Analysis of The Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls

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Analysis of The Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Preamble

“The grass withers and the flowers fall but the word of our God stands forever” Isaiah 40.8

“Mohammed Dib, a Bedouin shepherd of the T’Amireh tribe” (Keller, 1957, 401) could not have known that he would be the person who, in 1947, would bring to bear the words of Isaiah 40.8

This shepherd boy had been clambering around the clefts and gullies of a rock face on Wadi Qumran, north of the Dead Sea hoping to find one of his lost lambs. Thinking that it could have taken refuge in a cave he threw stones at the opening. He heard a jar break, became fearful and ran to fetch his fellow tribesmen. What they discovered were written scrolls of ancient papyrus, stuffed in jars and wrapped in linen. The Bedouins thought that they could make money on the black market in Bethlehem so sold them for a few shekels. A bundle of four of these scrolls was purchased by “the Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, Yeshue Samuel who then stored them in St. Marks Monastery”. (Albright, 1954, 403)

From this point in time interest in the scrolls escalated and in “1949 the Oriental Institute in Chicago invited Yeshue Samuel to submit the scrolls for examination. The Dead Sea Scrolls were given extensive and exhaustive examinations including carbon testing which indicated that “ because

the linen they were wrapped in was made from flax which had been harvested in the time of Christ that the scrolls were seen to have been copied around 100 B.C.” (Albright, 1954, 404).

From the time of the initial discovery there was also an upsurge in archeological expeditions to the area. One such expedition was in 1949 when Father Roland de Vaux, Dominican Director of the French Ecole Biblique et Archeologique at Jerusalem and Professor Lankester Harding the British Director of the Department of Antiquities in Amran arrived in Qumran. After the initial disappointment of finding no complete scrolls or jars they “ literally examined the floor of the cave with their fingernails. What they found allowed them to come to some astonishing conclusions” (“they found fragments and potsherds relating to Graeco-Roman times, dating from 30 B.C. to A.D. 70. Six hundred tiny scraps of leather and papyrus made it possible to recognize Hebrew transcriptions from Genesis, Deuteronomy, and the...

... middle of paper ...

...ve been invented for the purpose of Christianity, that they are in fact the Word of God.

Works Cited

Albright, W.F. “Archeology and the Religion of Israel”. The Bible as History Ed.

Werner Keller. Trans. William Neil. London: 1956 Hodder and Stoughton. 403

Burrows, Millar. More Light on the Dead Sea Scrolls and New Interpretations. New

York: 1955. The Viking Press. 1958. 180.

Dupont-Sommer, A. The Essene Writings from Qumran. New York: 1962. 23-38

Ferguson, F. Backgrounds of Early Christianity. 1987. Grand Rapids, Mich: 1990.

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 1990. 369-421

Harding, L. Journal of the Society of Oriental Research (JSOR). The Bible as History.

Ed. Werner Keller. Trans. William Neil. London: 1956 Hodder and Stoughton. 409- 410

Josephus Flavius, The Jewish War. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England. 1959 Penguin

Books Ltd. 129

Lohse, E. The new Testament Environment. Trans. John E. Steeley. 1974 London: SCM

Press. 1989: 89-115

Tushingham, A. Douglas. The Men who hid the Dead Sea Scrolls. December. 1958:

National Geographic Magazine

Vardaman, J. The Earliest Fragments of the New Testament. 1971-72: Expository Times

374-376

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