The Qumran Documents

The Qumran Documents

The finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Qumran Documents is the single most important religious find of the twentieth century. These manuscripts have revolutionized the entire field of biblical study and have the ability to destabilize the mass of western religious thought as we know it today. For the information contained in these scrolls, include books of the Hebrew Bible that predate the next earlier example by one thousand years. The data found in these scrolls enable us to form a historically accurate reconstruction of the time period formative of Rabbinic Judaism and of Christianity. By studying the customs and the religious practices of the Essene people we can put together a snapshot of the religious and political times that were in place at the start of Christianity.

In 1947 near the city of Qumran, a young Bedouin shepherd named Mohammed Dib of the T’Amireh tribe left his village in search of a goat that had become lost. He threw a stone into a small cave in a cliff thinking the goat had taken refuge inside the cave. When he threw the stone he heard the sound of pottery breaking. The next day he returned and found the entrance to the cave. Inside the cave he found ten jars made of clay. Most of the jars were empty and one held only dirt, but inside the remaining three he found scrolls. The scrolls he found were made of ancient papyrus, stuffed in jars and wrapped in linen. On a second visit he found four more scrolls. These scrolls were taken to an antiques dealer named Kando in Bethlehem in the hopes that they might be worth something on the black market. Kando bought the four scrolls from the shepherd boy nicknamed “The Wolf” for roughly one hundred and ten dollars. Kando then found a buyer for the scrolls, and they were purchased by the Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem and then stored in St. Marks Monastery. These manuscripts were sold in a hidden transaction aboard a public bus. From this point in time interest in the scrolls escalated and in 1949 the Oriental Institute in Chicago invited Yeshue Samuel, the Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, to submit the scrolls for examination. The Dead Sea Scrolls were then given extensive and exhaustive examinations including carbon testing which indicated that because the linen that the scrolls 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. The scrolls were found in small clay cylinder like jars with rope bound locking lids. This type of jar was unique to Qumran and all of the scrolls found were found in this type of jar. Eighty percent of the documents found were written on parchment made of hides taken from sheep, goats and cows. The other twenty percent were written on papyrus. The scrolls were hidden in caves near the ancient city of Qumran.

After Jericho was besieged by the Romans, the people of Qumran, the Essenes, knew their city would come under attack next, so they attempted to hide their most valuable possessions, their library of scrolls and manuscripts. They hid their scrolls in nearby caves hoping that in their haste the Roman army would not take the time to search the remote caves of Qumran. Soon after the city was attacked by the Romans. The attacking Roman army numbered 32,000 infantry, 10,000 Calvary and 10,000 archers along with catapults with the ability to launch stones weighing up to one hundred and twenty five pound stones. The city of Qumran was reduced to rubble, and all but a handful of the people were killed.

The Essenes were a separatist Jewish sect who formed an ascetic monastic community at Qumran. The number of Essenes in Judea was estimated to be around four thousand people spread out into many villages. The Essenes were a very closely united people. They renounced pleasure as an evil, and were celibate, being content in adopting the young children of others in order to instruct them at a young age. When they entered the sect they must surrender all money and possessions into the common fund, to be put at the disposal of everyone. They made a point of having their skin dry and of always being clothed in white garments. They did not live just in Qumran, but had small colonies formed in various small towns. They would welcome members of other colonies as equal brothers even though they were perfect strangers. They were treated as if intimate friends. They did not change their garments or shoes until they were completely worn out. They neither buy or sell anything among themselves, instead they give to each other freely and feel no need to repay anything in exchange. They would also hold the practice of reciting ancestral prayers at sunrise to the sun as though entreating it to rise. The Essenes would work until eleven in the morning and then practice ritual purification