Nearly 2,000 years ago, several Jewish groups, fleeing Roman legions, hid their sacred texts in caves near Qumran, on the shores of the Dead Sea. Its discovery in the last century radically changed our view of this turbulent time, when Jesus was also alive. The Dead Sea Scrolls can be seen in Assen from 9 July to 5 January.
Today, archaeologists search the deserts of Israel, Jordan and the Sinai using state-of-the-art soil-raising techniques in search of archaeological treasures. But some important finds were made by accident. In 1947, young Bedouins with their herd of goats were on their way through the desert on the western shores of the Dead Sea, near the ruins of the ancient settlement of Qumran.
The now legendary story goes that a goat strayed from the herd and disappeared into a cave. To chase the animal out of the cave, the Bedouin boys threw stones. One of the rocks made something break in the cave. The next day the shepherds returned to the cave to see if there might be anything of value to be found. It turned out that there were stone jars in the cave, containing leather bundles with strange texts on them.
Tens of thousands of fragments
They turned out to be ancient scrolls from a period of great religious and political turmoil in ancient Israel. The scrolls were roughly written between 200 BC and 50 AD. It was a time when the Jews of the Roman province of Judea, oppressed by Greek and Roman rulers, waited for a messiah to redeem them.
Scientists in the mid-twentieth century knew little about this period. No written texts were known from it. The oldest known version of the Jewish Bible was medieval, dating from the year 1008 (the codex Leningradensis). There was no earlier source. That all changed with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Once the historical (and therefore financial!) value of the texts became clear, a real race ensued between archaeologists and Bedouins to see who would get the rest of the leather scrolls first. No less than eleven caves with texts were discovered near Qumran between 1947 and 1956.
The term "Dead Sea Scrolls" is actually misleading. Only a few largely intact scrolls have been found. The largest is the so-called Temple Scroll, which is almost nine meters long. But much more, the Dead Sea Scrolls are fragments, tens of thousands of large and small pieces of text, from a total of about a thousand manuscripts. Once put together, they provide a unique insight into the mysterious world of early Jewish religion and culture, from the time when Jesus also lived.
'Dutch Cave'
Some of the fragments have now been brought to the Netherlands by the Drents Museum in Assen. The guest curator of this special exhibition is Mladen Popovic, director of the Qumran Institute of the University of Groningen. It was founded in 1961, when ZWO (the predecessor of science funder NWO) set aside a million guilders for research into the texts. As a result, the Netherlands obtained the publication rights of the scrolls from the eleventh cave of Qumran, which has since been called the 'Dutch Cave'.
The vast majority of manuscripts belonging to the Dead Sea Scrolls are written in Hebrew. Some are in Aramaic and a small number in Greek. They give such a special insight into the culture of the time because they are almost exclusively literary texts, not administrative ones such as accounts or stock lists. Religious precepts, rules of life and texts from the Jewish Bible.
Because the extremely vulnerable Dead Sea Scrolls can only tolerate a dose of light known to the lux per year, they are not yet in the special display cases four days before the opening of the exhibition. For the same reason, all fragments will be exchanged for others halfway through the exhibition.
In order to be able to take a look, one fragment, a scroll of Psalms about a meter long, is shown to the press in the depot of the museum. One of the attending staff of the Isreal Antiquities Authority, the body that manages the roles reads the 2000-year-old text effortlessly. Hebrew has hardly changed in all those years.
Skeleton
“We know more and more about the circumstances under which the texts ended up in the caves,” Popovic says enthusiastically as we view the exhibition. “That's why we didn't want to only exhibit the Dead Sea Scrolls. We also wanted to tell the bigger story about Jewish life around the beginning of our era. This exhibition is a wonderful opportunity to share the results of scientific research with a wide audience.”
“We believe that some texts may have been written in the Qumran fortress. But it is also conceivable that some scrolls were brought to Qumran by Jewish refugees from Jerusalem,” Popovic said. “Between the beginning of the Jewish revolt in 66 AD. ch. and the destruction of the temple in AD 70. ch. Many Jews fled into the desert in fear of the Roman legions. They may have tried to salvage their sacred texts in the caves. Thousands of Jews were then massacred.”
And even after that time, the violence in Judea continued. Popovic points to a frayed tunic from the second century in one of the display cases. “This one is in a basket in Nahal Hever, the Cave of the Letters, about 20 kilometers south of Qumran. In this tunic the skeleton of a child of two or three years old was wrapped. Romans had camped above the cave. The Jewish family could no longer safely leave the cave and starved there.”
'Son of the Most High'
Perhaps the most special thing about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they are so diverse. A lot of different religious precepts, cleanliness rules, and even different versions of Bible books have been found. Early in the investigation of the scrolls, it was often thought that they belonged to the Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect that is said to have lived in the Qumran fortress.
According to Popovic, however, the multiplicity and diversity of the texts rather indicate that the roles come from different, in some way related, movements within Judaism. In any case, what the research into the Dead Sea Scrolls has shown is that Jewish religious life at that time was much more varied than previously thought. Nor did the authoritative Hebrew Bible, today known as the Old Testament, exist as a complete and unchanging whole. That has been the case for centuries now.
All writings that later became "Biblical," with the exception of the book of Esther, have been recovered at Qumran. But they show that the text of the holy books was not yet completely fixed. For example, two versions of the Bible book of Jeremiah have been found, one long and one shorter, both with different order of verses. Parts of 'Biblical' texts have also been found with all kinds of interpretations written on them. These interpretations were also apparently given authority by the Jewish scholarly community of the time.
Although Jesus does not appear anywhere in the texts, some concepts that we associate with the Christian faith today can already be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of the fragments, the rather mysterious "Apocryphon of Daniel," an incomplete text presumably describing a vision of the coming of the Messiah, speaks of "the son of God" and "son of the Most High." And there is talk of an 'eternal kingship'.
The "Apocryphon" did not make it into the definitive Jewish Bible. However, it already contains terms that before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls we associated only with Jesus and therefore with Christianity. Yet its roots appear to have been traced back to those turbulent ages before Christ. In a time of oppression and great religious revival. When several, as yet largely unknown, Jewish scribes gathered, discussed, and wrote down their findings on the teachings of the Dead Sea Scrolls.