THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS: A NEW TRANSLATION

M. Wise, M. Abegg, E. Cook

INTRODUCTION

Like Shangri-la, the term "Dead Sea Scrolls" has the power to evoke images and emotions
even in those who have only a vague idea of what they are. The term is redolent of enigma, of
intrigue, perhaps even of sacred mysteries; hovering in the background are images of caves,
scrolls, barren deserts, and intense scholars hunched over tiny scraps of leather. A closer
acquaintance with the scrolls does not dispel the air of mystery, because even when all the
documents are read, translated, and explained, huge areas of uncertainty remain. Who wrote the
scrolls, and when? What purpose did they serve, and what influence did they have? And what
do they mean for us? Scholars still give different answers to all these questions.
We, the authors of this book, feel that the right answers are closer than ever. For decades,
specialists have been able to study many of the scrolls, but not all of them. They reached
conclusions that did not-could not-take into account all of the documents, many of which
remained unavailable until recently.
Now all of the texts are available. Some of them support, and some undermine, cherished
theories about the scrolls and their origins. Some of them suggest that long-discarded
hypotheses may have been amazingly accurate. Others suggest new and subtle shadings of old
interpretations. Most important, the scrolls, now that we can see all of them, testify to the
astonishingly rich and fertile literary culture that gave birth to the foundational religious
documents of Judaism and Christianity. We find here previously unknown stories about biblical
figures such as Enoch, Abraham, and Noah-including a work explaining why God asked
Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. A dozen writings that claim Moses as their author-yet
that are not a part of our Bibles-have come forth from the caves. Newly deciphered scrolls
reveal ancient doctrines about angels, while others claim to be revelations by angels themselves,
including the archangel Michael. Among the scrolls are never before seen psalms attributed to
King David and to the leader of the conquest of the Holy Land, Joshua. The scrolls include
extrabiblical prophecies by Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel. The last words of the patriarchs
Joseph, Judah, Levi, Naphtali, and Amram, father of Moses, are here among the scrolls. Still
other writings pulse with the conviction that the end of the world is at hand and describe the rise
of the Antichrist.
Yet the scrolls, like the Bible they often imitate, are more frequently honored than read. One
reason for this neglect is the genuine difficulty of reading and translating texts that survive,
many of them only in bits and pieces; another is that few of the published translations are
intended for nonspecialists. This one is. In it we have aspired to be both responsible to the
sources and understandable to the public.
DISCOVERY AND PUBLICATION
Archaeology is the study of archaia, "old things," but for a long time nobody knew that old
things were interesting. The past, they thought, was pretty much the same as the present, and so
in illuminated medieval Bibles King David is pictured in a medieval suit of armor. But people
began to gain a sense of historical perspective during the Renaissance, and some things began to
be valued because they were old. The wealthy began to collect antiquities: archaia. When
Napoleon and his legions entered Egypt in the early nineteenth century, they opened up not only
a new arena of cultural interchange, but a rich new source of archaia. The antiquities trade
began in earnest at that time, along with colonialism, its sponsor, and a new science –
archaeology.
Private collectors and professional archaeologists have always vied for the same antiquities.
"That belongs in a museum!" is the cry of Indiana Jones and his professional colleagues as they
struggle against mere collectors. Both parties, of course, are willing to pay for their antiquities
under the right circumstances. An awareness of that fact led certain Bedouin of the Taamireh
tribe to preserve some old scrolls that they had found in the Judean desert in 1946 or 1947.They
happened to enter a narrow cave, they said, and there they were, rolled up in stone jars. Could
not someone be found to buy the manuscripts – old, dirty, and tattered as they were?
The original seven scrolls were early divided into two lots. One lot of four was purchased by
the Syrian Orthodox archbishop of Jerusalem, Athanasius Samuel, the other lot of three by a
scholar at the Hebrew University, E. Y. Sukenik. Samuel, wishing to authenticate the antiquity
of his purchase through experts, eventually showed his texts to specialists at the American
Schools of Oriental Research. They realized that Samuel's scrolls had been written at least two
thousand years earlier, not the oldest archaia ever, but centuries older than the oldest
manuscript ever discovered in the Holy Land. These excited scholars announced the discovery
of the oldest known biblical manuscripts to the press on April 1 1, 1948, and Sukenik followed
suit days later. The original seven scrolls are the Charter of a Jewish Sectarian Association
(then called the Manual of Discipline, text 5 in the present collection), Tales of the Patriarchs
(text 2), Thanksgiving Psalms (text 3), A Commentary on Habakkuk (text 4), The War Scroll
(text 8), and two copies of the book of Isaiah.
Samuel took the scrolls to the United States and continued to try to sell them for years,
without success. Potential buyers were aware that some scholars doubted the scrolls'
authenticity and that questions lingered about the propriety of Samuel's removing the scrolls
from their country of origin. Finally, in 1955, an agent of the young state of Israel paid Samuel
$250,000 for his four scrolls, and the texts were reunited with Sukenik's three scrolls. Today
they are the prize displays of the Shrine of the Book museum in Jerusalem.
But by 1955, no one really cared anymore whether Israel or the archbishop had the scrolls,
because by then the industrious Bedouin had discovered nine more caves containing scrolls
equally ancient. Another cave would turn up in 1956, for a total of eleven. The first astonishing
discovery was succeeded by a steady stream, as the caves of Judea seemed eager to disgorge
everything that had silently lain in their depths for millennia. These eleven caves, it should be
noted, were all in the general vicinity of the Wadi Qumran, near the northwest end of the Dead
Sea, and their treasures do not exhaust the total number of discoveries. Ancient writings were
also found in caves near the Wadi Murabba'at and the Wadi Daliyeh and in the ruins of Masada.
Except for the Masada texts, the other discoveries came from times and milieus different from
those of the Qumran texts. When people use the phrase "Dead Sea Scrolls," they sometimes
mean all of these treasure troves, but more usually only the Qumran scrolls are meant. That will
be our own usage in the pages that follow.
The total number of scrolls, when the books were intact, may have been as high as 1,000.
Some have vanished without a trace, but scholars have identified the remains of about 870
separate scrolls. Their long centuries in the earth have reduced the vast majority of them to bits
and pieces, mere scraps, some no larger than a fingernail. The fourth cave alone, where the
biggest cache of manuscripts was unearthed, contained an estimated 15,000 fragments.
The great glut of material – a bonanza that far exceeded the wildest dreams of scholars – was
not without its problems. The biggest was simply finding scholars equipped with enough
knowledge and time to sort through the material. The government of Jordan – in whose
territory, after 1948, the Qumran caves lay – allowed foreign scholars to form a team in the
early 1950s to deal with all the incoming texts. These eight young men were to have the
responsibility – and the privilege – of publishing everything.
The scroll team began well, publishing its first volume of texts in 1955, Discoveries in the
Judean Desert, Vol. 1: Qumran Cave 1 (abbreviated as DJD 1).This book contained additional
fragments from the first cave the Bedouin had entered, pieces of documents that had turned up
after the first seven scrolls were removed. "Work of this nature is of necessity slow," wrote G.
L. Harding, director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, in the foreword. "It may well
be a few years before the series can be completed." Harding could not have foreseen that forty
years later the work would still not be complete. What explains the achingly slow pace of
publication?
For one thing, the work required considerably more time than originally estimated. The first
seven scrolls were all more or less intact (although some were in better repair than the others).
The publishing program consisted of simply publishing photographs of the texts, which were
(and still are) legible to anyone who can read ancient Hebrew. But undamaged scrolls like these
turned out to be the exception. Most were fragmentary, and it required considerable painstaking
work to even figure out which fragments originally belonged to the same scroll. That work
necessarily had to be done before even preliminary translations and interpretations could be
issued. (This work, by the way, still continues, and new "joins"-ways of connecting the
fragments-are discovered from time to time. We propose a few ourselves in the pages that
follow.)
The work of collecting and joining fragments, then, required much painstaking work and not a
little ingenuity. The original team did this phase of its work well, but in hindsight it is clear that
the task was too large and the team too small. The second volume of DJD came out in 1961,
with texts from Murabba'at, and DJD 3 followed in 1962, containing all the texts from Caves 2,
3, 5, 6, 7, and 10, the so-called Minor Caves (for comparatively few scrolls were found in these
caves). DJD 4 (1965) contained a single manuscript of the book of Psalms from Cave 11. Only
with DJD 5 (1968) were several manuscripts from the "mother lode," Cave 4, issued.
At this point the already slowing pace of publication ground to a complete halt. As a result of
the Six-Day War of June 1967, the Palestine Archaeological Museum, where the scroll
fragments were stored, had become the property of the state of Israel. The members of the
scrolls publication team-most of whom held decidedly pro-Arab convictions-were reluctant to
continue under Israeli auspices, even after the authorities assured them they could continue their
work without interference.
Eventually the Israelis and the team worked out an agreement, and the team published DJD 6,
containing a number of minor texts, in 1977. By this time, however, the scholarly community
was growing increasingly unhappy with the official scrolls team. The scrolls that had already
been published had revolutionized study of the Bible, early Judaism, and early Christianity. The
thought that hundreds of texts-more than half of what had been found-had never been seen
outside a small circle of privileged editors was maddening, "the academic scandal of the
century" in the words of Britain's Geza Vermes.
In fact, after a modus operandi had been reached with Israel, there was no good reason why
the rest of the texts could not be published rapidly. The team had finished most of the initial
work of reconstruction by 1960. But they had come to feel that a simple publication was no
longer enough. The scrolls had become an entire subdiscipline of ancient history, and a "proper"
publication now had to include vast analyses, large syntheses, and detailed assessments placing
every fragment in its place in the history of Judaism, Christianity, and humankind. This was a
daunting task for a large team; for a small team it was simply impossible. And, although the
team had slowly begun to increase its size-taking on a few Israeli members and select graduate
students (those who studied with team members) in the 1980s-it still refused to allow other
scholars access to the texts. In academia, of course, knowledge is power, and the scrolls editors
enjoyed theirs immensely.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, complaints about the slow pace of publication snowballed.
Team members continued to publish individual texts from time to time, but control of the
process always remained in their hands. Even when a text was published it seemed like noblesse
oblige and the perceived arrogance behind the slow pace of publication acted as a catalyst,
goading "outsiders" to work toward achieving unfettered access. New obstacles to publication
had arisen as well: several members of the original team had died and others were battling poor
health.
Finally, in the early 1990s, the monopoly of the official team was broken, both from within
and from without. In 1990,John Strugnell, head of the scrolls team since 1987, was forced to
resign by the Israel Antiquities Authority for derogatory comments he made about Judaism. The
Authority put Israeli scholars in charge of the project, and they began to invite more scholars to
join the team, intending to speed up the pace of publication.
But outside forces played the decisive role. The official team had compiled a concordance-a
comprehensive word list that also provides the context in which each word listed occurs-of all
the words in the unreleased texts. The team had always limited use of the concordance to
themselves, but before Strugnell's departure he allowed certain academic libraries to receive
copies of the concordance. Since the concordance listed each word along with one or two on
either side of it, theoretically one might reconstruct not only entire lines, but entire scrolls.
 A graduate student at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Martin Abegg, with his adviser,
Ben Zion Wacholder, put the theory into practice. He carried out the reconstruction with the aid
of a desktop computer, and the first volume of hitherto unreleased scrolls was published in
September 1991. The publication was a bombshell, and it triggered another. Later that same
month, the director of the Huntington Library in southern California, William Moffett,
announced that the library had in its possession photographs of all of the unreleased Dead Sea
Scrolls and that scholars would be allowed full access to them. These twin attacks on the
monopoly of the scrolls team proved decisive. After initially threatening legal action, in
November 1991 the new editor-in-chief of the official team, Emanuel Tov, announced that all
scholars would have free and unconditional access to all the photographs of the Dead Sea
Scrolls. This victory over scholarly secrecy and possessiveness made the book you hold in your
hand possible.
HOW THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS WERE WRITTEN
What, exactly, are the Dead Sea Scrolls? The objects themselves are documents written with a
carbon-based ink usually on animal skins, although some are inscribed on papyrus. The scrolls
were written right to left using no punctuation except for an occasional paragraph indentation-
no periods, commas, quotation marks, or any of the other reader helps to which we are so
accustomed. Indeed, in some cases there are not even spaces between words: the letters simply
run together in a continuous stream. The codex, the early form of the book with pages bound on
one side, had not yet been invented, so the "pages," or columns, were written consecutively on
the scroll. To read them one slowly unrolled the scroll, and then, to be polite, rewrapped it, like
rewinding a modern videotape. Not a few of the scrolls testify that the ancients failed to rewind
as often as we do. The scrolls are written in several languages and half a dozen scripts, and
though all are religious texts, within that category their contents are amazingly varied.
THE LANGUAGES USED IN THE SCROLLS
Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the dominant view of the Semitic languages of
Palestine in this period was essentially as follows: Hebrew had died; it was no longer learned at
mother's knee. It was known only by the educated classes through study, just as educated
medieval Europeans knew Latin. Rabbinic Hebrew, the written language of the Mishnah,
Tosephta, and other rabbinic literature of 200 C.E. and later, was considered a sort of scholarly
invention-artificial, not the language of life put to the page. The spoken language of the Jews
had in fact become Aramaic. Even in this tongue, literary production was thought to be meager.
Accordingly, prominent scholars writing in the mid-1940s (on the eve of the scrolls' discovery)
expressed doubts that the composition of a Semitic Gospel was even possible. Edgar
Goodspeed, for example, argued: "The Gospel is Christianity's contribution to literature. It is the
most potent type of religious literature ever devised. To credit such a creation to the most barren
age of a never very productive tongue like Aramaic would seem the height of improbability. For
in the days of Jesus the Jews of Palestine were not engaged in writing books. It is not too much
to say that a Galilean or Jerusalem Jew of the time of Christ would regard writing a book in his
native tongue with positive horror." 1
(1) Edgar Goodspeed, "The Original Language of the Gospels," in Contemporary Thinking About
Jesus: An Anthology, ed. Thomas S. Kepler (NewYork: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1944), 59.

The discovery of the scrolls swept these linguistic notions into the trash bin. Here were
hundreds and hundreds of texts, tangible evidence of substantial literary productivity. Apart
from copies of biblical books, about one out of six of the Dead Sea Scrolls is inscribed in
Aramaic. Clearly the writing of an Aramaic Gospel was eminently possible. Yet the vast
majority of the scrolls were Hebrew texts. Hebrew was manifestly the principal literary
language for the Jews of this period. The new discoveries underlined the still living, breathing,
even supple character of that language. A few texts pointed to the use of Hebrew for speech as
well as writing. These works (for example, A Sectarian Manifesto, text 84) displayed a missing-
link type of Hebrew, intermediate between the form of Hebrew used in the Bible and that used
by the rabbis. Rabbinic Hebrew was shown to be no invention, but simply a development from
the ordinary spoken Hebrew of biblical times.
The scrolls have therefore proven that late Second-Temple Jews used various dialects of
Hebrew along with Aramaic. (These two languages are closely related-Aramaic is to Hebrew as
French is to Italian.) For writing, however, they generally tried to imitate biblical Hebrew, an
older form of the language. The situation would be analogous to our trying today to write in the
style of Elizabethan English. Not all the scrolls writers could perform this feat equally well, so
the "correctness" of the Hebrew varies considerably. Modern scholars actually appreciate the
mistakes more than the deft performances, because the mistakes arise out of the writer's own
language usage. The written form teaches us about the spoken.
A small minority of the scrolls were written in Greek. Their discovery has vouchsafed us a
further glimpse into the linguistic complexity of first-century Jewish society. Hebrew, Aramaic,
Greek: each was being used in particular situations of speech and writing. We are only just
beginning to discover some of the rules for those uses, to bring to bear the more sophisticated
perspectives of sociolinguistics. Since, as noted above, many of the Dead Sea Scrolls have but
recently become known to a wide range of scholars, we are presently at an early stage of
linguistic understanding.
SCRIPTS USED FOR WRITING THE SCROLLS
The script most commonly used to write these texts, whether Hebrew or Aramaic, has come to
be called the Jewish script. Before the discovery of the scrolls, we knew relatively little about it.
The Jewish script proves to be a development of an earlier script of the fourth and third
centuries B.C.E., one that has been known to scholars since the nineteenth century. Perhaps
surprisingly, that script had originally been used only for Aramaic, not for Hebrew. In the time
of the scrolls it came to be used for Hebrew as well. Whereas Hebrew won the battle of the
languages, when it came to script Aramaic was the victor. The scrolls reveal various forms of
the Jewish script: beautiful, careful chancellery hands decorated with serifs, informal varieties,
cursive and extremely cursive (i.e., illegible and extremely illegible!) types. From this script
later developed the medieval scripts used to write Hebrew, and one descendant became that
most often used in modern printed Hebrew Bibles and books.
Also surviving among a small group of the scrolls, however, is a developed form of the
ancient Hebrew script that the Aramaic form had supplanted among the Jews. This script had
been the standard in the days of David and Solomon and on down to the time of Jeremiah. In
our period this form of writing, known as Paleo-Hebrew was especially used for copies of the
books of Moses (Genesis through Deuteronomy) and of Job. Presumably the scribes who chose
it regarded those books as the oldest of the Hebrew Scriptures; Paleo-Hebrew was therefore
most appropriate. The scrolls have shown, then, that the Jews of Jesus' day used scripts
descended from both earlier Aramaic and earlier Hebrew scripts. In addition, three different
cryptic, or secret, scripts have emerged. Before the discovery of the scrolls, we had never seen
these forms of writing. While cryptic writing as a concept goes back as far as the third
millennium B.C.E. in ancient Mesopotamia, these are the oldest forms associated with Hebrew
ever discovered. The most important of these secret scripts has come to be called Cryptic Script
A. Perhaps fifteen scrolls use Cryptic Script A either entirely or for marginal notes (see
especially The Sage to the "Children of Dawn," text 55, and The Phases of the Moon, text 57).
As Edgar Allan Poe once noted in an essay, A Few Words on Secret Writing, "Few persons
can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing
which shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot
concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve." Cryptic Script A, likewise, has
yielded up its secrets to modern scholars, who have discovered that it is a simple substitution
cipher-that is, each symbol of the cryptic alphabet corresponds to one symbol of the regular
Hebrew alphabet.
CONTENTS
As noted, all the scrolls, with a few minor exceptions, are Jewish religious texts. In a way, the
fact that all the writings are religious is surprising. Why are there no copies of works on
agriculture or animal husbandry – on secular, "practical" topics? The Jews in this period were an
agricultural people. Wouldn't they want to read such secular books? Immediately, then, as we
consider the contents of the scrolls, we begin to perceive an element of intentionality in their
being gathered and hidden in the caves. This is not a random collection of "what there was" –
not a chance sweeping from this bookshelf and that.
These religious writings are of two different kinds: the biblical and the nonbiblical. The
biblical texts are copies of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), forming about one-
quarter of the total number of scrolls in the collection. The caches included a copy of every one
of the books of the Jewish Bible, except, apparently, the book of Esther. Not a trace of Esther
has turned up.
The "Dead Sea Bible" is the oldest group of Old Testament manuscripts ever found-at least a
thousand years older than the traditional Hebrew texts from the early medieval period that have
been the basis of all our modern Bible translations. In many cases, the scrolls have supported
the traditional text of the Bible, but in others, what they say in particular verses (their
"readings") agrees with nontraditional versions like the Septuagint. (The Septuagint is the
ancient translation of the Old Testament into Greek that was used among Egyptian Jews.)
Sometimes the scrolls preserve readings we never knew existed.
At other times, the scrolls contain differences more profound than the readings of individual
verses. They preserve "editions" of entire biblical books that differ from the traditional text. For
example, two forms of the book of Jeremiah have emerged from the caves, one agreeing with
that usually printed and translated in modern Bibles, the other about 15 percent shorter and with
the contents in a different order. Several versions of the book of Psalms have likewise come to
light. These versions differ greatly from one another, in particular from Psalm 90 onward.
Psalms 90-150 are arranged in different orders, and what is more, some of the manuscripts
include additional, previously unknown psalms. The content and form of the book of Psalms
was manifestly in flux in the period when the scrolls were written. (To read some of these
additional psalms, attributed to David, turn to text 15, Apocryphal Psalms, and text 127,
Apocryphal Psalms of David.)
In a similar vein, the discovery of the scrolls has uncovered the existence in this period of
anthologies of biblical excerpts, of "rewritten Bibles," and of lost sources used, perhaps, by the
writers of the biblical books. The first two of these categories were apparently methods of
interpreting the Bible; in both, material was added to the biblical texts quoted. The additions
were intended to give a particular "spin" to the biblical portions being interpreted. Whether
people understood these types of texts as less authoritative than the Bible itself is a legitimate
question, given that the final contours of the Bible were not fixed. The Healing of King
Nabonidus (text 39) is a scroll manuscript preserving a source that may have inspired a biblical
writer, in this case the author of Daniel. Healing is a more primitive version of a story about the
Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar familiar to modern readers from Daniel 4.
In short, the scrolls have proven that some of the Jews of Jesus' day knew and used more than
one form of many biblical books, and it seems not to have disturbed them or driven them to
resolve the differences. There was as yet no agreed upon "canon" of the Bible. Which books
would be included in the Bible and in what form or "edition" had not yet been decided.
Doubtless different Jews and groups of Jews would have made different selections of
authoritative books. Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, though not a part of our Bible today, were
certainly regarded as holy and authoritative by at least some Second-Temple Jews. Only later,
after 100 C. E., did a "standard" version of the Bible emerge.
The nonbiblical texts are simply copies of religious texts not found in the Bible. Based on our
ignorance, these can be further subdivided into two categories. There are nonbiblical texts that
were known before the discovery and others that were completely unknown until the scrolls
were read.
The previously known nonbiblical texts are religious works like the book of Jubilees, the book
of 1 Enoch, and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Although Jews wrote them (or some
early form of them) in Aramaic and Hebrew in ancient times, these writings did not survive in
Jewish circles. They survived only among Christians, who adapted them and "republished" them
as edifying literature, even sometimes adopting them as part of Holy Writ. Both Jubilees and 1
Enoch survived, translated into the ancient language of Ethiopia, as components of the Old
Testament of the Ethiopian church. The Testaments is extant only in Greek. Another example is
the book of Tobit. Translated into Greek in ancient times, it became a part of the Roman
Catholic Old Testament canon. Until the Qumran finds, however, it was unknown in its original
Semitic language. Copies in both Hebrew and Aramaic have turned up. These manuscripts in
themselves would be enough to earn the title of Greatest Find of the Century.
But it is the texts that no one knew existed that give the Qumran collection its special quality,
and they defy easy summary by their sheer variety and richness. They are the texts that are
translated here, and the best way of finding out about them is just to read them. They are in
poetry and prose, and in them we find astrology, magic, and apocalyptic dreams of worldwide
Jewish domination. There are biblical commentaries, descriptions of messiahs and Antichrists,
and stories about angels and giants. There is even a list of buried treasure-actual, not imaginary,
treasure (A List of Buried Treasure, text 14). Yet even this part of the collection can be thought
of as comprising two kinds of texts: the sectarian writings and the nonsectarian writings.
Such a division is much more controversial, and some scholars would rush to deny the validity
of it. Yet even a rough-and-ready perusal of the materials shows that some texts presuppose a
particular kind of organization and share a distinctive set of doctrines, a unique theological
vocabulary, and a special perspective on history, things absent from other Qumran texts and
other sorts of Judaism in general. Quite a few works advocate or presuppose an unorthodox
calendar. Perhaps 40 percent of the nonbiblical Dead Sea Scrolls fall into this subgroup. These
texts, it seems clear, were the central documents of the group or groups behind the Dead Sea
Scrolls, and these are the ones we would designate as sectarian. Those to whom they belonged
and who wrote most of them called themselves the Yahad, a Hebrew word meaning "unity."
This is the term we shall use for them throughout the book.
Of the many controversies surrounding the scrolls, probably the most lasting has been over the
identification of the group responsible for the sectarian documents. This controversy continues
as we write. It is quite rightly felt that if one could securely make such an identification, most of
the other questions surrounding the scrolls and their nature would fall in line. Unfortunately, the
identity of the sect has been, and remains, a knotty problem – although some of the newly
available scrolls suggest new solutions.
THE ORIGIN OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
It is not true that within a month after the discovery of the scrolls everyone thought Essenes
wrote them, although in retrospect it may seem that way. The Essenes were one of the major
groups among the Jews at the turn of the era. It is true that the initial press release in April 1948
mentioned them and both popular and academic studies of the first scrolls argued for Essene
authorship. As the studies piled up, though, the "Essene hypothesis" did not have the field to
itself.
Why did, and do, the Essenes look so attractive to those looking for the group behind the Dead
Sea Scrolls? This question leads us in several directions.
First, it is important to understand the dating of the scrolls. None of the Dead Sea Scrolls is
dated internally. Unlike medieval scribes, for example, their copyists did not use colophons
(summarizing statements praising God and giving the date) to identify themselves. Only a few
works refer to identifiable historical events, and none of these writings was among the initial
discoveries. The men who first saw the archbishop's scrolls guessed, on the basis of the letter
shapes, that the scrolls were penned in the first century B.C. E., and almost all of the studies of
the scroll writing since have confirmed that initial impression. In fact, the Qumran texts have so
galvanized the science of paleography-the study of ancient writing and its evolution-that some
proponents claim to be able to date a text within twenty-five years on that basis alone. Others
(including the authors) are less confident, although few would argue with the "broader view"
that paleography can date a text within about a century. On that evidence, then, a few scrolls
would date from the second century B.C.E., the vast majority from the first century B.C. E., and
a smaller number from the first century C. E.
Beyond paleography, carbon-14 analysis provides another strand of evidence for dating. This
kind of analysis can indicate a general date for objects made of organic material. In 1951, some
of the linen scroll covers from Cave 1 were tested and yielded a date between 60 B.C.E. and 20
C.E. Swiss scientists made additional tests in 1991, the technique having been refined in the
interim to allow individual texts to be tested. Further tests, on different texts, were conducted in
Arizona in 1994. All the Qumran texts tested fell between the parameters established by the
"broader view" of paleography.
Finally, a few texts from Cave 4 actually refer to historical individuals by name. These
references, though isolated, are of enormous importance, as will be seen below. For now, it is
enough to state that the individuals so named are the Syrian king Demetrius Eukairos (who
reigned 95-78 B.C.E.), King Alexander Jannaeus of Israel (103-76), Queen Salome Alexandra
of Israel (76-67), King John Hyrcanus II (63-40), and the Roman general Aemilius Scaurus
(active in Israel 65-63). In addition, A Commentary on Habakkuk makes a transparent reference
to the Roman invasion of Israel in 63 B.C.E. All of these individuals and events fall within the
first century B.C.E., again broadly confirming the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E. as the time
when the scrolls were put down in writing.
Artifacts found in or around the scroll caves also provide supporting evidence for dating the
scrolls. Researchers found pottery in several caves, and pottery styles are the basis of most kinds
of archaeological dating. Although dating by pottery types is subject to the same kinds of
reservation as paleographical dating, archaeologists estimate that the Qumran pottery types are
typical of the period 150 B.C.E.-100 C.E.

In short, there are good – indeed, overwhelming – reasons to locate those who wrote and
copied the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Israel of the period ca. 200 B.C. E. to 100 C. E. As it
happens, we have only one comprehensive contemporary source for the history of Israel during
that period: the writings of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Josephus was a generation
younger than the apostle Paul and spent the later years of his life under the patronage of the
Flavian family in Rome writing about his own people. He wrote two books that tell us almost
everything we know (or think we know) about Israel during that time: The Jewish War
(abbreviated War), describing the Jewish revolt against the Romans from 66 to 73/4 C. E. and
the events leading up to it, and The Antiquities of the Jews (abbreviated Ant.), a sweeping
chronicle of Jewish history from creation to Josephus's own time.
In both books, Josephus describes what he calls three Jewish "schools of philosophy" that
existed in his time: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. It is what Josephus says about
the Essenes that made the Essene hypothesis of the scrolls' origins so appealing. Particularly
noteworthy in this respect is the correspondence between his description of the Essenes and the
text we call the Charter of a Jewish Sectarian Association (text 5).
Some of the correspondences are as follows. Josephus says that "those entering the sect
transfer their property to the order" (War 2.122); the Charter says that new members must give
their property to the Overseer (6: 19; see also 1 :11-12; 5: 1-2). Essenes emphasize the role of
fate, or divine providence, in all things, unlike the Pharisees and Sadducees, who allow some
scope for free will (Ant. 13.171-173); the doctrine of predestination is common in the scrolls
(see the Charter 2:13-4:26 for its most notable expression). The Essenes allow new members to
join only after a period of one trial year, when the novice shows his aptitude for the Essene way
of life, followed by two years as a probationary member with some privileges (War 2.137-138);
according to the Charter, the would-be initiate must also pass a trial year as a member, and then
a second year (note: not two more years) under probation (6:13-23) before becoming a full
member.
There is also some striking agreement in details. For instance, Josephus mentions (and it says
volumes about ancient mores that he considers it worth mentioning) that Essenes "avoid spitting
in the midst of the group or on the right side" (War 2.147); the Charter also stipulates that
"anyone who spits into the midst of a session of the general membership is to be punished" (7:
13).
These data in themselves would naturally make anyone consider the Essenes as possibly the
sect of the scrolls; but another description of the Essenes from an ancient travelogue clinched
the matter for many. The Roman writer Pliny wrote in his Natural History that a sect called the
Essenes lived "without women, sex, or money" by the shores of the Dead Sea, south of Jericho
and north of Engedi – an area corresponding to the region where the Dead Sea Scrolls were
found. For many, that settled the matter: the Qumran group were Essenes. That view still
prevails today, but it is facing new challenges.
THE STANDARD MODEL
The Essene hypothesis is one leg of an influential three-legged theory about the Qumran texts
that we shall call the Standard Model. There are two other legs to it, which will here be called
(1) the anti-Hasmonean hypothesis and (2) the "mother house" hypothesis. The anti-Hasmonean
hypothesis has to do with the historical origins of the Essene movement; the "mother house"
hypothesis concerns the connection of the scrolls to the Khirbet Qumran ruins located near
some of the caves. It will be convenient to consider each of the three legs in turn, starting with
what we know about the Essenes.
Josephus goes into some detail about the beliefs and customs of the Essenes, but he says-and
probably knew-nothing about their origin or how they came to have their beliefs. The scrolls, if
they are of Essene origin, tell us more, although in veiled terms. The Damascus Document (text
1) and the commentaries, particularly A Commentary on Habakkuk (text 4), mention some of
the prominent people and events involved in the founding of the group. Ordinarily such
information would be of tremendous historical value. In the scrolls, however, there is a catch:
most of the dramatis personae are named only under symbolic pseudonyms. Thus the apparent
founder of the group is called only the Teacher of Righteousness; the prominent member of the
group or groups opposing him is called the Man of the Lie (or sometimes the Spewer of Lies),
who may be the leader of a sinister cabal called the Flattery-Seekers; and the sect's chief
persecutor is designated only as the Wicked Priest. There is another ruler called the Lion of
Wrath, and there is a menacing foreign power known as the Kittim.
A story can be pieced together from the various texts. The Teacher of Righteousness was a
priest exceptionally gifted in religious insight; indeed, he had been granted special revelations
from God about the true meaning of Scripture and the proper interpretation of the Law of
Moses. Although he succeeded in gaining a following among other priests and righteous Jews,
he was opposed by the Man of the Lie, who by his cunning rhetoric was able to dissuade many
from submitting to the Teacher's precepts. The Flattery-Seekers also opposed the ministry of the
Teacher. The Wicked Priest, however, initially seemed to be favorable to the Teacher; but
"when he ruled in Israel" he showed himself to be irreligious, greedy, corrupt, and violent. He
harried the Teacher and his followers, drove them into exile, and on at least one occasion made
an attempt to have the Teacher killed-apparently without success. The Wicked Priest was
threatened by Gentile powers and was captured and mistreated by them. There is no certain
indication that the Teacher died a violent death, although that is possible.
The texts often combine elements of this story of the Teacher with imprecations on his and the
group's enemies. In particular, the imminent coming of the rapacious "Kittim" is understood to
be divine punishment on the nation for its rejection of the Teacher of Righteousness and his
followers.
Scholars have ransacked the turbulent history of Israel in the second and first centuries B.C. E.
to find scenarios that match the synopsis above. Very briefly, that history goes like this: after
the Jews had thrown off the yoke of the Greek kings of Syria in 165 B.C.E., they were ruled by
the priestly family of the Hasmoneans (also known as the Maccabees), leaders of the revolt. For
slightly less than a century (152-63 B.C.E.), Judea was independent under Hasmonean rule and
even expanded its territory to something like its boundaries under David and Solomon. At the
same time, however, the country was riven by religio-political factions, of which the two main
ones were the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
The origins of both groups are obscure. Josephus first mentions them as existing, with the
Essenes, during the reign of the early Hasmonean high priest Jonathan Maccabee (152-142
B.C.E.; Ant. 13.171). It is certain that the Pharisees, largely a lay movement and the "liberals" of
their day, generally opposed the Hasmoneans. The Sadducees, on the other hand, were
composed primarily of priests and as the "conservatives" supported the Hasmoneans.
The Pharisees were distinguished in particular for their "oral law," an unwritten adjunct to the
Scriptures that claimed to provide the correct interpretation of Holy Writ. As Josephus wrote,
"The Pharisees have imposed on the people many laws from the tradition of the fathers not
written in the Law of Moses" (Ant. 13.297). These traditions of the fathers were the genius of
the movement, for they spelled flexibility, enabling the Pharisees to adjust to new situations and
to recast old laws as new circumstances required. Naturally, to the Sadducees and other non-
Pharisaic groups among the Jews these same traditions were anathema. The Pharisees were
nevertheless often able to impose their will because they were the group that enjoyed the most
support among the general populace. They were the forebears of the rabbis, and rabbinic
literature contains a fair number of laws and traditions that go back to the Pharisees. The
Pharisees were also the group most often depicted in the Gospels as opposing Jesus and his
interpretations of the Law, although in many respects Jesus stood close to their position. (Our
strongest arguments are often within our own family.) Josephus further tells us that the
Pharisees believed in resurrection and the existence of angels and spirits, whereas according to
the New Testament (Acts 23:8) their principal competitors for power, the Sadducees, denied
both.
Whether the Sadducees actually did deny these doctrines pure and simple, especially the
existence of angels, is problematic. Angels appear in the books of Moses, after all, and every
Jew embraced those writings. As a priestly party, the Sadducees may, however, have questioned
the resurrection, since the ancient priestly doctrine of the afterlife – as found in the Hebrew
Bible and in the apocryphal book of Sirach, for example – held that a shadowy existence in
Sheol follows death. This ill-defined existence was much less desirable than earthly life. For the
ancient priests true life after death consisted primarily in the continuation of one's name through
children and grandchildren and in leaving behind a "blessed memory." In any case, what is
certain is that the Sadducees, whose primary support lay with the Jerusalem elite, denied the
Pharisaic understanding of these matters. That denial was part conviction, part political
necessity.
During the tenure of Alexander Jannaeus, a Sadducean supporter, (103-76 B.C.E.) the
Pharisees helped invite the Greek king of Syria, Demetrius III, to mount a military campaign
against Alexander – for which they were severely punished when the revolt failed. Alexander
later received very bad press from Josephus, who depicted him as a drunken, war-besotted
monarch whose greatest pleasure, outside of drink and war, was consorting publicly with his
many concubines. But as we shall see, not everyone among the Jews would have accepted
Josephus's characterization, and the other side finds a voice among the scrolls.
Alexander and the Pharisees were for six years on opposite sides of a civil war among the
Jews, and it was in this context that, desperate to remove Alexander, the Pharisees turned to the
traditional Syrian Greek enemies of the Jews for help. Later, after Alexander's death, his widow,
Salome Alexandra, came under Pharisaic influence and allowed them to suppress dissenting
views. She was thus the antithesis of her husband. Whereas he had embraced, and been
embraced by, the Sadducees and other priestly groups, she allied herself with the Pharisees. The
reason for the switch was purely political. Knowing that she could not hope to appeal to both
Sadducees and Pharisees, Salome (depicted by Josephus as a prudent and energetic queen, if a
bit naive) simply calculated which group's support would most strengthen her own position.
After Salome's death (67 B.C.E.) yet another civil war broke out between her two sons,
Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, partisans of the Pharisees and Sadducees, respectively. Thus the
militant disputes between the principal religious factions among the Jews continued for yet
another generation. Hyrcanus had already been the high priest while his mother reigned. Upon
her death he simply assumed the royal mantle as well. But Hyrcanus was weak and had no real
stomach for war or the other duties that monarchs of that period were expected to perform (at
least, that's the way Josephus tells it). He abdicated the throne in favor of his much more
ambitious brother, Aristobulus, but later, at the instigation of members of the Jerusalem elite,
had second thoughts. War broke out between the brothers. The war ended only when the
Romans invaded and added Judea to the list of Roman provinces in 63 B.C. E.
Qumran pseudonyms can be correlated with Judean history in two cases: the Kittim and the
Wicked Priest. The Kittim, conquerors of nations, are pretty clearly the Romans; and the
Wicked Priest, who was also a ruler of Israel, must have been one of the Hasmoneans. But
which one? Rather than focus on the period from Alexander Jannaeus to the coming of the
Romans, most proponents of the Standard Model look to an earlier time and favor early
members of the family: either Jonathan Maccabee or his brother and successor, Simon (142-134
B.C.E.).Why?
One main reason is archeological, and that leads us to the "mother house" hypothesis. The
Standard Model stipulates that the Khirbet Qumran site (see below, on the archaeology of
Khirbet Qumran) was the central headquarters of the Essene movement and the main dwelling
place of the Teacher and his disciples after their rejection by the establishment. Proponents then
proceed to read out a chronological framework for Essene history from the settlement history of
the ruin. Since the site's history has been understood to begin around the middle of the second
century B.C.E., the Wicked Priest must have been the Hasmonean then holding office-Jonathan
or Simon.
That conclusion is then further buttressed by a certain reading of the Damascus Document:
When Israel abandoned Him by being faithless, He turned away from them and from His sanctuary
and gave them up to the sword. But when He called to mind the covenant He made with their
forefathers, He left a remnant for Israel and did not allow them to be exterminated. In the era of
wrath – three hundred and ninety years at the time He handed them over to the power of
Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon – He took care of them and caused to grow from Israel and from
Aaron a root of planting to inherit His land and to grow fat on the good produce of His soil. They
considered their iniquity and they knew that they were guilty men, and had been like the blind and
like those groping for the way twenty years. But God considered their deeds, that they had sought
Him with a whole heart. So He raised up for them a Teacher of Righteousness to guide them in the
way of His heart. (A 1:3-11)
The Standard Model understands this passage to be, in a nutshell, the history of the founding
of the sect. The ambiguous statement about 390 years is interpreted so that the 390 years follow
rather than precede (as is possible in the original Hebrew) the conquest of Nebuchadnezzar,
which happened in 586 B.C.E. Subtraction yields the date 196, and an additional 20 years leads
to 176 as the beginning of the Teacher's ministry. Since his activity could have lasted some 30
years, the Teacher and Jonathan Maccabee could easily have been contemporaries.
But what made Jonathan so wicked? There is no indication in Josephus or other sources that
he was notably corrupt or violent. Here the model baldly asserts that Jonathan's great sin was
precisely in accepting appointment as high priest of Israel under the auspices of the Syrian
Greek king Alexander Balas in 152 B.C.E. The Hasmonean family, although of priestly stock,
did not belong to the descendants of David's high priest Zadok, from whom alone many Jews
thought the high priest could come. Of course, if this act was what made Jonathan wicked, then
his successors to the high-priestly throne – in short, all the Hasmoneans – must likewise have
been odious to the Essenes.
In turn, so the theory goes, their opposition to Hasmonean rule made the Essenes obnoxious to
the government and to some other Jews, and they were hounded by Jonathan (or his successor,
Simon) into exile in the Judean desert, where they built a settlement. There they remained for at
least two centuries, isolated and insulated from the evil regime of the Hasmoneans, from the
Roman successors to the Hasmoneans, and from the corrupt society of Judea, which had
rejected the holy verities of the Teacher of Righteousness. During the Jewish revolt against the
Romans in 66-73/4 C.E., they fell afoul of the Roman legions and their settlement was
destroyed-but not before they were able to conceal a precious library in the nearby caves.
Such, in brief, is the understanding of the historical background of the Dead Sea sect that
many scholars hold today. It would be pointless to deny the element of truth in the Standard
Model, but is also fair to say that it has had much too easy a time of it in scholarly circles. There
are significant gaps in this theory, and some of the new texts have the effect of spotlighting
these gaps. Also, there are many weaknesses in the notion that the ruin was once the
headquarters of the Essenes.
THE SITE OF KHIRBET QUMRAN
Khirbet Qumran lies on the northwest coast of the Dead Sea within easy walking distance of
Jericho, and it is not difficult to access from Jerusalem. (Khirbet is the Arabic word for "ruin,"
and the name means "ruin of Qumran"; generally scholars use the shorthand reference
"Qumran.") When the scrolls were discovered, their caves seemed to radiate north and south
from this site, so early investigators thought it reasonable to suppose there might be some
connection. Believing that an understanding of Khirbet Qumran could clarify the human
situation behind the scrolls, they decided to excavate. The Department of Antiquities of Jordan,
the Palestinian Archaeological Museum, and the Ecole Archéologique Française de Jérusalem
undertook joint campaigns beginning in 1951 and continuing through 1956. Unfortunately, the
results of those excavations were never published scientifically. (Preparations to do so are now
under way, two generations later.) Father Roland de Vaux, who led the excavations, did,
however, publish a variety of preliminary reports, as did some of the others who had helped in
the work. DeVaux also lectured widely on the findings, which culminated in the Schweich
Lectures of 1959, published as Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
DeVaux distinguished four basic occupational levels (periods of habitation): one in the
seventh century B.C.E. and, after a long hiatus, three others beginning about 135 B.C.E. and
ending shortly after 70 C.E. The fourth and final period represented a few years of Roman
occupation, so the two periods between 135 B.C.E. and 70 C.E. were the important ones in
terms of the scrolls. DeVaux and other early proponents of the Standard Model linked these two
periods to the sectarian scrolls. The group that had produced them was imagined to have lived
on the site in those years. A layer of ash pointed to fiery destruction at the end of that time, the
walls around the site being mined under in the fashion of Roman siege warfare. Iron arrowheads
were also associated with this level. DeVaux argued that in 68 C.E., when their forces invested
Jericho, the Romans had destroyed a resisting Qumran. DeVaux's view, therefore, was that a
community lived in this abandoned region for a period of almost two centuries.
The excavators went on to equate Qumran with the Essene habitation on the shores of the
Dead Sea described by Pliny. The findings of the excavations now fed into and became a crucial
element of the Standard Model, bolstering the Essene hypothesis. Qumran, the theory held, had
been the center of Essene activity, the "mother house" of the sect. To shore up this equation, de
Vaux and others tended to push the resettling of the site in the Second-Temple period back even
earlier than 135 B.C.E. Archaeological findings offered no real support, but the move was
necessary because they could hardly position Qumran as the center of the Essenes unless it had
come into existence about when the Essenes had. As noted above, Josephus had written of the
Essenes as existing before 135.
Estimating that between a hundred and fifty and two hundred people could inhabit the site
itself, de Vaux and the members of his team theorized that numerous others must have lived in
the nearby caves – not only in the ones where manuscripts were discovered, but also in the
many others in the region where signs of habitation had turned up. Additional members of the
community, they suggested, probably lived in huts and tents that they would have set up around
Qumran. Common meals would be held at the mother house, as shown by the hundreds ofbowls
and pitchers found in one of the rooms dubbed the "refectory." (Note the monastic terminology:
the excavation team was led and dominated by Catholic priests. One cannot but suspect that in
interpreting the excavation they peered down into the well of time and there beheld –
themselves.)
The excavators were particularly excited about the discovery at Qumran of plastered "tables."
Here, they urged, were the very tables upon which the Dead Sea Scrolls had been inscribed,
copied out by generation after generation of monkish scribes. The tables were found on the
ground amidst rubble that had piled up with the collapse of a second-story room. The
archaeologists reasoned that the tables had likewise f:1llen from that vanished room and named
this room the scriptorium, "the room of the writing" (more monastic terminology). The
unearthing of an elaborate waterwork system transversing the site led to the notion that these
channels and pools served for elaborate Essene ablutions. All of these interpretations of the
archaeological findings found their way into countless articles and books on the scrolls and, like
other aspects of the Standard Model, were repeated so often that the mist of theory congealed
and became solid fact.
In the last several years, however, a growing number of scholars have begun to question the
nature of the connection between the scrolls and Khirbet Qumran. The discoveries at the site
were not, after all, facts; archaeology seldom yields those. What archaeology yields is not facts,
but artifacts-which then have to be interpreted. Those interpretations, no matter how convincing
they may seem, are not facts. Thus, Pauline Donceel-Voûte (one of those now responsible for
full publication of the de Vaux excavations) argues that the principal evidence for the
scriptorium-the plastered "tables"-points rather to a Roman-period dining room, or triclinium.
The Romans did not sit down to eat, but instead reclined on cushioned couches. During the
years of the Second-Temple period, the Jews came to do likewise. She says the tables were
actually couches.
Before it could recover from this blow, the Standard Model's romantic image of sustained
scribal activity at Qumran suffered yet another challenge with the release of all the scrolls in
late 1991. Now that scholars could examine the totality of the manuscript evidence for
themselves, a puzzling fact became evident: hundreds of different scribes appeared to have
written the scrolls. Since each writer had a distinct handwriting, just as we do, it was possible to
isolate individual scribes and determine which scrolls each had copied. Not only were hundreds
of different scribes responsible for the texts, but very few seemed to have written more than one
scroll. Only about a dozen "repeats" have been identified. Needless to say, this situation does
not square very well with the theory-now-fact that Qumran scribes produced the scrolls at the
site. If that theory were correct, what one would have expected to find is a limited number of
hands, with many more texts traceable to each scribe. Presumably a given scribe, laboring for a
generation at the site, would have produced numerous manuscripts. Even allowing for the fact
that some of the scrolls would have perished before being discovered in our century, release of
the manuscripts has revealed a notably different profile. The logical inference is that most of the
scrolls come from elsewhere. Indeed, once that much has been conceded, the burden shifts and
it becomes necessary to prove that any of the scrolls were written at Qumran.
Other questions have arisen regarding the notion of Qumran as an Essene laura, or mother
house. Recent investigation by Joseph Patrich and other Israeli archaeologists has uncovered no
network of paths converging on the supposed communal center. Medieval monasteries always
display such a network connecting the church and dining room to the dispersed cells. Moreover,
Patrich has been unable to locate any traces of the hypothesized huts and tents, although in the
case of desert archaeology such traces should still be evident. Ancient Bedouin temporary
encampments in the desert are readily identifiable centuries later. Qumran was supposedly no
mere temporary encampment, but a site occupied more or less continuously for two centuries.
Yet there are no traces of any surrounding habitats. At most, then, about fifty people inhabited
the site, only those who could fit within its walls. Consequently, most of the hundreds of
communicants populating the picture drawn by de Vaux and the Standard Model have now been
erased.
Aerial photography has likewise revealed no paths linking the caves where the scrolls were
discovered to the site of Qumran. The movement back and forth that would have produced a
path evidently did not occur. Thus the caves could not have functioned as separate libraries or
repositories to which sectarians would repair for reading and reflection.
The first probe of Khirbet Qumran since de Vaux's 1950s excavations took place in late 1993
during Operation Scroll, an archaeological sweep of the region prior to ceding control to the
new Palestinian state. Amir Drori and Yitzhak Magen conducted a limited dig and came to the
conclusion that the Qumran complex was founded by the Hasmoneans, not by the Essenes.
They pointed out (as, indeed, others had before them) that Qumran was right in the middle of a
line of fortresses established by the Hasmonean dynasty. These fortresses ran from Nablus in
the north to Masada in the south. They further noted that the elaborate waterworks of the site
would have required heavy investment more consonant with a state project than a sectarian
initiative. The two scholars' final conclusion was that the founding of Qumran should be viewed
as an integral part of the Hasmonean plan to settle and fortify the Jordan Valley.
Nevertheless, still under the sway of the Standard Model, the archaeologists continued to
attach the Essenes to the site, simply recalculating their existence there to a later date. Based on
no particular evidence, they hypothesized that Herod the Great, put on the throne by the
Romans, gave Qumran to the Essenes shortly after taking power from the Hasmoneans in 37
B.C.E. Drori and Magen apparently did not perceive how badly their reassessment of the site
would cripple the Standard Model they invoked. By moving the date of Essene occupation up to
37 B.C.E., these investigators have kicked out the chronological underpinnings of the model's
view of Essene beginnings. Qumran could hardly have been founded as the center of a
breakaway new movement if that movement had already existed for a century. Nor could the
Teacher of Righteousness have come here if it was a fortress under the control of the
Hasmoneans who, according to the model, were his bitterest enemies.
More and more, then, it is becoming clear that the archaeology of Qumran cannot bear the
weight of a theory that it has too long been forced to support. Even the strongest proponents of
the Standard Model are beginning to admit as much. One staunch adherent, Jonas Greenfield,
conceded recently, "The problem is we all bought de Vaux's version hook, line, and sinker."
One can no longer reasonably argue for a "strong" connection between the site and the scrolls,
though the two may have a "weak" connection; that is, though the site may have been used by
the sect, it cannot have been their main location. 2
(2) The recent discovery of an ostracon (piece of pottery) at the site, reportedly inscribed with the
conveyance of a horse and a slave to the Yalwd, seems to clinch the matter. The site must have been
used by the sect.

FURTHER PROBLEMS WITH THE STANDARD MODEL

Not only is the significance of the ruin for the scrolls disputed, but the Essene hypothesis of
the Standard Model is itself vulnerable to criticisms of one kind and another. As noted, the
parallels between some of the scrolls, especially the Charter, and Josephus's description of the
Essenes, are striking. But the scrolls give no evidence of other notable characteristics of the
Essenes. For instance, Josephus and Pliny and the Jewish philosopher Philo all describe the
Essenes as celibate-indeed, it is perhaps their most arresting trait. But the scrolls contain no
command to be celibate; on the contrary, numerous passages presuppose the opposite, that the
group members will be married.
Philo also says that the Essenes pursued only peaceful occupations-and yet the War Scroll
gives detailed prescriptions for the conduct of a very real, though future, armed conflict against
the powers of darkness.
Philo and Josephus also agree that the Essenes rejected slavery-and yet the Damascus
Document has rules governing the treatment of slaves (11:12, 12:10-11). Another writing, called
here Ordinances (text 17), further regulates slavery. Josephus mentions, among other things, the
white garments of the Essenes-of which the scrolls say nothing.
If the classical sources describe the Essenes in ways that conflict or lack support from the
contents of the scrolls, the opposite is also the case. The scrolls stress beliefs that Josephus and
Philo say nothing about. The doctrine that God had commanded Israel to follow a 364-day solar
calendar instead of a 354-day lunar calendar was a key tenet of the Qumran group. This peculiar
calendar unifies the scrolls more than any other single sectarian element. Yet Josephus and
Philo say nothing of the calendar. The scrolls strongly emphasize the role of priests in the group
leadership; but again, Josephus says not a word about priestly dominance, although he himself
came from a priestly family and claims to have studied with the Essenes as a youth. Josephus
also fails to mention the Teacher of Righteousness in his extensive descriptions of the Essenes.
There are ways to finesse all of these objections, and some of them are more or less
convincing. For instance, Josephus, living so long after the Teacher, might not have heard of
him, especially if, over the years, the Essenes had changed and were no longer so attached to the
Teacher. Also, Josephus does allude to a sect of "marrying Essenes" (War 2.160-161) – and that
could perhaps account for the lack of interest the scrolls show in celibacy. But the "Essene
hypothesis," however appealing, is hardly airtight.
A part of the difficulty may be in too ready acceptance of Josephus's oversimplifying division
of the Jews into Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. We know from other sources, both Jewish
and early Christian, that there were many more than three groups among Second-Temple Jews.
In fact, Josephus himself mentions others in passing or in detail, including Zealots and sicarii,
and describes various movements that centered on charismatic leaders such as John of Gischala
or Simon bar Giora. Trying to apply Josephus's three labels to a complex historical reality is like
trying to use only the categories "Catholic," "Protestant," and "Jew" to understand every shade
of religious opinion in the United States in the late 1990s. Which one was David Koresh, leader
of the Branch Davidian group at Waco? Well, if forced, you would probably say "Protestant" –
but such a label would prove singularly unhelpful for anyone studying Koresh and his followers.
The same may well be true of the Teacher of Righteousness and his flock.
Finally, the idea that the Qumran group-Essenes or some other persuasion originated in the
second century B.C.E. out of opposition to the Hasmonean takeover of the high-priesthood is
crumbling. The newly released scrolls offer this notion no support. In both old scrolls and new
there are indeed many references to the corruption of Israel's rulers-to their rapacity, to their
greed, to their complicity in the profanation of holy sites – but not a single passage objects to
the high priest's line of descent. In fact, a close reading of Josephus will reveal that only the
Pharisees ever objected to a Hasmonean as such holding the high-priesthood (Ant. 13.288-292).
In short, the Standard Model, while an elegant idea, has become less convincing, not more, as
additional evidence has come forth from archaeology and the texts. The situation is reminiscent
of the words of Thomas Huxley, who in a very different context decried the great tragedy of
"the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Ugly little facts are now making
themselves known, and many come from the new texts.
A NEW PROPOSAL FOR SCROLL ORIGINS
Not only is there no evidence that the Dead Sea group objected to the Hasmonean high-
priesthood as such, the newly available texts actually show the opposite: they held some of the
Hasmoneans in high regard. One such writing is the so-called In Praise of King Jonathan (text
95), technically referred to as 4Q448.The difficult script on this scrap of leather has been
brilliantly deciphered by Ada Yardeni. It is a poem in honor of a king of Israel known as
Jonathan; the vital opening portion reads "For Jonathan the king" and goes on to say "and all the
congregation of Your people Israel, which have been dispersed to the four winds of the heavens,
let peace be on all of them and Your kingdom" (B:2-8). Yardeni and her colleagues, Hanan and
Esther Eshel, believe that the text refers to the Hasmonean ruler Alexander Jannaeus (Hebrew
name: Jonathan), who was the first Hasmonean officially to style himself as "king." If they are
correct, as we believe they are, then In Praise of King Jonathan undermines the idea that the
Teacher and his followers were on principle opposed to the Hasmoneans. Not only were they
not opposed to them, they supported one of the most ill-famed of the family, for Alexander, as
noted, was described by the historian Josephus as an extraordinary villain. (Proponents of the
Standard Model have labored to explain In Praise of King Jonathan. Lawrence Schiffman, for
example, proposes that "it may have happened that a text presenting an opposing view simply
ended up there [in the collection] – an exceptional occurrence, but not impossible." 3 Indeed.)
(3) Lawrence H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication
Society, 1994), 240.

At least one new text, then, has provided a big surprise. But as often with new discoveries, it
has sent us back to the old texts with new eyes. One of the old texts, already published in the
1950s, is the Commentary on Nahum. The ancient Qumran group liked to pore over the ancient
prophecies of the Hebrew Bible looking for foreshadowings of their own history. One result of
this activity was a commentary on the prophet Nahum from Cave 4 (text 21); it was the first
published scroll to refer to identifiable historical figures. One of them was Alexander Jannaeus,
the "Lion of Wrath." Alexander, according to the writer "used to hang men alive [ . . . GAP . . . ]
in Israel in former times, for to anyone hanging alive on the tree, [the verse app]lies: 'Behold, I
am against [you, says the Lord of Hosts]'" (frags. 3-4 1:7-9).
The crucial gap was initially filled in by some such phrase as "[which had never been done],"
expressing outrage at the act of crucifixion. But when another scroll, the Temple Scroll (text
131), was published in 1977, it became clear that under certain circumstances the scroll writers
did approve of crucifixion: "If a man is a traitor against his people and gives them up to a
foreign nation, so doing evil to his people, you are to hang him on a tree until dead" (64:7-8). It
so happens that Alexander did crucify eight hundred men for the crime of siding with the Greek
king Demetrius III and inviting him to invade Judea. With the publication of the Temple Scroll,
it now seemed that the proper restoration of the gap was that suggested by Yigael Yadin: "the
Lion of Wrath used to hang men alive, [as it was done] in Israel in former times."
 Now, according to the Commentary on Nahum, some of those that the Lion of Wrath crucified
were the Flattery-Seekers, and they are those known in other historical sources as the Pharisees.
We already knew that the Qumran sect hated the Pharisees, but it is now apparent that
Alexander, the sworn enemy of the Pharisees during his reign, was a hero to the sect. The sect,
in other words, heartily approved of Alexander's crucifying eight hundred Pharisaic rebels.
If the Teacher's group could side with Alexander Jannaeus, then clearly they need not have
disapproved of any Hasmonean ruler on principle. This new chain of evidence makes it very
unlikely that the group originated in a dispute concerning the high-priestly succession in the
mid-second century B.C.E. Moreover, not only does this newly possible combination of
evidence change our ideas about the origin of the sect, it suggests that they were fully involved
in the internal politics of Israel in the first century B.C.E. They supported Alexander and
opposed the Pharisees. One of the effects of the Standard Model has been to distance the scroll
writers geographically and ideologically from the Judean mainstream: they were insular,
monastic dropouts. But the new model suggested here brings the group back into the flow of
history.
King Alexander, as we know from other sources, was himself sympathetic to the group known
as Sadducees. What did the Qumran group think of the Sadducees?

Another newly published text sheds some light on that question. Although known to the tiny
group of official scroll editors since the late 1950s, it was only in the 1980s that the existence of
the work now called Miqsat Maase ha-Torah (MMT for short) or the Sectarian Manifesto (text
84) was revealed. The Manifesto is a position paper of some kind and juxtaposes the views of
three parties: a "we" group, a "you" individual who is a ruler, and a "they" group who are doing
things in the Temple that the "we" group condemns. The "we" group further tries to persuade
the "you" ruler to support them in this condemnation. Who are these three parties?
Jewish scholars, most notably Schiffman of New York University, early recognized that the
positions of the "we" group sometimes bore a striking resemblance to laws of the Sadducees
described in rabbinic literature – so much so that Schiffman now leaps to redefine the Qumran
sect as being itself Sadducees. We may prefer to look before we leap with him, but we can walk
as far as the cliff's edge: if the "we" group are Sadducees (or a Sadducean subgroup or priestly
sympathizers), then logically the opposing "they" group are Pharisees. The royal "you" to whom
the text is addressed must be one of the Hasmonean rulers. The connections with rabbinic
literature thus point to a tentative identification of the three parties, at least in general terms.
The social setting implicit in the Manifesto permits further deductions. Strugnell argues that
the text was written against the background of the Sadducean loss of power over the Temple
and the concomitant rise of Pharisaic control there: "[The Manifesto] was sent by a priestly
faction that was later to evolve, under the influence of the Teacher of Righteousness, into the
Qumran sect. Further, it was sent to keep the then High Priest of Israel faithful to those
Sadducean priestly laws that were shared at that time by him and them." 4
(4) J. Strugnell,"MMT: Second Thoughts on a Forthcoming Edition," in E. Ulrich and J.Vanderkam,
eds., The Community of the Renewed Covenant (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 72.

Yet the idea that Sadducees wrote the sectarian scrolls is vulnerable in some of the same ways
that the theory connecting them to the Essenes is. The "Sadducean theory" does not easily
square with important aspects of what we know about the Sadducees from other sources.
According to Josephus, for example, the Sadducees of his day had no use for the doctrine of
predestination. The New Testament further says that they did not believe in an afterlife or in
angels (Acts 23:8). In contrast, we know from the sectarian scrolls that their authors strongly
held all these convictions.
The evidence suggests, then, that the scroll group resembled the Sadducees in some ways and
the Essenes in others. Yet there are major obstacles to identifying the group straightforwardly as
one or the other.
Apart from this problem of labeling the group, so far we can say the following. In Praise of
King Jonathan, the Commentary on Nahum, and the Manifesto, taken together, seem to imply
that the sect (whoever they were) took sides in the inter-Jewish political conflicts of the first
century B.C.E. They favored Alexander over his opponents, the Pharisees, and favored
Sadducean law over its opponents, also the Pharisees. The Sectarian Manifesto in particular
seems to point to an era when the tide was turning away from Alexander's partisans – including
the scroll writers – and in favor of his old enemies, the Pharisees. Josephus describes only one
possible period of rising Pharisaic power in the Hasmonean period: the reign of Salome
Alexandra, the widow of Alexander.
The Commentary on Nahum fits very well into this watershed era. Its author considers the
activity of the Lion of Wrath to be past, while the "dominion of the Flattery-Seekers" is a tragic
reality at the time he is writing. Since, as we have seen, the Lion was Alexander, the writer must
be living in the period after Alexander's death in the year 76 B.C. E. Salome Alexandra
followed him in power, and she favored the Pharisees, granting them unprecedented sway over
the internal affairs of the nation.
Josephus wrote of this turn of events with thinly veiled disapproval, and of Salome
Alexandra's allowing it with outright disdain. The Pharisees, he noted,
are a certain sect of the Jews that appear more religious than others, and seem to interpret the laws
more accurately. Now (Salome] Alexandra hearkened to them to an extraordinary degree. . . . These
Pharisees artfully insinuated themselves into her favour by little and little, and became themselves
the real administrators of the public affairs: they banished and reduced whom they pleased; they
bound and loosed men at their pleasure: and, to say all at once, they had the enjoyment of the royal
authority....While (Salome Alexandra] governed other people, the Pharisees governed her. (War
1.110-112)
Another reason for focusing on the first century B.C.E. rather than the second is still another
newly published text known as An Annalistic Calendar (text 61). What gives this calendrical
work special significance is its occasional mention of historical events, just as some modern
calendars mention D-Day or President's Day on the appropriate dates. Unfortunately, since the
work is very fragmentary, mere phrases survive, but they are enough to tell us to what era they
are referring. The phrases are: "Shelomziyon came ... ," referring to Queen Salome Alexandra
by her Hebrew name; "Hyrcanus rebelled against Aristobulus," referring to the sons of Salome
and Alexander, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II; and "Aemilius killed," referring to the Roman
general Aemilius Scaurus, who led the armies of Pompey into Judea in the 60s of the first
century B.C.E.
As noted above, Salome reigned from 76 to 67 B.C.E., during which time her eldest son
Hyrcanus was high priest.Aristobulus was king and high priest from 67 to 63 B.C. E., when the
Romans arrived. A confused period ensued, with Roman dominion overlaying first civil war,
then continuing general discord between Hyrcanus and Aristobulus and their followers. This
confusion continued until 37 B.C.E. with the rise of Herod the Great. The Annalistic Calendar
seems clearly, then, to refer only to events in the first half of the first century B.C.E. – not to
later events, and most particularly not to earlier ones. Conspicuous by their absence are any
events of the second half of the previous century, when the Standard Model would locate the
rise of the sectarians.
The prominence of the period 76-63 B.C.E. in the Calendar has not escaped the notice of
adherents of the Standard Model, nor have they failed to see the implications. Forced to offer
alternate explanations, they either fall silent or are reduced to a response something like
Schiffman's: "It is possible that these names designate heavenly bodies rather than actual
people."5 Schiffman offers no support for his proposal, and we have otherwise no reason to
believe that heavenly bodies were known to the Jews of this period by human names.
(5) Schiffinan, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, 240.

Just as In Praise of King Jonathan sent us back to the Commentary on Nahum with a new
perspective, so the Calendar sends us back to another commentary with new appreciation, the
Commentary on Habakkuk (text 4).
As noted earlier, the Commentary on Habakkuk was one of the first seven scrolls found in
Cave 1. For over forty years it has been the subject of intense scrutiny. The Qumran writer
interpreted the biblical prophet's Chaldeans as the Kittim, "who are swift and mighty in war ...
attacking and pillaging the cities of the land.... From far away they come, from the seacoasts, to
eat up all the peoples like an insatiable vulture" (1:12; 3:1, 10-12). Scholars are agreed today
that the term "Kittim" refers to the Romans and that the advent of the Roman armies in the 60s
of the first century B.C.E. led to the highly colored account of the commentary. There seems to
be no good reason why the personalities of the commentary should be drastically separated in
time from the Roman invasion, as required by the Standard Model. The Roman invasion is
portrayed as a punishment for the sins of the Wicked Priest and the Man of the Lie. What makes
most sense is that the Wicked Priest should have been active in the first decades of the first
century B.C. E., and so also the Teacher of Righteousness.
If the Wicked Priest is from the fmt century B.C. E., there are only two candidates for the
position: Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II. Hyrcanus was supported by the Pharisees, Aristobulus
by the Sadducees; hence, in view of the anti-Pharisaic cast of the scrolls, Hyrcanus II is the best
suggestion for the Wicked Priest.
As for the Man of the Lie, it appears from a close reading of the sources that he was probably
the head of the Pharisaic party. Rabbinic sources preserve the name of a prominent Pharisaic
leader of the first century B.C. E., a man who was noted both for his violence and for his
success in winning approval for his views: Shimeon ben Shetah. He may have been a brother or
more distant kinsman of Salome Alexandra. Ben Shetah is known only from later rabbinic
literature, but the legends told of him there match up with what we know of Pharisaic power
from Josephus. Shimeon was able and apparently willing to sentence people to death, and one
story tells of his hanging eighty women in Ashkelon for witchcraft. From the Pharisaic
perspective, the era was remembered as that of "Shimeon ben Shetah and Queen Salome," and it
is said that during this golden age "wheat grew to the size of kidneys, barley to that of olive
berries, lentils to that of gold denarii." Although it can be no more than a suggestion, it is
interesting to speculate that the Man of the Lie may have been this proto-rabbinic figure. If he
was, it would fit well with the idea that the Wicked Priest was Hyrcanus II. We are not the first
to propose equating Ben Shetah with the Man of the Lie; F.F. Bruce argued the possibility as
early as 1956. This is an example of what we meant when we spoke above of the newly released
materials sometimes bringing us back to long-discarded hypotheses.
Finally, what of the Teacher of Righteousness? We know little about him, other than that the
Wicked Priest persecuted him-an undertaking that would fit well, by the way, within the
Pharisaic reign of terror described by Josephus during the reign of Salome Alexandra:
[The Pharisees] became themselves the real administrators of the public affairs; they banished and
reduced whom they pleased; they bound and loosed men at their pleasure: and, to say all at once, they
had the enjoyment of the royal authority.... Now she [Salome] was so superstitious as to comply with
their desires, and accordingly they slew whom they pleased themselves. (War 1.111-113)
Josephus goes on to say that Aristobulus prevailed upon the queen to allow the enemies of the
Pharisees to be banished from Jerusalem instead of executed, "so they were suffered to go
unpunished, and were dispersed all over the country." And we are reminded that the Wicked
Priest, according to the Commentary on Habakkuk, followed the Teacher to his "place of exile."
In short, we suggest a scenario markedly different from that of the Standard Model: the
Teacher of Righteousness began his ministry late in the second or early in the first century B.C.
E., perhaps during the reign of Alexander. After the Pharisees came to power under Salome,
they persecuted the Teacher's group, which was sympathetic to the Sadducean establishment,
eventually hounding the Teacher into exile. When Hyrcanus II became king, he renewed his
efforts to destroy the Teacher and his group. The Roman intervention ended the Jewish civil war
of Pharisee versus Sadducee, Hyrcanus versus Aristobulus. All of the verifiable historical
references within the scrolls and the apparent attitudes of the scroll writers to those references
fit this model exceedingly well.
What, then, became of the Teacher and his group after this period? We have been using the
Josephan categories of Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes as if these were distinct and different
entities in the first century B.C.E., and indeed that is how Josephus presents them. But he was
writing toward the end of the first century C.E., nearly two hundred years later, and the three
parties he knew did not necessarily exist in the same form in the first century B.C.E. How much
are today's Democrats and Republicans like the Whigs and Tories of two hundred years ago? In
other words, the Qumran group may have been (or been part of) the ancestor movement of more
than one group that existed in the first century C.E. We should consider a distinction seldom
raised in research on the scrolls: those who write a text may have little or no direct connection
with those who later read it. People may read a work because they find something attractive in it
that was not necessarily foremost in the mind of the work's author. Sociologists refer to groups
who adopt another's ideology as "carrier groups." Various carrier groups may well have been
reading the scrolls in the century after the Teacher.
The Dead Sea Scrolls taken as a whole give evidence of a diverse movement, although not so
diverse that it could accommodate just any point of view. This is a judgment supported both by
the works we have called sectarian and by those that seem to be nonsectarian texts. This
movement was clearly favorable to priests, inclined to support those rulers who submitted to
priestly direction, and was violently averse to Pharisaism – perhaps because that ideology
allowed lay teachers, the later "rabbis," to revise traditional laws. The movement arose among
the religious conservatives of its day, whereas the Pharisees were more liberal. In addition to
supporting old legal positions against Pharisaic innovation, the Teacher's group held to a
calendar that they claimed – and probably believed – was very old. This is the mind-set of
conservatives. The Teacher's group supported conservative politicians such as Alexander
Jannaeus and his son Aristobulus II, at the same time opposing those under liberal domination.
After the Romans came to power, the situation changed. The movement could no longer hope
to influence the political course of events directly, although the priests could still attempt, by
collaborating with the occupying powers, to control the religious practices of the people. We
can guess that some in the movement did exactly that, while others were not willing to
cooperate with the Romans. The uncooperative group still had two further choices to make: to
seek the violent overthrow of Roman power or to wait quietly for the intervention of God. Some
chose the latter option, and they may have been described by Josephus under the umbrella term
"Essenes."
We know that many others chose the way of violence, and bands of Zealots and sicarii played
a role in igniting the Jewish revolt in 66 c. E. Both these groups could have drawn inspiration
from the primarily first-century B.C.E. texts now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, for there they
would have read of a group much like themselves, organized for holy war. That such freedom-
fighting groups were reading these texts is more than speculation. The Dead Sea Scroll we have
called A List of Buried Treasure (text 14) is a list of treasures from Herod's Temple, compiled as
part of an effort to hide the gold, silver, and other valuables from the Romans, should the
Temple fall. Logically, the compilers of the list must have been in control of the treasures they
wanted to save. According to Josephus, it was freedom fighters and Zealots who seized the
Temple when the war broke out in 66, and they never relinquished control during the
subsequent years of war against Rome and against other Jewish groups. Who but they could
have drawn up this list? Thus, when it is found in Cave 3 among other Dead Sea Scrolls, we
cannot but conclude that not only the List, but the other scrolls as well, may have been hidden
by the same people.
Another clue to the identity of some first-century readers comes from the finds at Masada. The
story of the Masada excavations is, wearily, much like that of the Qumran texts. In both cases,
materials discovered in the late 1950s and early 1960s have only recently come to be fully
available. The Masada finds present a profile similar to those of Qumran: various different
handwritings, similar types of literary works (seventeen were found). The salient difference is
that in the case of Masada, we possess ancient, eyewitness testimony as to who had collected
these scrolls. Josephus was involved with the freedom fighters in the first stages of the war, and
he gives us a name: the sicarii. This group, named for their penchant for using a sica, or short
dagger, to assassinate collaborators with Rome, seized control of Masada at the time the war
broke out. They made numerous forays against the Romans and collaborating Jews in the years
that followed, and at the last, about to be overcome by Roman forces, they committed mass
suicide.
Among the writings they left behind was a copy of The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. This
work also appears among the Dead Sea Scrolls, in fully nine copies (see text 85). Perhaps the
most significant aspect of the Songs in the present connection is that it adheres to the 364-day
calendar we have previously mentioned and that had been so important to the Teacher's
followers more than a century earlier. This calendar was integral to what made the work so
attractive for the sicarii, for it was an antiestablishment, conservative symbol as much in their
own time as in the Teacher's. Indeed, for all the importance of the calendar to the scrolls, the
only group of ancient Jews following it to whom the ancient sources give a name is the sicarii,
the last defenders of Masada.
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS TODAY
"We are immigrants from the past," says Jack Miles, the noted author, in God: A Biography.
For both Christians and Jews, Palestine in the first century C.E. is our homeland, our Old
Country. We have immigrated from the world of the Dead Sea Scrolls, so it is only natural that,
though they are two thousand years old, they still have much to say to us.
For Jews, the Qumran texts say, "Our family was larger than you knew." The watchword is
diversity. Modern Judaism comes from Pharisaism, but in the first centuries B.C. E. and C. E.
there were also other kinds of Judaism, and it was not obvious that the Pharisees would be the
ones still standing at the end of the day. Understanding the world of the first century C.E. now
means understanding the fact of diversity, and the scrolls have helped cultivate a sense of the
historical complexity of the matrix of Judaism and of early Christianity. The scrolls teach,
indirectly, a message the scroll writers themselves would have repudiated; that is, that there are
different ways of being authentically Jewish. Any effort to "reclaim the scrolls for Judaism"
must acknowledge that truth.
For Christians, the texts say, "You are more Jewish than you realized." There are many
individual parallels between passages in the scrolls and the New Testament, and we point out
some of these in the body of the book. But those connections are less important than certain
broad views that the two groups of documents share: a pervasive dualism expressed as Light
versus Darkness; the necessity of conversion; the idea that God's purposes are secrets revealed
only to those who accept certain teachings; the high estimate placed on poverty-all are traits of
early Christian belief that scholars used to attribute to the influence of Greco-Roman culture,
not to Jewish background. Yet all are now attested in the scrolls. Early Christianity, we learn,
was not a hybrid of Judaism and Hellenism it was rooted in the native soil of Palestine.
For both Jews and Christians, the Dead Sea Scrolls group are the cousins we never knew we
had; the scrolls themselves are lost letters from home. When they tell us about our forebears,
they tell us about ourselves. Like all lost letters from home, they beckon to us, draw us
irresistibly to hear their message. Like all letters from home, they are well worth reading.

READING A DEAD SEA SCROLL

In order to read a Dead Sea Scroll with proper appreciation and a modicum of critical acumen,
it's important to know what you are reading. How does one go from a hugger-mugger of over
15,000 tiny scraps of skin and ink to 870 full-blown manuscripts, and from there to published
texts and translations? You should have some idea of the various steps involved in the process.
Only then can you begin to think for yourself about what you will be reading in the following
pages. Understanding the process by which the scrolls have been put together will help you to
avoid the reader's cardinal sin – trusting an author too much. If we have certain ideas to present,
we want you to be persuaded, not simply take our word for it. We want you to know just how
much reconstructing the scrolls can be a matter of judgment (possibly mistaken) and
uncertainty. We also want you to be able to make sense of the various sigla, brackets, and other
paraphernalia that decorate the translations in this book.
As noted in the Introduction, the first seven Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more or less
intact. That can be said of very few of the hundreds of works that came to light subsequently.
The early members of the scrolls editorial team found themselves facing an enormously
complex jigsaw puzzle. After a short time, they worked out a modus operandi. Thousands of
fragments were spread out on the tables of the Palestine Archaeological Museum, flattened
under glass. The editors would walk from table to table, scrutinizing the fragments and trying to
match them with this or that grouping they had already isolated. One of the editors, John
Allegro, has described the guiding principle of those early efforts:
One of the saving factors has been that of the four hundred [later: eight hundred] or so manuscripts
we have had to deal with, surprisingly few were written by the same scribe, so that by recognizing
the idiosyncracies of one's own scribes one could be fairly sure that the piece belonged to his
document.1
(1) J. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reappraisal (New York: Penguin, 1964), 55-56.

Handwriting was thus the foremost criterion that the editors used to separate fragments into
piles and then into manuscripts. A second important guide was the skin on which the texts were
inscribed. The treated hides of goats, ibex, and even gazelle used for the scrolls are not uniform
in thickness or color. Each skin is, so to speak, its own animal; one might be thick, another thin;
one might have a reddish cast, another could be nearly black. Study of the differences in the
skins was therefore important for figuring out how to group fragments.l3ut the skins could
sometimes be misleading. Though they might have been uniform shortly after they were first
placed in the caves, when they came out of the caves as manuscript fragments, they could differ
markedly in appearance. The reason: the variable conditions in which they had spent the past
two millennia. Some fragments were exposed to more light than others, some to more moisture
or a different soil chemistry. Still, in general, handwriting and the appearance of the skins were
reasonably trustworthy as dual criteria guiding the early work of separating out scrolls. For the
hundred or so texts written not on skin, but on papyrus, scrutiny of the patterns of the plant
fibers in the papyrus helped in the separating.
Work on proper identification of the fragments continues until this day. While the early editors
did their work of sorting admirably well, they were not infallible. Sometimes they made
mistakes; in fact, we suggest a few that we think we've caught in the pages that follow (for
example, see Assorted Manuscripts, text 99). Scholars continue to assess older conclusions.
Advancing technology holds the promise of new approaches, although, since in most cases there
is little doubt about the sorting, help will come mostly "at the margins." In this vein, researchers
at Brigham Young University have recently begun to extract DNA from some of the fragments.
Extraction does minimal damage to the materials, and DNA analysis makes it possible to
identify the individual animal from which· each fragment came. Where there is some question
about a given fragment, or where fragments have never been assigned to any manuscript (there
is a fairly sizable group of such pieces, all extremely tiny), this new approach may accomplish a
modest breakthrough.
Once the early editors had grouped the fragments of a given manuscript together on one or
more plates, they had photographs taken. Also, each manuscript was assigned a "Q-number,"
indicating which cave it had come from. For example, 4Q242 means: Cave 4 of Q(umran), the
242nd manuscript from that cave. (This system did not yet exist when the first seven scrolls
were discovered, so they have no numbers. They are designated by abbreviations of their
names; e.g., 1QS means: Cave 1 of Q(umran), Serek [Hebrew for "order"].) As work progressed
and new fragments were identified, or it became clear that questionable assignments were in
fact mistaken and fragments were removed, the shape of a given manuscript changed, and new
photographs were taken. Today we can study the entire sequence of photographs for each
manuscript. For the most part, these photographs were taken under infrared light. Time had so
blackened many of the fragments that the writing on them was nearly invisible to the naked eye.
Infrared photography rendered the invisible, visible. The use of infrared explains why you
seldom see color photographs of the more fragmentary manuscripts; in the 1950s color infrared
photography was not yet possible (now it is).
Because these photographs were usually so much more legible than the manuscripts
themselves, the early editors worked mostly with the photographs, and subsequent scholars have
continued this practice. Autopsy of the original manuscript is still important, for it can resolve
uncertainties (is this odd mark ink, or just a spot on the skin?), but research on the scrolls
centers on the photographs. Here, too, technology promises to improve our understanding in the
future. Photographic methods developed for aerial reconnaissance have been brought down to
earth and are now being applied to the scrolls. Researchers are beginning to use infrared
imaging systems enhanced by electronic cameras and computer image-processing technology.
Like the magical liquid we applied as children to reveal invisible ink, this method has brought
out writing on fragments so dark that nothing was visible before, even in conventional infrared
photographs. "We were using infrared photography like a blunt instrument," Bruce Zuckerman,
one of the pioneers in applying the new techniques, has said. "Now we can sharp-shoot, be
precise and push technology beyond anything we've done before." So far the method has been
applied to the Tales of the Patriarchs (text 2) with salutary results.
Working with the photographs today, a scrolls scholar will attempt to reconstruct the original
manuscript as much as possible. (The early editors, overwhelmed as they were with multiple
lifetimes of material, usually attempted more limited reconstruction. Thus, the fragments in the
early volumes of DJD were often simply arranged by size from largest down to smallest.)
Usually a scholar will not choose an ordinary photograph, but rather a transparency made from
the photographic negative. The transparency is placed on a light table, the sort you often see in
camera stores for use with slides. The scholar may work with two copies of the transparency
simultaneously, sliding one on top of the other to try "joining" fragments, or checking an
uncertain letter by sliding well preserved options for the letter underneath it, to see how the
remaining bits of ink line up. Magnification is helpful to a degree. A jeweler's lupe, with a
strength of 8x-12x, works best; too much magnification results in pixilation (all you see are
dots). This work can also be done with computer digital imaging, but as yet few scholars have
access to the necessary computer equipment. (Unlike in the sciences, there is little money
available for equipment in the humanities, even for important tasks in which there is widespread
interest such as this one.)
A guiding principle for manuscript reconstruction is the recognition of congruent patterns of
damage. Consider: as a scroll lay decomposing on the floor of its cave, it rotted away layer by
layer, from the outside in. The scroll might also be visited by insects or rats, who would eat
away at the edges or at a fold. Worms could bore into the scroll. Assuming that the vermin ate
through more than one turn of the scroll, more than a single thickness of skin, the damage
pattern of the outer layer will continue some distance into the interior layers. An analogy would
be the patterns of damage in your rolled-up morning newspaper left by the teeth of your
overeager dog who brought it to you. The puncture marks and tears go several layers deep, right
into the sports section.
Scholars study these patterns of damage, for they can help determine how surviving fragments
of a scroll were positioned when it was intact. If two fragments manifest a congruent pattern,
then they must once have been in some physical relation to one another. Perhaps one fragment
originated near the center of the rolled scroll, and the other came from an outer layer overlying
the first fragment. If the scholar can identify fragments that come from three contiguous
columns, he or she is off to the races. He or she need merely measure the distance between
fragments. The distance between consecutive layers of a rolled scroll will change by a
mathematically predictable amount, decreasing as you move toward the center. Having
identified three consecutive fragments, you can then calculate the diameter of the scroll at the
point where the fragments stood, using the mathematical formula for the geometric shape of a
"regular spiral." (If you picture a scroll edge on, you will see that from that perspective it
actually is a tight spiral. If it's not too late, have a look at your damaged rolled newspaper, edge
on.)
At this juncture in the editing process a scholar will usually make a scale drawing of the scroll,
showing the proposed relation between the fragments. The photographs will not depict such
relations, of course, so a drawing is needed. No"': begins in earnest the difficult process of
reading the words and trying to figure out what might have been lost in the portions of the scroll
that have perished. The researcher copies or traces all the fragments and words from the
photographs. In most cases the result is a series of legible letters or words that breaks off
because of damage to the scroll, only to pick up a bit farther on. If the scholar is to have any
chance of understanding a fragmentary scroll, he or she must try to imagine what was
happening in the damaged, lost sections. How do the preserved portions relate? What is the flow
of thought? Here the scale drawing helps, for one can lightly draw in a few tentative words,
tracing letters so as to use the very handwriting that appears in the scroll. It's important to use
the ancient scribe's actual letter forms, because the size of ancient handwriting varied as much
as modern handwriting does. A break large enough for ten letters in one hand may
accommodate only five in another, larger handwriting.
Of paramount importance is determining the width of the original column. Unfortunately, the
full width is only occasionally preserved in some of the fragments of a manuscript, so certainty
on this question is often elusive. On a good day one gets a little help. The scholar may recognize
a broken biblical quotation, for example, or a broken quotation from a known extrabiblical
writing, even another Dead Sea Scroll. Filling out the broken quotation may reveal the column's
width. The quotation of Zechariah 2:8 works that way in frag. 2 of An Aramaic Text on the
Persian Period (text 124), for example. Knowing the width is crucial, for with that information
one also knows how much text is missing, how much preserved. The resulting parameters will
guide the reconstruction of ideas. If, say, half a line is missing, then it's unlikely that the idea or
statement in the preserved half can simply be extrapolated into the next preserved section. Too
much is missing. But if only one or two words are missing, the flow of ideas is generally not too
badly disrupted, and confident reconstuction is possible.
Constant interaction goes on between the scholar's mind – his or her "theory of the text" – and
what can be read and understood in the fragmentary manuscript. Imagination is important, but
so is the opposite pole, restraint. Reconstructing a Dead Sea Scroll, for all it may resort to
technology and sophisticated methods, is no science. It is an art. Like all art, it requires
inspiration, intuition, and the clamp-jawed determination of a pit bull. An intractable problem
may gnaw at the mind for months, and then suddenly, in a moment, the solution becomes
obvious. Yet paradoxically, when done best, this art is not creative, for the result is no new
creation. The goal is to recreate an ancient writer's work.
Having done as much reconstruction of the fragmentary manuscript as he or she can (someone
else may later do better; scholarship is cumulative), the scholar prepares a transcription. This is
the term for a rendering of the text into standard Hebrew or Aramaic book-style lettering. If you
were to type out a handwritten note from a friend, that would be a transcription. The scholar
does the same with the ancient text. He or she also labels fragments and columns using a
standard system. A fragment can, of course, contain parts of more than one column. Labeling
will then indicate "Frag. 1 Col. 1" and "Frag. 1 Col. 2," for example. At other times a column
may be composed of several fragments joined together. The label might then read "Col. 1
(Frags. 1 + 2 + 3)." Lines in the transcription are numbered, reading from the top of the column
to the bottom. Numbering does not necessarily begin with 1. Several lines may be known to be
missing, and the first line might be 1.4, or 1.15. Much of this labeling carries over into the next
step, the translation. We have included such labels in our translations throughout the following
pages.
The transcription indicates uncertain letters in the text with standard sigla, which also signal
the degree of uncertainty. And scholars use different types of brackets to communicate
additional types of information. Square brackets, for example ([ ]), surround reconstructed
words. We have ourselves used square brackets for that purpose throughout the book. Square-
bracketed portions may be simple guesses, calculated probabilities, or virtually certain: broken
biblical quotations filled out, for example, or wording that overlaps with another scroll. If you
see square brackets, you should be cautious about the words inside. Portions in square brackets
do not actually appear in the scroll.
Simultaneously with the transcription one prepares a translation. Note: not the translation – a
translation. There is no single translation equivalent for many words, not to speak of phrases or
entire texts. Some words have many possible rough equivalents. Other words, phrases, and
idioms in one language lack exact counterparts in another language. For example, none of the
European languages possesses an exact equivalent for the English phrase "bend over backward."
The unfortunate inhabitants of Germany, Italy, and France, among others, must make do with a
translation equivalent like "try very hard." A little thought, however, will convince you that "try
very hard" does not really convey the entire meaning or any of the nuance of the other phrase. In
fact, exact translation between two languages is impossible. To truly read Goethe, you must
learn German. So scholars prepare a translation of each transcription.
 Essentially, that is what you will be reading in the following pages: translations of
transcriptions that we have prepared for each Dead Sea Scroll in the book. Translation is the last
step in an intricate and frequently uncertain process of reconstruction. In the process we have
consulted and profited from the work of many colleagues worldwide (see the Bibliography). We
have done our best to present flowing, idiomatic translations, so far as that has been possible
given the frequently fragmentary materials. Throughout our work we have been mindful of the
Italian apothegm: "Traduttore traditore" ("The translator is a traitor"). Translators betray both
what they translate and readers of the translation. By their very effort they violate the original.
Yet we are not unduly concerned, nor in the least repentant. Any damage is for a worthy cause
and is not irreparable. Much of the beauty, the concision, the power of the Hebrew and Aramaic
in which the scrolls are couched will continue to reside, untranslatable, where nature has
decreed it must. And we are not really traitors to you, the reader, for we have drawn your
attention to our betrayal from the very first. Forewarned, you go forward fully armed. If we
have perhaps transported at least most of the meaning of the words across time, space, and
linguistic distance, we shall have succeeded in a principal aim.
 THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS BIBLE
INTRODUCTION

At the time of Jesus and rabbi Hillel—the origins of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism—there
was, and there was not, a “Bible.” This critical period, and the nature of the Bible in that period,
have been freshly illuminated by the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls.
There was a Bible in the sense that there were certain sacred books widely recognized by Jews
as foundational to their religion and supremely authoritative for religious practice. There was
not, however, a Bible in the sense that the leaders of the general Jewish community had
specifically considered, debated, and definitively decided the full range of which books were
supremely and permanently authoritative and which ones—no matter how sublime, useful, or
beloved—were not. The collection or collections of the Scriptures varied from group to group
and from time to time. All Jews would have recognized “the Law” (the Torah) and most would
have recognized “the Prophets” as belonging to that collection. Such a recognition is attested by
references in the New Testament to the “Law and the Prophets” (Matt 7:12; Luke 16:16; and
Rom 3:21). But the exact contents of “the Prophets” may not have been the same for all, and the
status of other books beyond “the Law and the Prophets” was neither clear nor widely accepted.
The notion of a wider collection of Scriptures that extended beyond the Law and Prophets is
suggested by an intriguing passage in Luke 24, which says that “everything written about me
[i.e., Jesus] in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets, and in the Psalms must be fulfilled” (vs. 44).
The Dead Sea Scrolls help us see the state of affairs more clearly from an on-the-spot
perspective. “The Bible,” or more accurately then, “the Scriptures,” would have been a
collection of numerous separate scrolls, each containing usually only one or two books. There is
indeed persuasive evidence that certain books were considered “Scripture.” But there is little
evidence that people were seriously asking the question yet about the extent or the limits of the
collection—the crucial question for a “Bible” or “canon”—which books are in and which books
are outside this most sacred collection.
Thus, The Dead Sea Scrolls Scriptures may be a more historically accurate title for this
volume. At any rate, it presents the remains of the books for which there is good evidence that
Jews at that time viewed them as Sacred Scripture.
THE “BIBLES” USED TODAY
The word “Bible” has different meanings for different people and groups. The most obvious
difference in content is between the Bible of Judaism (i.e., the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament)
and that of Christianity, which contains both the Old and New Testaments. The Dead Sea
Scrolls Bible does not include any New Testament books for one simple reason: by the time the
vast majority of the scrolls had been copied (in 68 CE), the New Testament was only beginning
to be written. Not surprisingly, then, there are no copies of New Testament books among the
scrolls.
The list of books included in a Bible is termed a “canon.” There are three main canons in the
different Bibles used today (see Figure 1):
1. The Jewish Bible (or Tanak) contains twenty-four books in three sections: the Torah, the
Prophets, and the Writings.
2. The Protestant Old Testament contains the same books as the Tanak, but in four sections
and in a different order: the Pentateuch, the Historical Books, the Poetical Books, and the
Prophets. In addition, the Protestant canon contains thirty-nine books, not twenty-four,
because it counts separately several books that comprise single books in the Jewish Bible.
For example, the one Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets in the Jewish canon becomes
the twelve books of the Minor Prophets in the Protestant Bible.
3. The Roman Catholic Old Testament contains exactly the same four divisions and thirty-
nine books as the Protestant Bible, but also includes further writings. Seven of these are
entire books (Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, and
Baruch [which includes the Letter of Jeremiah]); the others are sections added to Esther
(the Additions to Esther) and to Daniel (the Prayer of Azariah, Song of the Three Young
 Men, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon). For Catholics, these additional writings are part
of the Bible and are thus known as the “deuterocanonical books” (that is, a second group
of canonical books). However, Jews and most Protestants do not view these writings as
Scripture, labeling them the “Apocrypha” (plural of “Apocryphon”), which means
“hidden books.”

Some scholars believe that these books are not in the Jewish and Protestant canons because
they are later than most other biblical books (Daniel being an exception), while others point to
their supposed secular or unorthodox content as the reason for exclusion. The real explanation,
however, is more complicated and goes back to two ancient Bibles. Early Christians accepted
the Greek Septuagint, which contains these additional books, as their Old Testament, while
early Rabbis finalized the list of books for the Hebrew Bible in the second century CE. It is
these two early collections (the shorter Hebrew one and the longer Greek one) that determine
which books are included in the Bibles used by modern Jews, Protestants, and Catholics. Jews,
followed by Protestants, regard the shorter collection as Scripture, whereas Catholics accept a
larger canon that includes apocryphal/deuterocanonical writings found in the Septuagint.
THREE OLD BIBLES
All modern Bibles are translations of older texts. The Scriptures used by most readers of this
book (whether Jewish, Protestant, or Roman Catholic) are based on much older manuscripts that
have been translated into English. The three most important of these older Bibles are known as
the “Masoretic Text” (MT), the “Septuagint” (LXX), and the “Samaritan Pentateuch” (SP).
Scholars believe that the books in these three texts are from pre-Christian times, but
unfortunately no really early manuscripts were available before the discovery of the Dead Sea
Scrolls. Translations were made from the oldest available manuscripts, most of them medieval,
in the belief that these late documents were accurate copies of far more ancient texts.
The Masoretic Text
Almost all modern English translations of the Old Testament are based on a single manuscript,
the Leningrad Codex, which was copied in 1008 CE and is our earliest complete copy of the
Masoretic (or Rabbinic) Text of the Hebrew Bible. The Leningrad Codex is used by most
biblical scholars in its published edition, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (or the earlier Biblia
Hebraica).
Another important manuscript is the Aleppo Codex, which forms the basis of a new edition of
the Hebrew Bible currently being produced at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This
manuscript was copied in about 925 CE and is thus earlier than the Leningrad Codex; however,
a substantial part has been lost, which means that for some books the Hebrew University project
must rely on the Leningrad Codex and other Hebrew manuscripts.
Both the Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex are part of what is known as the “Masoretic
Text.” This term is quite complicated, since it covers many manuscripts rather than a single one;
“Masoretic Group” or “Masoretic Family” would thus be a more accurate name. Masoretic
manuscripts—including the Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex—contain the books of the
Hebrew Bible in the threefold arrangement that was developed by the Rabbis and is found in
modern Jewish Bibles: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings (though the specific order of
books sometimes varies between manuscripts).
This form of the Old Testament text now found in the Masoretic Text grew and was finalized
in three periods, or stages.
 The first stage originated among Babylonian Jews, the Pharisees, or “temple circles” and
ended with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE (or perhaps with the end of the Second
Jewish Revolt in 135 CE).
 The second stage extended from the destruction of the Temple until the eighth century CE
and was characterized by more and more textual consistency as rabbinic scholars sought to
standardize the text of the Hebrew Bible.
 The third stage extended from the eighth century until the end of the Middle Ages and was
characterized by almost complete textual uniformity. During this period, a group of Jewish
 scholars known as the Masoretes set out to produce a standard text of the Hebrew Bible—
one that in their eyes would be true to the Scriptures revealed by God in ancient times.
Since the ancient text consisted only of Hebrew consonants without any vowels (see Figure
2), many readings were open to diverse meanings (compare dg in English, which could be
dig, dog, or dug, depending on which vowel is used). The Masoretes’ solution was to add
vowels, accents, and Masoretic notes (see Figure 3), which required fixed meanings for
groups of consonants (for example, only dig, not dog or dug). As a result, the Masoretic
Text became almost completely standardized during this time. It is this standardized form
of the Hebrew Bible that is found in the Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex, and upon
which the Old Testaments of most English Bibles are based.

Because the Masoretic Text has become the Bible of Judaism and is the main text of the Old
Testament used by scholars and Bible translators, its relationship to the biblical Dead Sea
Scrolls is an important issue. In the translation presented in this book, all readings from the
scrolls have therefore been carefully compared with the Masoretic Text, with any differences
(or “variants”) signaled by the use of italics.
The Septuagint
The Septuagint is the ancient Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament,
translated by a number of different Jewish scholars over the course of the third, second, and first
centuries BCE. The oldest manuscripts of the Septuagint, which are very fragmentary, include
John Rylands Papyrus 458 (second century BCE) and Papyrus Fouad 266 (about 100 BCE).
Complete (or almost complete) manuscripts exist as well: Codex Sinaiticus (fourth century),
Codex Vaticanus (fourth century), and Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century).
But why was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures necessary? Following the conquests
of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BCE, Greek was increasingly used in the
Ancient Near East, including Palestine, and numerous Jews and other peoples emigrated to
lands such as Egypt. Eventually, more and more Jews adopted Greek as their first language and
became less and less fluent in Hebrew. For such Hellenized Jews to maintain and understand
their religion, a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek became increasingly necessary.
The translation was begun in the third century BCE in Alexandria (Egypt), one of the centers
of Hellenistic Judaism. According to a delightful legend in the Letter of Aristeas, seventy-two
scholars, six from each of the twelve Israelite tribes, were brought from Jerusalem to translate
the Pentateuch into Greek during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285–247 BCE). The
precise number of scholars was rounded off to seventy, from which comes the term Septuagint
(meaning “seventy” in Latin). Eventually, the “Septuagint” grew to embrace Greek translations
of all the books of the Hebrew Bible, translations of some books excluded from the Hebrew
Bible, and even a few sacred Jewish books originally composed in Greek.
The Septuagint is important for several reasons. First, almost all the books it contains were
translated from an earlier Hebrew or Aramaic form (though a few books, such as 2 Maccabees,
were originally composed in Greek). This means that the Septuagint gives readers a window on
an ancient Hebrew form of the Old Testament that is earlier than the time of Jesus. Second, the
Septuagint sometimes offers striking evidence of different ancient forms of biblical books (for
example, Jeremiah is about 13 percent shorter in the Greek than in the Masoretic Text) as well
as different ancient readings in specific passages. Third, because the Septuagint was the Bible of
Hellenistic Judaism, it offers important insights into how Greek-speaking Jews used and
understood Scripture. Fourth, since the Septuagint is quoted in the New Testament and was used
by early Christian authors, it constitutes the Bible of the early church and helps to explain early
Christian exegesis of Scripture. Finally, the Septuagint contains the books of the Old Testament
in the fourfold arrangement that is found in modern Christian Bibles: Pentateuch, Historical
Books, Poetical Books, and Prophets (though the specific order of books sometimes varies
between Septuagint manuscripts). It is from the Septuagint that most modern Bibles have
adopted this grouping and that Catholic Bibles have included the deuterocanonical books (or
Apocrypha).
 Because of the Septuagint’s importance as an ancient translation, the list of variant readings in
the footnotes of this book will often indicate whether or not the Septuagint agrees with readings
found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the Masoretic Text, and in the Samaritan Pentateuch.
The Samaritan Pentateuch
The third ancient Bible is known as the Samaritan Pentateuch; as its name implies, it contains
only the five Books of Moses. The Samaritan Pentateuch was finalized as a collection before the
Christian era and has been used by the Samaritans, a small branch of Judaism, ever since. A
small but active Samaritan community still exists, using this Bible and practicing its own
customs and ceremonies.
THE DISCOVERY, CONTENTS, AND ORIGIN OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
This book provides only a brief overview of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their
contents, since detailed information is readily available elsewhere. The term “Dead Sea Scrolls”
refers to ancient manuscripts discovered at sites in the Judean Desert in the vicinity of the Dead
Sea. The most important and famous of these sites is Qumran, but scrolls were found at several
other sites as well.
Discovery of the Scrolls
Between 1947 and 1956, eleven caves were discovered in the region of Khirbet Qumran, about
a mile inland from the western shore of the Dead Sea and approximately fourteen miles east of
Jerusalem. The eleven caves yielded various artifacts (especially pottery) and manuscripts
written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, the three languages of the Bible. (The Hebrew Bible is
written in Hebrew and Aramaic; the Septuagint and New Testament in Greek.)
In addition to the finds at Khirbet Qumran, several manuscripts were discovered at other
locations in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, especially Wadi Murabba‘ât (1951–52), Nah.al H.ever
(1951–52 and 1960–61), and Masada (1963–65).
Description and Contents of the Scrolls
At Qumran, nearly 900 manuscripts were found in some twenty-five thousand pieces, with
many no bigger than a postage stamp. A few scrolls are well preserved, such as the Great Isaiah
Scroll from Cave 1 (1QIsaa) and the Great Psalms Scroll from Cave 11 (11QPsa).
Unfortunately, however, most of the scrolls are very fragmentary. The earliest manuscripts date
from about 250BC, while the latest ones were copied shortly before the destruction of the
Qumran site by the Romans in 68 CE. Approximately forty-five more manuscripts were
discovered at the other sites: about fifteen at Wadi Murabba‘ât, eighteen at Nah.al H.ever, and
twelve at Masada.
Scholars divide the Dead Sea Scrolls into two categories: the “biblical” manuscripts and the
“nonbiblical” ones. Of course, this distinction is from our later viewpoint (and not necessarily
that of the ancient copyists), but it is useful for purposes of organization and editing. The
nonbiblical scrolls are already available in English translation: for example, The Dead Sea
Scrolls, by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, Jr., and Edward Cook (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). But until now the biblical scrolls have never been translated into
any modern language; The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible makes this material available in English for
the first time.
Some 215 manuscripts from Qumran, plus twelve more from the other sites, are classified as
biblical scrolls, since they contain material found in the canonical Hebrew Bible. Since these
manuscripts contain the texts from which The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible has been translated, they
will be discussed in greater detail later in this Introduction (see section headed “The Biblical
Scrolls”).
A few brief comments on the nonbiblical scrolls will be helpful at this point. There are
approximately 670 of these scrolls, which can be divided into five groups: (1) rules and
regulations (for example, the Community Rule); (2) poetic and wisdom texts (for example, the
Hodayot or Thanksgiving Psalms); (3) reworked or rewritten Scripture (for example, the
Genesis Apocryphon); (4) commentaries or pesharim (for example, the Pesher on Habakkuk);
and (5) miscellaneous writings (for example, the Copper Scroll).
The nonbiblical scrolls can be very helpful for understanding Scripture at Qumran, since they
often quote from or refer to biblical books and passages. These manuscripts also offer valuable
insights into how Scripture was used and interpreted by the Essenes and other Jewish groups in
the last few centuries BCE and up to the destruction of the Qumran community in 68 CE. Many
of these documents are also of direct relevance to early Judaism and emerging Christianity,
since they anticipate or confirm numerous ideas and teachings found in the New Testament and
in later rabbinic writings (the Mishnah and Talmud).
Origin of the Scrolls
Most scholars agree that the group who lived at the Qumran site from about 150 BCE to 68
CE was a strict branch of the Essenes. Together with the Pharisees and Sadducees, the Essenes
formed the three main divisions (or “denominations”) of Judaism at the time of Jesus; they were
previously known to us in works of the Hellenistic Jewish writers Josephus and Philo, and of
Latin authors such as Pliny the Elder. It is also generally agreed that these Essenes deposited
many scrolls in most of the Qumran caves. However, a smaller number of scholars disagree
with these points. It has been suggested, for instance, that the members of the Qumran
community were not Essenes at all but Sadducees, or that the site was in fact a military fortress
or a winter resort.
These issues are of great importance for understanding the nonbiblical scrolls, since scholars
distinguish between those manuscripts that were composed at Qumran and those that came to
the Qumran “library” from elsewhere. Many scholars refer to the writings composed at Qumran
as the “sectarian” scrolls, which is helpful for purposes of identification—but is also confusing.
In modern Judaism and Christianity, a “sect” is usually an offshoot of a larger religion and is
frequently viewed as eccentric or deviant with respect to beliefs. But both scholars and
laypeople would do well to remember that during the entire Qumran period, the Pharisees and
Sadducees were as much “sects” as the Essenes were! It was only from the second century CE
onward that one type of Judaism—that of the Pharisees and their descendants, the Rabbis—
became standard for the Jewish people as a whole.
These issues are of less importance with respect to the biblical scrolls. For one thing, all
scholars agree that none of the biblical texts (such as Genesis or Isaiah) was actually composed
at Qumran; on the contrary, they all originated before the Qumran period. It is also widely held
that many or most of these manuscripts were brought to Qumran from outside and were thus
copied elsewhere. This means that the value of most biblical scrolls lies not in establishing
precisely where they were written or copied, but rather in studying the textual forms they
contain.
Several distinctive biblical scrolls, however, were copied at Qumran, which raises some
interesting issues. For example, it is likely that 4QSam c was copied there, since it was copied by
the same scribe who penned the main manuscript of the Community Rule (1QS). This offers
helpful insights into scribal habits among the Qumran community. Another issue is whether or
not such Qumran scribes modified the text they were copying in order to produce distinctive
Qumranic readings of the biblical text. The evidence to date suggests that such alteration did not
take place.
THE BIBLICAL SCROLLS
The Dead Sea Scrolls include more than 225 “biblical” manuscripts, about 215 of which were
found at Qumran. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions (such as 1QIsa a and 11QPsa), almost all
these manuscripts are in fragmentary form. Parts of every book of the Jewish and Protestant Old
Testament are included, with the exception of Esther and Nehemiah. In addition, some other
books now included in Roman Catholic Bibles were found at Qumran: Tobit, Ben Sira (also
known as Sirach or Ecclesiasticus), and the Letter of Jeremiah (also known as Baruch 6). In
terms of the Catholic canon, then, the total of biblical scrolls would be somewhat higher, at
about 235 (about 222 from Qumran). It is also most likely that the Qumran community viewed
the books of 1 Enoch and Jubilees as Scripture.
 What was the “shape” of the Bible at Qumran? In other words, in what order did the books
viewed as scripture at Qumran most likely occur? While most modern Bibles follow the order of
the Christian Old Testament canon in four divisions (Pentateuch, Historical Books, Poetry, and
Prophets), the ancient evidence from the scrolls suggests the following order: the Books of
Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms. A key passage that suggests this order can be found in the
Halakhic Letter from Qumran (4QMMT): “And we have also written to you so that you may
have discernment in the book of Moses and in the books of the Prophets and in Dav[id].” (It is
interesting to note that Jesus uses almost the same terminology in Luke 24:44: “. . . that
everything written about me in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets, and in the Psalms must be
fulfilled.”)
Which of these many biblical books are represented most among the Qumran scrolls? In other
words, which writings were most popular for the Qumran community? The following list
emerges: (1) the Psalms, with a total of thirty-seven manuscripts, (2) Deuteronomy (with thirty
manuscripts), and (3) Isaiah (with twenty-one manuscripts). Although many scrolls have been
lost, these statistics serve to indicate which books were most frequently used among the Qumran
community. If we count the number of times an Old Testament passage is quoted or referred to
in the New Testament, the same three books turn up most: the Psalms (cited about sixty-eight
times), Isaiah (sixty-three times), and Deuteronomy (thirty-nine times).
HOW THIS BOOK WAS COMPILED
This book, containing the first translation of the biblical scrolls into any language, was
compiled according to seven principles:
1. Maintaining the Historical Order of Books. The order of books in The Dead Sea Scrolls
Bible corresponds to the ancient evidence as far as can be determined: the Books of Moses
(including Jubilees), the Prophets (including 1 Enoch and Daniel), and the Psalms and
remaining books (including Ben Sira, the Epistle of Jeremiah, and Tobit).
2. Including Introductory Material. The translation of each book is preceded by an
introduction that includes a brief description of the relevant scrolls, the dates of at least
some of these manuscripts, and the textual form or forms of the book in the scrolls.
3. Depending on Large Manuscripts. Among all the biblical scrolls, very large manuscripts
are preserved for only two books: Isaiah and Psalms. Since a scroll of the entire book of
Isaiah was found in a sealed jar in Cave 1 virtually intact, the translation of Isaiah
presented here is of this complete manuscript (1QIsa a). Similarly, another large,
continuous scroll of the Psalms (11QPs a) was found in Cave 11. The translation of Psalms
101 to 151, in a different order than that found in traditional Bibles, is mostly from this
manuscript.
4. Integrating Material from Several Manuscripts. Unfortunately, for all the other biblical
books, only fragments survive (some quite substantial, but most of them small). Thus for
these books the translation is necessarily a patchwork of the remaining pieces from
different scrolls. Since the text is constantly interrupted by the breaking off of the
fragments, intervening text is inserted to provide context; this material is taken from our
traditional Bible (based on the Masoretic Text). The preserved text is presented in regular
type, with nonextant text supplied in square brackets. If only part of a verse or word is
preserved in one scroll and another part can be found in a different scroll, the editors have
combined the fragments to supply as much of the surviving text as possible.
For example, in one scroll (4QGen b), we have only the following words preserved for
Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning Go[] made [ ].” If this were our only manuscript containing
this verse, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible would read: “In the beginning Go[d] made [the
heavens and the earth],” with the supplied text in square brackets. Fortunately, however,
another scroll (4QGen g) also contains part of this verse—“In the beginn[ ] God [ ] the
heavens and the earth”—a fragment that includes material missing from 4QGen b. So when
the preserved letters from the two scrolls are combined, the translation is as follows: “In
the beginning God made the heavens and the earth.”
5. Signaling Variant Readings. When the translation of a passage in the scrolls differs from
the traditional biblical text (the Masoretic Text) or from any other Dead Sea Scroll, it is
 printed in italics to alert the reader. In order to emphasize the distinctive readings found in
some scrolls, the editors have presented these variant readings in the main translation as
far as possible (except for Isaiah and Psalms 101 to 151, where the translation is from a
single large scroll, as explained above). Any alternative readings that are found in the
scrolls, the Masoretic Text (MT), the Septuagint (LXX), or the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP)
are listed in the footnotes. Thus the reader is able to compare all the different readings for
a given word or passage on the same page.
For example, near the end of Daniel 7:1 the traditional text says of King Belshazzar,
“then he wrote down the dream, he related the sum of the words,” which is awkward. The
only scroll that preserves this verse is 4QDan b, which simply reads “then he wrote down
the dream.” Accordingly, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible translation reads “then he wrote
down the dream.”3 The corresponding footnote (which is indicated by the superscripted 3)
reads:
4QDanb and probably LXX. the dream, he related the sum of the words MT LXXmss.
This shows that the translation is found in 4QDan b and most likely the original Septuagint,
while the longer reading is found in the Masoretic Text and some Septuagint manuscripts.
6. Highlighting Interesting or Important Readings. The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible includes
apocryphal books, new Psalms, previously unknown passages, and hundreds of individual
readings that are significant or interesting for our understanding of Scripture. The
translators highlight some of this new or interesting material with the use of italicized
comments. One example is found before Isaiah 29:5:
■ Several possibilities exist for the multitude referred to in Isaiah 29:5. Is the best reading
“your strangers,” mentioned in the Masoretic text, “the ungodly,” referred to in the
Septuagint, or “your enemies,” as found in 1QIsaa? A solution is offered by the parallel
phrase later in the verse “and the multitude of the ruthless ones,” which suggests that the
reading in 1QIsaa is the preferred one. “Your enemies” (or “Your foes”) is found in
several modern translations, including the Revised Standard Version, the New Revised
Standard Version, and the New International Version.
Although there are scores of such interesting readings, in order to produce The Dead Sea
Scrolls Bible in one volume we were limited to highlighting only a selection of key
readings in this way. But for the reader who seeks further examples, this book presents the
rich variety of readings found in all the biblical scrolls in a complete fashion, whether in
italicized form in the main text, or in the footnotes below.
7. Emphasizing Accuracy over Style. Since there are numerous aspects involved in the
translation of a Bible, it usually takes a large team of translators more than a decade to
produce one. In order to make The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible available in a reasonable
amount of time, the main concern of the translators was to represent faithfully the text as
found in the scrolls. We have not attempted to achieve overall stylistic consistency for the
whole volume, since that would have required a far greater amount of time. Two points,
however, should be emphasized. First, we have been consistent in translating the Divine
Name by following the practice of the Revised Standard Version and the New Revised
Standard Version (i.e., the LORD for the Hebrew YHWH, and the LORD God for YHWH
elohim). Second, inclusive language has been used to a considerable extent with respect to
humans (but not for God). We realize all too well that more could be done in this regard,
which we intend to carry out in a future edition of The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible.