Review: The Scrolls From The Dead Sea

When I picked up the thin volume, The Scrolls from the Dead Sea by Edmund Wilson, I was certain I knew what I was getting into. While I was hazy about the details of the Dead Sea Scrolls, I thought surely they were a treasured discovery met with universal acclaim.

I imagined that finding the Dead Sea Scrolls would be like finding a cache of letters from your grandparents. At first the discovery would be met with disbelief: Surely these aren't what I think these are?! Once confirmed, you would pore over the letters, savoring even the most minor detail.

Wilson, however, paints a far more nuanced picture than this naive scene.

The book starts off light enough: the author describes the discovery of the scrolls.

At some point rather early in the spring of 1947, a Bedouin boy called Muhammed the Wolf was minding some goats near a cliff on the western shore of the Dead Sea. Climbing up after one that had strayed, he noticed a cave that he had not seen before, and he idly threw a stone into it. There was an unfamiliar sound of breakage. The boy was frightened and ran away. But he later came back with another boy, and together they explored the cave.

I love that this once-in-a-lifetime discovery came down to kids being kids. I can still picture my nieces and nephews standing on the shore of Deer Island joyfully chucking rocks into the water, as though this was the world's greatest pastime. Let's hear it for the magic of play.

From the discovery, however, the book only gets more complex. Take the Essenes. The text explains that the cache of scrolls was most likely the library of this ancient sect of Jews. Great, I thought, I'll get to learn about my people. One classic description of the Essenes comes from Flavius Josephus in his book The Wars of the Jews, written around 75 AD. Here's what he says:

[119] For there are three philosophical sects among the Jews. The followers of the first of which are the Pharisees; of the second, the Sadducees; and the third sect, which pretends to a severer discipline, are called Essens. These last are Jews by birth, and seem to have a greater affection for one another than the other sects have. These Essens reject pleasures as an evil, but esteem continence, and the conquest over our passions, to be virtue. They neglect wedlock, but choose out other persons children, while they are pliable, and fit for learning, and esteem them to be of their kindred, and form them according to their own manners. They do not absolutely deny the fitness of marriage, and the succession of mankind thereby continued; but they guard against the lascivious behavior of women, and are persuaded that none of them preserve their fidelity to one man.

So the Essenes were basically a cult. Great. So much for finding my people.

Wilson then delves into the details of a handful of discoveries, working his way to a number of conclusions. This is trickier to do than one might imagine, as at the time the book was published, much of the text of the scrolls had yet to be analyzed. Heck, the complete set of fragments hadn't even been collected.

Wilson ultimately arrives at two conclusions: one that resonated and one that fell flat.

His first conclusion was that the discovery, while invaluable to historians, was slow to be appreciated by the faithful. Jews, he suggests, feared "impairing the authority of the Masoretic text." In hindsight, I can appreciate his point. As Jews, we've ascribed meaning to every word, letter, and whitespace in our source text; I could see how adding new source text could be a disruption.

The same could be said of that hypothetical cache of letters: reading them may reveal some truth best left in the past. What if Grandma was a jerk? What if Grandpa had an affair? What if the stories you built your life around simply aren't true?

It's Wilson's second conclusion, however, where he lost me. He suggests that the scrolls could demonstrate that Christianity grew organically out of Judaism:

[the scrolls show] that the morality and mysticism of the Gospels may perfectly well be explained as the creation of several generations of Jews working by and for themselves, in their own religious tradition, and that one need not assume the miracle of a special magnanimous act of God to allow the salvation of the human race.

That certainly seems plausible. However, he takes this a step further by suggesting that reasoning out these Christian beliefs is a sort of universal humanistic accomplishment. In that light, because Jews don't accept Christianity they are "left with a discipline of difficult observances, an anxious devotion to the letter of Scripture, which in time did perhaps as much as the malignity of Christian prejudice to keep [them] locked in [their] special compartment." In other words, because Jews haven't accepted Christianity, they are stuck in a smothering past.

He doesn't let Christians off the hook, either. He wishes they would embrace the scrolls' evidence that Christianity was a human development and not a supernatural phenomenon.

Wilson's view that Jews are somehow stunted isn't just insulting or a gross misreading of Judaism, it fails to acknowledge his own insight. The slow crawl of ideas that the Essenes used to get from one tradition to another is very much alive today. It's what allows me to attend a shul that sees no contradiction in mining the same texts that my Essene ancestors scrutinized for inspiration, all while under the guidance of a gay, female Rabbi.

One advantage I have over Wilson is time. It's now been over 75 years since the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Everyone from NASA to DNA experts has analyzed the find. So we can reasonably ask, has the discovery revealed any great flaws in our source text?

Consider the Great Isaiah Scroll:

The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) is one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in Qumran in 1947. It is the largest (734 cm) and best preserved of all the biblical scrolls, and the only one that is almost complete. The 54 columns contain all 66 chapters of the Hebrew version of the biblical Book of Isaiah. Dating from ca. 125 BCE, it is also one of the oldest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some one thousand years older than the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible known to us before the scrolls' discovery.

According to the Israel Museum Dead Sea Scrolls Project, the Great Isaiah Scroll contains nearly 2,600 differences from the Masoretic text that Jews use today. Aha! you might be thinking, this proves how unreliable the Masoretic text. Not so fast. The project explains:

The version of the text is generally in agreement with the Masoretic or traditional version codified in medieval codices, such as the Aleppo Codex, but it contains many variant readings, alternative spellings, scribal errors, and corrections.

Ultimately, all 66 chapters of Isaiah are accounted for. Rather than the Dead Sea Scrolls version showing our modern version as a fraud, it overwhelmingly supports it. This is especially remarkable when you consider that the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text were composed 1,000 years apart. The fact that there was a game of telephone going on for 1,000 years and the textual differences are so small only underscores the miraculous nature of this text. How did humans manage to accomplish this incredible feat of textual fidelity? But don't take my word for this, go read the side-by-side translations and see for yourself.

Perhaps Jews don't live in fear of what the Dead Sea Scrolls may reveal because many of our source texts already contain contradictions. We've been wrestling with and learning from messy sources for millennia. From verses in the Masoretic text that appear to contradict each other (I'm looking at you: Deuteronomy 15:4, 15:7 and 15:11) to verses written one way but read aloud another, to dissenting opinions captured in the Talmud. Judaism has never been about textual purity. So bring on the Dead Sea Scrolls; that just gives us new material to study and learn from.