Out of the Desert

The end of the world seemed at hand. The sun beat down on the rock-strewn desert and struck shimmering heat waves from the flat, metallic surface of the Dead Sea. In a room of the community, the elders took council; they were sure that the men of darkness would soon be upon the Children of Light. Reports had come that Vespasian's legionaries, clanking up the road from Caesarea, were already at Jericho, less than seven miles to the north. Before they moved on Jerusalem, the Romans would surely fall upon the Community by the Dead Sea. Perhaps then, at last, the prophesied messiah would appear.

There was much to be done: prayers, lustrations, holy meals--and the sacred scrolls must be taken to the nearby caves and hidden from the impious enemy. Then the Romans came, and in that summer A.D. 68 the Community of the New Covenant at Qumran sank beneath the surging tide of history that laid waste Jerusalem and began the great dispersion of the Jews. For nearly 19 centuries nothing remained of the covenanters but a dim tradition and a ruin in the desert like an enormous graveyard. Christianity spread from Palestine, Rome fell, Mohammed's conquering armies passed within a few miles of that graveyard; so again and again did the Crusaders, never suspecting its secrets. Today Qumran is yielding up those secrets while the world looks on in fascination and awe. For the people of the Dead Sea Community who are appearing through the mists of the past are closer than scholarship has ever come, in time and place and belief, to the men who wrote the Gospels.

Cradle of Christianity? Since a Bedouin shepherd boy named Muhammad adh-Dhib ("The Wolf") first stumbled on them just ten years ago in a cave near Qumran (he had hoped to find buried treasure), the scrolls have stirred up perhaps the most vigorous debate in Christianity since Darwin. One faction, headed by French Orientalist Andre Dupont-Sommer (whose views were popularized in the U.S. by Amateur Scrollman Edmund Wilson), held that the Dead Sea Community more than Bethlehem might have been the cradle of Christianity. Philologist John Allegro of Britain's University of Manchester strongly implied that the scrolls put into question the uniqueness of Jesus. At the other extreme were theologians who summarily dismissed the scrolls as having no major importance to Christianity.

Only lately have scholars accumulated enough facts to be able to settle down to a sober appraisal of the scrolls' significance. The majority verdict: the scrolls do not shake the foundations of Christianity, but they greatly contribute to the understanding of those foundations. As U.S. Old Testament Scholar Frank Cross of McCormick Theological Seminary puts it: the writers of the scrolls and of the New Testament "draw on common resources of language, theological themes, and concepts . . . The strange world of the New Testament becomes less baffling, less exotic." Says Hebrew Scholar Theodor Caster of Dropsie College: "They recover for us ... the backdrop of the stage on which the first act of the Christian drama was performed."

The New Cave. Since "The Wolf" found Cave 1, scrolls and fragments from ten more caves near Qumran have been recovered. Most notable are the contents of Cave 4, in which the remains of more than 400 manuscripts have been found in tens of thousands of tiny fragments; presumably this was the main library of the Qumran Community. The Suez crisis raised serious roadblocks to the scholars' work. Many were called home, and the manuscripts themselves were packed away in 36 cases and locked up in the Ottoman Bank at Amman, Jordan, from which they were returned to Jerusalem for study only last month--some of them slightly moldy and spotted from the damp vault. (Complete photographs of the manuscript material exist, but direct examination is necessary to the delicate process of matching and fitting fragments.)

The scholars carried on as best they could. This week came news that an important new find has been made in an eleventh cave. Because of the political situation and payment difficulties, the Jordan government has so far kept its contents under lock and key, but scholars have been permitted a preliminary peek. On the basis of this examination, they tentatively identified the Cave II scrolls as the Biblical 'Psalms and Leviticus, an apocalyptic description of the New Jerusalem, and a targum (i.e., a translation of a Hebrew text into Aramaic, the colloquial language of Christ's time) of the Book of Job. In all probability this is the targum that disappeared when it was suppressed (for still-obscure theological reasons) by Rabbi Gamaliel I, teacher of Saul the Pharisee, who later rode down the road to Damascus to become Paul the Apostle.

Meanwhile, the search for new caves, new scrolls and fragments continues, carried on by an extraordinary crew of amateur archaeologists--the Bedouins.

To the Scrollery. Today the scholars for the most part leave the search to the tribesmen, who have become highly skilled in the work. The Bedouins sift with timeless patience through four-foot layers of dust and bat dung, spoonful by spoonful, to find the tiny fragments of black and crumbly leather--often smaller than a postage stamp--that they know will make them rich. The Jordan government has given the Ta'amireh Bedouins a cave-hunting monopoly--making the Qumran area a military zone, and policing it to keep other tribes from muscling in on the scroll rush.

With their finds carefully wrapped up or tucked away in cardboard cigarette boxes, the Bedouins go to Bethlehem. About 100 yards from the Church of the Nativity, where Jesus is supposed to have been born, they disappear into a cobbler's shop. There in his single tiny room, surrounded by wooden lasts and shoemaker's tools (including a Singer sewing machine), sits Khalil Iskander Shahin, a seam-faced

Syrian in a red tarboosh. Kando, as he is called, is the trusted link between finders and keepers; he is technically a "fence," for all scroll finds are officially the property of the Jordanian government, but Eastern pragmatism finds no difficulty in blessing his undercover role.

With the precious fragments in their soiled cigarette boxes, Kando journeys to the "Scrollery"--the Palestine Archaeological Museum in the Jordanian Old City of Jerusalem. There he usually receives the fees for his Bedouin clients (according to the size and condition of the bits of manuscript). And there an international--and inter-credal--task force of scholars takes over, trying to fit the fragments together in a vast, incredibly difficult jigsaw puzzle.

Shadow Land. Dean of the scholars is Pere Roland de Vaux, a French Dominican priest who has spent the last 24 of his 53 years in Palestine. Archaeologist de Vaux supervises the publication of the fragments, leads the periodic expeditions to the Qumran ruins. (Features of a typically rugged day there: Mass at 5:30 a.m., digging in the merciless heat until 3 p.m., paper work amid clouds of mosquitoes until midnight.) De Vaux's fellow priest, Polish-born Father Joseph Milik, 35, who left Warsaw when the Communists took over, is known as the Scrollery's fastest man with a fragment. Chicago's Frank Cross, a Presbyterian, spent 19 months working at the Scrollery, hopes to go back soon, as will Catholic University's Msgr. Patrick W. Skehan and young (26) British Scholar John Strugnell, a Presbyterian. The atmosphere at the Scrollery is probably unique. Says Lutheran Claus-Hunno Hunzinger, of Germany's University of Gottingen: "Every now and then one of us here will discover something new, and will cry out, and everyone will crowd around to discuss and suggest. It's the only situation I know in the study of the humanities where scholars are working in the same field at such close quarters."

The work these men do is unique, too. The fragments brought to them by the Bedouins make a strange kind of shadow land. Some carry familiar Biblical names, or snatches of familiar Old Testament language; others are single words or phrases, hanging like abrupt cries in the air of history. All are tackled by the scholars.

The work is done in a long, light, white-paneled room filled with 20 trestled tables. There lie the scroll fragments, pressed flat and protected between plates of glass. Fragments are identified by labels bearing such symbols as 4 QM5, i.e., a fragment from Qumran Cave 4, under study by Milik, and belonging to the fifth plate in a series.

At one end of the room, the fragments are prepared for mounting. Those too brittle to be uncurled are placed in a humidifier until they are pliable enough to be pressed flat. Then they are cleaned of sand, mold and marl (a clayey sediment) with fine camel's-hair brushes, sometimes dipped in castor oil. Some are so delicate that special brushes of only a few hairs must be used; and these fragments bear warnings--Don't Touch or, occasionally, DON'T BREATHE!

Time-Defying Leap. Next, the fragments are sorted according to script and (if possible) scribe. The mutations of Hebrew and Aramaic letters are classifiable by date--this science of paleography is, in fact, the most exact way of dating the scrolls. Each scribe, too, had his own characteristic handwriting ("ductus"), and a shred of personality makes a time-defying leap across the centuries when a scroll scholar recognizes the mannerisms of an Essene scribe who worked at a long table not unlike his own, 20 miles away and 2,000 years ago. In addition to matching up the script, it is also sometimes possible to match fragments according to the material on which they are written: the leather scrolls were treated on only one side, making it possible to match the rough, untreated side of the skin.

Next the fragments are classified as to whether they are Biblical or nonBiblical. Even a single word with a few letters of the words preceding and following it may be identified in this way by consulting a concordance which lists every word in the Bible in its immediate context. Noncanonical works from the Apocrypha and unknown writings of the Qumran sect are identified more slowly by their use of key words and characteristic phrases.

Black Market in Scrolls? The study of the fragments has had a stunning impact upon both Jewish and Christian Biblical scholarship. Not only do they provide a wealth of script samples from different eras to advance the science of paleography by a giant step; they provide a far earlier authority for the text of the Old Testament than had been available. The Old Testament is based on the so-called Masoretic text (from masora, tradition) developed in the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries A.D. by the schools of Babylonia and Palestine. Older than the Masoretic Bible is the Septuagint, a pre-Christian Greek translation which has been thought to be less authoritative than the Masoretic because of the difficulties of translating Hebrew terms into Greek. The Biblical manuscripts from Cave 4, yielding some texts far earlier than either, have considerably raised the prestige of the Septuagint.

Curreatly, the scholars at Jerusalem are preoccupied with the worldly question of how and whom to pay for more fragments. While the largest single gift of money came from the Jordanian government under the old informal system much of the money for the Bedouin suppliers came from foreign foundations and universities that expected to keep the fragments after the scholars were done with their first studies. Now Jordan's nationalist government wants to abolish this system, keep all the manuscripts in the country but still get the money, either for the Bedouins or for itself. While negotiations are going on, scholars of the Scrollery suffer from a recurrent nightmare: that the Bedouins may stop bringing their finds to the cobbler shop of Khalil Iskander, and take them to a black market instead (no more than three or four small fragments have so far turned up for private sale by antique dealers around the world).

The Setting. The black and fragile bits of leather that now make nests for rats in desert rock holes, or repose in battered cigarette boxes with such labels as Gold Star and Friends, are not the only puzzle pieces that need gathering and fitting together. There are also human and historical fragments from which scholars are trying to reconstruct the story of the Qumran sect itself--one of the great dramas of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

It is now assumed as almost certain that they were Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect hitherto known chiefly from the accounts of Josephus and Philo. Much information about the Dead Sea covenanters is contained in the original scrolls (now in the Hebrew University just across the bristling boundary from the Jordanian Scrollers in the Israeli half of Jerusalem). Those first seven scrolls included, in addition to two versions of the book of Isaiah and a collection of apocryphal stories based on Genesis, four documents relating to the Dead Sea sect itself: 1) the Rule of the Community (also known as the Manual of Discipline); 2) a Commentary on Habakkuk, which indirectly reflects some of the sect's story because it treats the Old Testament book as prophecy concerning the Essenes' own history; 3) The War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness, which seems to be an account of the end of the world told like a detailed battle plan for Armageddon, and 4) Essene Psalms. Besides these documents, there is the evidence of pick and shovel--the site itself, worked over five times by expeditions since 1949.

The settlement resembled a fortified medieval monastery (see map). There was a central building, originally about 124 ft. square, adjoined by a complex of rooms, passageways and cisterns. At one corner was a formidable tower with three-foot-thick walls, probably designed as a lookout post and last-ditch defense point. Other rooms included kitchens and refectories, a scriptorium and a pottery (where the scrolls' storage jars were presumably made). Flour mills, storage bins and ovens have also been 'uncovered, indicating a highly self-sufficient community.

This was the setting of their life. How did they lead it? Their two guiding principles were both profoundly Jewish--ritual purity and apocalypticism, i.e., the expectation of the end of the world. They saw their desert retreat as symbolizing the desert wanderings of the Jews under Moses. And their asceticism was not for its own sake but a preparation for the new dispensation. Like the first Christians they held all things in common, looking forward to the characteristics of life in the New Age: unity, brotherhood, love. They identified themselves, the Congregation of the Poor, with the "meek who shall inherit the earth."

Love of Law. Twice a day they celebrated a solemn communion meal, with blessing of bread and wine. This, says Scholar Cross, was "a liturgical anticipation of the Messianic banquet" in the coming kingdom--a concept that was a common theme in the Judaism of the time. Another regular practice of the Essenes was baptism. On entering the community, individuals received a baptism on repentance of sins (unlike the later Christian practice, however, the Essene baptism was renewed each year and supplemented by continued daily ritual washings or lustrations).

Study of the Law was so important to the Essenes that in each group it was pursued day and night (the membership was divided into three shifts). Government of the sect was in the hands of twelve elders and three priests, "perfect in all that is revealed of the whole Torah, to practice truth and righteousness and justice and loving devotion and to walk humbly each with his neighbor, to guard faithfulness in the land with a strong purpose and a broken spirit." The punishments they administered were severe: for speaking brusquely "so as to undermine the composure of a fellow" the offender's food ration was cut for one year; for falling asleep or spitting in a public session it was cut 30 days.

It is uncertain whether or not the Essenes permitted marriage. The central cemetery seems to contain only male skeletons, but in smaller cemeteries adjoining it the remains of women and children have been found. It is possible that a secondary order of married Essenes grew up near the main community, or that the order relaxed its rule of celibacy at some time during its history (it is known from archaeological evidence that about 31 B.C., roughly coinciding with an earthquake, the Essenes left their desert community, did not return for more than 30 years).

Recent discoveries of a number of charred animal bones that had obviously been buried with care suggest that at some period the Essenes may have performed sacrifices at Qumran.

Where They Came From. That much is fairly certain about Qumran's Essenes. But when did they go into the desert and why? The answer must lie in the history of Israel from 200 B.C. to A.D. 68, the period indicated by paleography and archaeology for the existence of the Qumran community. It was a stretch of history so bloody and chaotic that it is easy to understand how people could believe that the End of Days was near. The tiny Jewish nation was torn and chivvied by powerful neighbors--first Egypt and Syria, later Rome. In the wake of Alexander the Great, the world outside Israel was dominated by Greek ways and Greek ideas, and many Jews were abandoning the ancient paths of their fathers for the new Hellenic mode. According to a widely held theory, the Essenes left Jerusalem in protest against such corruption of the ancient Jewish faith, and because of some unidentified act of persecution, withdrew into the desert to await the End.

When did this happen? One possible answer centers around a foreign invader of Israel characterized by the scrolls as the Kittim. It would obviously make a considerable difference whether this term meant the Syrians (who dominated Israel from 198 B.C. to 141 B.C.) or the Romans (from 63 B.C. on). This one problem provides a perfect example of the kind of puzzle the scroll scholars are up against. The Kittim, according to the scrolls, are "swift and men of valor in battle." go "over smooth ground" and "trample the earth with their horses and with their animals; and from afar they come, from the coasts of the sea." They "sacrifice to their standards, and their weapons of war are the object of their worship." Exponents of the theory that the Kittim are the Syrians see the "smooth ground" as meaning alternately a plain, a level road, the plateau east of the Dead Sea--or merely that they were unopposed. They identify the "animals" with which they trample the earth as the war elephants of which the Syrians were proud. But since the Hebrew language has a word for elephant, others ask, why did the scroll not use it if elephant were meant? As for the passage about worshiping their standards--Syrians, it is claimed, did this as well as Romans.

One scholar who thinks the Romans are the Kittim renders the "smooth ground" as "liquid plain," i.e., water. A scroll statement that the Kittim horsemen "fly like a vulture" is connected by the pro-Roman faction with the Roman eagle. The question of offering sacrifice to the standards is not as clear an argument for the Roman identification as it seems at first; it is doubtful whether the legions actually offered sacrifices to their standards before the time of the empire.

With just this kind of historical detective work, the scholars have moved in on the dramatic cast of characters offered in the Habakknk commentary. The leading members of the cast are the already famed Righteous Teacher, a spiritual leader with special inspiration from God, and his persecutor, the Wicked Priest, a sacrilegious, murdering, despoiling drunkard who comes to a bad end. There are probably subsidiary villains, referred to as the Man of the Lie and the Preacher of the Lie (though it is possible that these are additional epithets for the Wicked Priest). In the background is the House of Absalom, a group that betrayed the Teacher.

Teacher v. Priest. Scholars are trying ceaselessly to cast these shadowy roles with known actors on the stage of history. In an erudite and fascinating game, high priest after high priest has been tried for the roles:

P: Some scholars have identified the Man of the Lie as Antiochus Epiphanes, who in 175 B.C. became King of Syria, and thus ruler of Palestine. Determined to force Hellenism on the Jews, he marched an army into Jerusalem (with the help of a Hellenic fifth column) and deposed High Priest Onias III--a possible Righteous Teacher under this theory. Thus the Wicked Priest becomes one of Antiochus' appointees, Menelaus, who went to work enthusiastically forcing Greek clothes, games and gods on the Jews. Under the priest Mattathias and later his son Judas Maccabeus ("The Hammer"), the old-line Israelites rose to defeat the Syrians and slaughter many of the Hellenistic Jews.

P: Judas Maccabeus was succeeded in 160 B.C. by his brother Jonathan, who eventually assumed the office of High Priest as well. Another theory identifies him as the Wicked Priest, since he outraged the religious purists by usurping the priesthood. Scholar Milik holds to this view, citing further the Scrolls' presentation of the Wicked Priest as having rebuilt Jerusalem and been captured and put to death; the known history of Jonathan satisfies both these conditions.

P: Milik's colleague, Frank Cross, holds that a more plausible Wicked Priest is Jonathan's brother Simon, who issued a decree (I Maccabees 14: 27-47) that established his descendants, the Hasmonean dynasty, as High Priests in perpetuity, also gave them permission "to stamp out, indeed to persecute, those who refuse to recognize the full legitimacy of his office. This program seems to give the appropriate occasion for the crystallization of the Essene sect." Cross finds further evidence for this identification in a Qumran document that quotes Joshua's curse upon Jericho and follows it with a curse on an unnamed man and his sons who fortified a "stronghold of wickedness." Simon, while drunk, and later two of his sons were assassinated at Jericho on an inspection tour of its fortifications.

P: Another ingenious line of thought reasons that the Teacher was one Eleazar, in the reign of Simon's son, John Hyrcanus (134 to 104 B.C.). Hyrcanus, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, was friendly to the anti-Hellenist Pharisees ("Separators") who clung to the old ways. Once Hyrcanus gave a dinner for their leaders, and after dinner invited their opinions on his rule, whereupon Eleazar bluntly told him he had no right to the High Priesthood. Promptly, John Hyrcanus switched his favor to the pro-Hellenistic Sadducees and the Pharisaic observances were forbidden. It is not hard to imagine, according to some scholars, that a strict-thinking band of Pharisees heard in outspoken Eleazar the voice of a prophet, and fled with him from Wicked Priest Hyrcanus into the desert. P:Alexander Janneus (103-76 B.C.), son of Hyrcanus, makes an appealing Wicked Priest to some experts. He revenged himself for a Pharisee-led uprising by crucifying 800 leaders of the revolt in a single night and having their wives and children slaughtered before their dying eyes--meanwhile gratifying himself with his concubines in full sight of the victims. If he is the Wicked Priest and the community in the desert was founded by Eleazar under John Hyrcanus, the Man of the Lie might be the leader of the Pharisees who had sought to remain in Jerusalem instead of facing ascetic hardship in the desert. In any case it is reasonable to assume that many Pharisees joined the Dead Sea sect at this time.

The Three Messiahs. Scholars doubt whether the Righteous Teacher will ever be specifically identified. The important question is whether, as has been suggested, he prefigured Christ in any sense. Actually, scholars are now generally convinced that while the Teacher was persecuted and reviled ("They made me an object of contempt and reproach"), there is no suggestion that he was martyred, much less crucified. Sectarian Jews of the period expected not one but two and possibly three messiahs, i.e., anointed ones--a king, a priest and possibly a prophet. The Essenes may have seen the prophet-messiah as a return of the Teacher, but such an idea contains no suggestion that the Teacher was a figure comparable to Jesus Christ.

This is not to say that there was no connection between the Essene community at Qumran and the first Christians. John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness near Qumran at a time when the community was flourishing; he was, like the covenanters, an ascetic, living on locusts and wild honey, and proclaiming, like the Essenes, Isaiah's words about making "straight in the desert a highway for our God." It has been suggested that John had been adopted as a child and raised by the Essenes, as was their custom. "They neglect wedlock," writes Josephus, "but choose out other persons' children, while they are pliable . . . and form them according to their own manners."

John baptized like the Essenes to "repentance for the remission of sins," he proclaimed the end of the world, and though he attacked the Scribes and Pharisees as "generation of vipers" and worse, he seems not to have mentioned the Essenes at all. But on the other hand, John broke sharply with the Essene tradition in preaching the coming kingdom to the whole people of Israel, instead of withdrawing from the world like the Essenes to prepare his private salvation.

Jesus, too, proclaimed the end of the world; he used expressions familiar to the Essenes, such as "sons of light"--but on the other hand he treated the Law with un-Essene casualness, he associated with such sinners as would have had an Essene at his lustrations for days, he urged people to love their enemies while the Essenes carefully nurtured their hatred for the children of darkness, and instead of their rigid asceticism he "came eating and drinking," letting those who would call him "gluttonous and a wine-bibber."

The structure of the early church was much like that of the Qumran Community. Both had a council of Twelve, and the membership of each was known as "the Many." The Essene Twelve were to be judges at the end of the world, a role which Jesus also gave to his twelve disciples.

What the Angels Sang. The men at the Scrollery do not rule out the possibility of new finds. They hope soon to study the contents of Cave II, are never sure that Kando the shoemaker will not walk in, carrying some new revelation in a cigarette box. In the meantime, the scrolls have opened a wide new door to the study of Christianity. For the people of Qumran and the early Christians shared the same Hebraic theological tradition as well as the same language -- in an era for which Aramaic and Hebrew sources hardly exist.

An oral tradition of Hebrew and Aramaic underlying the Greek of the written Gospels made it necessary to use rough and often clumsy Greek equivalents for Semitic concepts. Hence, the treasury of scroll literature is enabling scholars to achieve new insight into the meaning of many passages. For example, the question of what the angels sang in their well-known announcement of Jesus' birth has long bothered Biblical scholars. "And on earth peace, good will toward men," says the King James version, and the Catholic Douay Bible has it "peace to men of good will." Now in the scrolls the idiom is found in its original form: "good will to men of [God's] favor," i.e., the elect in the apocalyptic age.

The Essene scrolls are closer in feeling and language to the Gospel of St. John than to any other part of the New Testament. And words that seem almost like a paraphrase of John's famous Prologue occur in the Rule of the Community: "And by His knowledge, everything has been brought into being. And everything that is, He established by His purpose; and apart from Him nothing is done." Professor William F. Albright of Johns Hopkins has pointed out that many phrases are duplicated in both, and in both the dualistic coupling of opposites recurs again and again -- light and darkness, truth and error, spirit and flesh, death and life. The parallels and similarities are, in fact, so numerous and conclusive that they seriously challenge the theory that the Gospel of John was the latest to be written and that it shows marked Greek influence. Instead, many modern scholars now view John as thoroughly Jewish and his Gospel perhaps the earliest of the four.

The Matrix. The scroll community called itself the people of the New Covenant or New Testament, and some of them may have become Christians after the Romans scattered them from their center on the Dead Sea. But the scholars on the ground agree that they were in no sense Christian or proto-Christian. The Essenes would probably have been the first to cry heresy at the Christian welding of all three messiahs -- prophet, priest and king -- to have been shocked at Jesus' attitude toward the Law, to have not understood his atoning death.

The only Christians whose faith the scrolls can jolt are those who have failed to see the paradox that the churches have always taught: that Jesus Christ was a man as well as God -- a man of a particular time and place, speaking a specific language, revealing his way in terms of a specific cultural and religious tradition. For Christians who want to know more of that matrix in which their faith was born, the People of the Scrolls are reaching a hand across the centuries.

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