The Dead Sea Scrolls

In 1947 between the Dead Sea and Judean Hills a young boy was exploring caves that can be found within the Judean Desert. What he finds changes everything that is known about the history of the Bible as well as the land it is from. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a very important part of the history of not only the Bible, but also the history of the lands surrounding its location. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a very important part of history because it provided several manuscripts to the Bibles’ writings, it provides information about the centuries that preceded Jesus and his followers, and the Dead Sea Scrolls allow historians the ability to piece together stories from this part of history. There are approximately 900 different scrolls and fragments

Centuryone.com says, “The scrolls contain previously unknown stories about biblical figures such as Enoch, Abraham, and Noah.” (25). The reason why these stories such as these are able to last up until the point of being written down is through verbal transmission. Verbal transmission is the concept that stories are passed down from generation to generation through simply telling them to one another. This activity has help provide these stories not only in the Jewish or Christian religions, but also to other religions as well as nations around the world. Verbal transmission has been a practice that has been lost, but only because of the new found art of written transmission which is the same as verbal transmission, simply in written form. The only problem that comes from verbal transmission is the story has a higher chance of changing or being mistranslated to later generations than in written form. Similar to the children’s game telephone which involves passing a message around a circle by whispering it one at a time in your neighbor’s ear, usually by the end of the circle the message is completely different from when it started. Unfortunately, that is the problem that can be seen with the concept of verbal transmission, the story happened one way, but over time the story is changed based on what people have heard from

When they first discovered these documents they did not treat them with the same respects that they are treated with now. This is simply because they were not familiar with documents with this much age and did not have the knowledge of the best way to preserve them. According to the DeadSeaScrolls.org “The first scholars used adhesive tape to join Scroll fragments and seal cracks. They placed the fragments loosely between plates of window glass. Unfortunately, the aging of the adhesives and the pressure of the glass caused the skins to darken and their edges to gelatinize, rendering some texts illegible.”(Conservation). These were the types of conditions that these documents went through during the early years of discovery. Now, thanks to the Israel Antiquities Authority, these scrolls are now under a strict protocol which will help ensure that the life span of these documents would now be a short one. There is now a building specifically for protecting and preserving these documents. There are even steps in place to ensure that any methods that were used to safeguard these documents are able to be reversed if necessary. The building that the scrolls now reside is climate controlled to mimic the conditions similar to that of the caves these documents were found in. These conditions are believed to be the reason that these documents have survived all of these