| It was sometime between 66 and
70 AD, when in the small village of Qumran, near the Dead Sea,
scribes heard that the Roman Army was on their way to Judea
to put down a Jewish revolt. The brutality of the Romans was
well known, and they knew that their small community might be
soon be completely destroyed. The scribes had an extensive library
of scrolls, and decided that they must do everything possible
to make certain that they were preserved.
Carrying hundreds of scrolls in clay pots, they
climbed the arid cliffs along the northwestern shore of the
Dead Sea, about 13 miles east of Jerusalem. The cliffs were
a perfect hiding place, since they were dotted with thousands
of caves. Expecting to return later after the dust had settled,
they concealed them in numerous caves, but for some unknown
reason, they never returned.
Then, nearly two thousand years later, in January
of 1947, Juma, a boy who was watching his family’s herd of goats,
thought that his goats were climbing too high on those rocky
cliffs. When he climbed up after them, he noticed two small
openings, and did what any normal boy would have done. He threw
a rock into one of them. Perhaps he thought that it was a deep
hole, and wondered how long it would take for the rock to hit
bottom, but instead, he heard the sound of a clay pot breaking.
Juma had unwittingly discovered the most important archeological
find of all time, the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Between 1947 and 1956, more than 800 scrolls
and thousands of fragments were found in eleven separate caves
in that rocky cliff. The scrolls contained numerous copies of
all of the books of the Old Testament, except the book of Esther.
The importance of this find cannot be overemphasized,
because it furnished proof of the reliability of the Old Testament
scriptures.
Skeptics over the years have suggested that
the books of the Bible that we have today could not possibly
be the same as the original books, because over time, scribes
and priests must have changed them for their own purposes.
In fact, just recently, someone wrote an opinion
letter to the Tulsa World stating that the Bible was a “2,000
year old book rewritten by dozens with tremendous imaginations”,
inferring that it was nothing that could be trusted.
Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
the oldest copies of Old Testament books were from the 9th and
10th centuries AD, or about 1,000 years old.
The reason that older versions did not exist
had to do with the procedures that the scribes used to copy
the Old Testament.
When a scroll became too worn, the scribes would
meticulously copy it letter by letter. At completion, it was
carefully checked for accuracy, including a count of the number
of letters in the old and new manuscripts. If they did not match,
the new manuscript was destroyed, and they started all over
again, repeating the same procedure until they were certain
that the new copy exactly matched the old copy. At that point,
the old manuscript was destroyed. This was the procedure that
was used by the Jewish scribes beginning about 3,500 years ago
when Moses wrote the first books of the Old Testament.
When the oldest known manuscripts of the Old
Testament were compared with the Dead Sea Scrolls, they matched
exactly, assuring us that the Old Testament books we read today
are exactly the inspired Word of God that they were when they
were written.
Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the
oldest known copy of the book of Isaiah was written in Greek,
not in the Hebrew language that it was originally written in.
In fact, there were no surviving copies of Isaiah in Hebrew.
But among the Dead Sea Scrolls was a clay pot filled with all
66 chapters of Isaiah, all written in Hebrew. When compared
to the Greek manuscripts, they matched exactly.
Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are on display
in a building called the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum
in Jerusalem. This odd-shaped building was patterned after the
lid of the first clay pot that was found. (You can see photos
of the building at http://lluker.faculty.ltss. edu/SOB-STM.htm).
The lid-shaped structure is a kind of dome,
under which the scrolls are displayed underground. Under the
center of the dome is a display that looks like a giant scroll
handle, with a reproduction of one of the scrolls of the book
of Isaiah wrapped around it. Around the perimeter walls, fragments
of other scrolls are displayed.
The Shrine of the Book Museum is in charge of
the preservation and restoration of the scrolls. They have worked
in conjunction with the Getty Conservation Institute in California
to develop methods of preserving these priceless documents.
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