sea level. Flowing down from the western slopes, brooks, which appear in the rainy season, have eaten their way through the marl and thereby created the rugged Wadi Qumran. Ages ago the brooks had already cut through the terrace and gnawed their way into the side of the channel thus created. Like a giant's fingers, the brooks running from the terrace in the north reach down into the valley below. The Arabs call streams like these, which in the rainy season can transport roaring torrents of water into the valley but otherwise are dry, by the name of wadi. Israelis call the same natural phenomenon a nahal.
Perched atop the last ledge of the old marl terrace before it becomes a precipice plunging down to the Dead Sea, more than a kilometer from today's west bank of the Sea and high over the floor of Wadi Qumran, stands Khirbet Qumran. Nowadays Qumran is a tourist attraction, with an air-conditioned restaurant, a parking lot for buses, and even a few palm trees. Half a century ago—and for thousands of years before that—the most that would be seen here were Bedouin with their tents and their herds of goats and sheep, when winter rain had greened the desert and provided pastureland for a few weeks. The Bedouin tribe of the Ta'amireh has regarded this area as its property in every age, regardless of how political boundaries might run or what state has sovereignty here at a given moment.
Since 1850 researchers have also shown an interest in the area around Qumran from time to time. The graves there are striking, in that they are placed so that the dead lie facing north and are separated from the earth around them by clean-cut slabs of stone. Thus the departed neatly awaited their resurrection to an everlasting life in the north—the direction to which they lay turned—where the Garden of Eden was thought to have been. Such a funerary custom is not known to have been practiced elsewhere in the Holy Land of ancient times. Meanwhile, of course, such graves have been discovered near En Ghweir, some fifteen kilometers to the south of Qumran. In the arid desert by the Dead Sea, by way of exception, a number of things have remained recognizable that in the rest of the country have long since rotted away or fallen victim to the conditions of time. This special funerary practice alone, however, at first induced no one to investigate the hill of ruins of Qumran and its broader vicinity.
Everything changed after seven writing scrolls turned up in Jerusalem in the late autumn of 1947 and the beginning of 1948, discovered by Bedouin the winter before in a rock cave near the northwest end of the Dead Sea. In 1949, this cave—1.3 kilometers north of Qumran—was investigated by researchers. There they found remnants, pieces broken off, from four of these scrolls, a few other manuscript fragments, potsherds from numerous clay jugs, and rotted linen covers, which had once served to enwrap the scrolls.
The Bedouin recounted how one of their shepherd boys, Muhammad ed-Dhib, "the Wolf," had discovered the cave by accident when he had climbed up into the rocks after a runaway goat. What else happened just then can no longer be sorted out very well. Some still usable clay jugs found in the cave had been taken by the Bedouin as containers. They are said to have used a few of the scrolls for their campfires, the area being so sparsely wooded, but these probably gave off more bad smell than real heat in the cold nights. What were they to do with these rare finds?
Several months after their unexpected lucky find, the Bedouin went to Bethlehem, their market town, and called on a Christian cobbler named Khalil Iskander Shahin, known in the area as "Kando." Doubtless they hoped the shoemaker could make them cheap sandals or some other useful item out of the old leather of the scrolls. Instead, Kando bought the leather scrolls for a few coins. Later, probably at the end of July 1947, he took four of these scrolls to his spiritual superior, Syrian Metropolitan Athanasius Yeshua Samuel, in Jerusalem, who paid him the equivalent of $97.20 for them.
Three other scrolls were acquired in a similar fashion at the end of 1947 by an archaeologist of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Professor Eliezer Lipa Sukenik. He was the father of then Israeli secret police officer Yigael Yadin, who was chief of staff of the Israeli army during the war of independence in 1948-49 and later became Professor of Archaeology and then, for a time, a cabinet minister and Vice Premier of the State of Israel. On June 28, 1984, Yadin died at the age of 67. When the State of Israel became politically independent in 1948, these three scrolls, which his father had bought, were already the property of Hebrew University. Since then they have formed the basic stock of Israeli property from the Qumran finds.
These are the most important of the facts about which there is any clear understanding today. Adiscussion of what else may have played out in the years 1947-51—what other persons were involved in these events in various ways, the story of individual scrolls until they came into scholars' hands—would take up several volumes of reports and surmises. (One clear exception is the fate of certain items that were cautiously buried in a moist garden to keep them from the eyes of officialdom—private possession of such archaeological finds being unlawful—and left there for a long time, so that they suffered further irreparable damage.) John C. Trever, in his book The Untold Story of Qumran (see p. 270, below), has said all that is to be said on the subject. The following paragraphs will provide an adequate condensation of what out of all of this is really relevant for an understanding of the manuscript finds.
At the end of 1951, researchers began to investigate the broader area of these scroll caves. They also took a number of random samples from the hill of ruins at Qumran that proved unproductive. It was thought that, above and beyond the isolated manuscript deposits in the caves, there would scarcely be anything else interesting to discover in such a remote area.
But in February 1952 Bedouin found near the first cave and in the same cliff another cave that contained extensively decomposed remnants of a number of manuscripts. That got the searches going again. Now investigators systematically searched 270 caves and crags along the mountain cliff, but despite all efforts they discovered only one more scroll cave, about one kilometer north of the first one discovered. In the interior of this cave, searchers found very small fragments of a few scrolls, along with a huge number of shards of broken clay jars.
At the entrance of this third manuscript cave, hidden under some stones, lay two scrolls of copper sheeting so thoroughly oxidized that at first they could not be unrolled. When they finally were unrolled in 1956, it became evident that the two copper scrolls belonged together. A long sheet of copper had only been rolled up into two separate parts. The text of the Copper Scroll is impressed into the sheeting. It is a catalogue of sixty-four localities where enormous treasures had been hidden—mostly bars of silver and gold—with precise information as to the location and content of each cache.
As early as 1953, Heidelberg Professor Karl Georg Kuhn had surmised this to be the content, when both parts of the Copper Scroll had lain in a showcase in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. He had deciphered pieces of the text, which were recognizable from without in mirror fashion. Since the letters had been engraved into the thin sheeting, they showed up embossed, in reverse, on the outside of the scroll. At first, his contention that the writing on the scrolls was a treasure catalogue was regarded as rather absurd in the scholarly world. With the opening of the scrolls, it was splendidly confirmed.
Archaeological interest in the Qumran settlement reached its climax, however, only after the withdrawal once more of researchers in March 1952. Now the Bedouin began to do some searching on their own, and in August of the same year they discovered a fourth cave that contained remnants of nearly 600 scrolls. This cave, however, was not way off somewhere on the rocky landscape, as the others had been, but in a spur of the marl terrace, quite close to the ruins of Qumran.
Naturally the investigators carried out searches in this cave as well. There, amidst rubble and cracks in the floor of the cave, they found some more manuscript fragments, which supplemented the material that would later be purchased from the intermediaries of the Bedouin. But above all, it was now crystal clear that the ruins of Qumran, only a few meters from this cave and never investigated very carefully, must hold very great promise.
This latest discovery also occasioned the numbering, in the order of their discovery, of the caves that had already come to light, pairing each numeral with a Q, for Qumran, in order to distinguish these manuscript caches from those that had been discovered elsewhere, for example in Wadi Murabba"at. Following these designations in the Qumran literature is always an indication of the content of the manuscript, usually in conventional scholarly abbreviations. The abbreviation 1QIsa, then, designates a scroll discovered in the first cave of the Qumran complex containing the text of the biblical book of Isaiah. If several manuscripts of a given work come from the same cave, they are distinguished by way of small superscript letters. For example, the two Isaiah scrolls from the first cave are called 1QIsaa and 1QIsab. Further, the manuscripts of the respective caves received serial numbers. When the fragments are too small to determine the contents, these numbers are simply listed, for example, 4Q521.
In the excavation campaigns of the years 1952 to 1958, the archaeologists, namely, French Dominican Roland de Vaux and his assistants, discovered that a settlement had existed on the site of today's Qumran. The settlement dated as far back as the time of the Israelite kings, from about the middle of the ninth century B.C. De Vaux and his team were able to identify the remains of a deep cistern, a high defense tower, and some buildings. With the fall of the southern Kingdom of Judah in 587 or 586 B.C. this settlement was destroyed by the Babylonians. Not until around 100 B.C. were the remains of this old settlement cleared of their rubble, restored, and developed into a place of activity for a larger number of people.
For all historical inferences, it is especially important that two kilns for the production of clay jars were found that dated from the beginning of this newly erected settlement. The manufacture of these jars establishes the continuous operation of this new settlement until its destruction in A.D. 68.
Nowhere but in Qumran was this special pottery produced. Individual pieces of this kind discovered elsewhere in Palestine can have come only from Qumran. After all, the settlers surely sold a part of their production to others, for example to inhabitants of Jericho, in order to purchase wares that they were unable to produce themselves. At all events, the same pottery has been found not only in the ruins of the settlement itself, but also in the ruins of certain maintenance buildings in the vicinity, in the manuscript caves, and in other caves of the cliff near Qumran. Accordingly, there can be no doubt whatever that all of these finds are most intimately connected with the Qumran settlement that dated from about 100 B.C. to A.D. 68.
In the course of their excavations at Khirbet Qumran, archaeologists discovered several more caves in the marl terrace. In 1952 they discovered Cave 5. In 1955, they discovered Caves 7, 8, and 9, which contained the remains of some scrolls, as well as Cave 10, which contained remnants of the possessions of its one-time inhabitants, among them a shard from a clay jar with the first two letters of a name, but no scrolls.
The Bedouin found two more caves in the rock cliff of the Judean Desert. In September 1952 they found Cave 6 some 300 meters west of Qumran, right by the path leading up from the rock cliff into the mountains. This cave contained the remains of some thirty-five scrolls. And finally, in 1956, they found Cave 11 some 250 meters south of Cave 3, nearly 2 kilometers from Qumran. In this cave were more than twenty scrolls, some of which were still well preserved, although most had extensively rotted away.
That is all to date. A stroke of luck could bring to light more Qumran caves containing scrolls. But we should not expect a great deal any more. This becomes clear when the various sorts of finds from the individual caves are investigated more closely and brought into relationship with one another. The puzzle produces an overall picture that is quite complete (see below, Chapter 5, pp. 58-79).
Chapter Two
Starting Points
In all of the Qumran caves together, nearly 900 different scrolls and other manuscript documents, or their remnants, have been found. That is a very large number and calls for comment.
Originally, some 1,000 documents were deposited in the ten manuscript caves. A part of these were discovered and removed very early, in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Over the course of the millennia, other scrolls have crumbled to dust or have clumped together, due to moisture, into hard wads that can no longer be separated. Furthermore, in the vast majority of cases only a few fragments of the once extensive scrolls are available, often no more than a single fragment. Often these fragments are so minuscule that even today no one has managed even to identify the literary works from which they come. The language of the text—Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek—the formation of the individual letters, the thickness and color of the manuscript material—leather or papyrus—variations in line spacing, or origin in a particular cave are often the only starting points just to determine which of these fragments may have once belonged together. Peculiarities of style, or the use of characteristic words, help determine the kind of content that these almost completely destroyed scrolls might once have had. In many cases, however, the remnants of once extensive scrolls are so small that it is impossible even to establish whether their text was composed in Hebrew or Aramaic.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE LIBRARY OF QUMRAN by Hartmut Stegemann Copyright © 1993 by Verlag Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
1. Discoveries....................12. Starting Points....................6
3. The Scrolls and the Modern Public....................12
4. The Excavations....................34
5. The Scroll Caves....................58
6. The Scroll Holdings of the Qumran Library....................80
7. The Essenes....................139
8. John the Baptist....................211
9. Jesus....................228
10. Early Christianity....................258
11. Rabbinic Judaism....................265
Suggestions for Further Reading....................269
Index of Names and Subjects....................271
Index of Citations....................279
Maps....................286