At some point rather early in the spring of 1947, a Bedouin boy called Muhammed the Wolf was minding some goats near a cliff on the western shore of the Dead Sea. Climbing up after one that had strayed, he noticed a cave that he had not seen before, and he idly threw a stone into it. There was an unfamiliar sound of breakage. The boy was frightened and ran away. But he later came back with another boy, and together they explored the cave. Inside were several tall clay jars, among fragments of other jars. They took off the bowl-like lids; a very bad smell arose; this turned out to arise from dark, oblong lumps which were found in all of the jars. When they got these lumps out of the cave, they saw they were wrapped up in lengths of linen and coated with a black layer of what seemed to be pitch or wax. They unrolled them and found long manuscripts, inscribed in parallel columns on thin sheets that had been sewn together. Though these manuscripts had faded and crumbled in places, they were in general remarkably clear. The character, they saw, was not Arabic. They wondered at the scrolls and kept them, carrying them along when they went.
These Bedouin boys belonged to a party of contrabanders who had been smuggling their goats and other goods out of Transjordan into Palestine. They had detoured so far to the south in order to circumvent the Jordan bridge, which the customs officers guarded with guns, and had floated their commodities across the stream. They were now on their way to Bethlehem to sell their stuff in the black market, and they had come to the Dead Sea in order to stock up with water at the spring of Ain Feshkha, the only fresh water to be found for miles in that dry, hot, and desolate region. They were quite safe from discovery there; it was a locality that had no attractions, to which nobody ever came. In Bethlehem, they sold their contraband, and showed their scrolls to the merchant who was buying it. He did not know what they were and refused to pay the twenty pounds they asked for them, so they took them to another merchant, from whom they always bought their supplies. Being a Syrian, he thought that the language might be ancient Syriac, and he sent word by another Syrian to the Syrian Metropolitan at the Monastery of Saint Mark, in Old Jerusalem.
The Metropolitan, Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, expressed a decided interest. He knew that nobody since the first Christian centuries had lived anywhere near Ain Feshkha, and he had been struck by the visitor’s telling him that the scrolls were “wrapped up like mummies.” When one was shown to him at the monastery, he broke off a bit and burned it, and could smell that it was leather or parchment. He recognized the language as Hebrew, but was not a Hebrew scholar and could not make out what the manuscript was. He sent word that he would buy the scrolls, but in the meantime the Bedouins were off again on another expedition. Several weeks passed. It was July before one of the Syrians called up to tell the Metropolitan that he and the Bedouins would bring him the scrolls. The Metropolitan expected them all morning, and finally went to lunch, and it was then that the visitors arrived. They were turned away at the door, and the priest who had refused to receive them came to the Metropolitan and told him that some tough-looking Arabs had appeared with some dirty old rolls, and that, seeing that these were written not in Syriac but in Hebrew, he had sent the Arabs to a Jewish school. The Metropolitan at once got in touch with the Syrian who had brought the Bedouins and learned with annoyance that these latter, turned away, had shown the scrolls to a Jewish merchant whom they met at the Jaffa Gate. This merchant had offered them what they thought a good price, but explained that, in order to collect it, they must come to his office in the Jaffa Road, in the predominantly Jewish New City.
Now, Jerusalem, by the summer of ’47, was already sharply divided between the Arabs and the Jews. The British, in their effort to propitiate the Arabs and to keep them out of the hands of Russia, had prevented refugees from Europe from landing in Palestinian ports, and this had imposed on the emigrants much hardship and even caused a large number of deaths. The Jews, in reprisal for this, had organized a terrorist group, which had been murdering British soldiers, and the British had been hanging these terrorists. The Jews had retaliated with bombs and mines, leaving a hangman’s noose on the scene of each assassination. The British had then kidnapped a sixteen-year-old boy who was supposed to be a member of the group. The Jews believed him to have been tortured and killed; his body was never found, and the terrorists blew a hole in the jail where the British had been locking up political prisoners. Some of the men who had done this were caught and hanged, and the Jews hanged two British sergeants and wired one of the bodies with a booby trap. At the time when the scrolls were offered for sale, the Jewish parts of Jerusalem had been put under martial law, and in consequence the Syrian merchant, who wanted to have the scrolls go to the monastery, had no difficulty in convincing the Bedouins that the Jewish merchant was planning to trap them—that, once off base in the Jaffa Road, they would be robbed of their property and put in jail—and he mentioned the Palestinian law that antiquities newly discovered must immediately be reported to the government. He even induced the Bedouins to leave five of the eight scrolls in his shop, and eventually to take them to the monastery, where the Metropolitan purchased them, along with a few fragments, for a price which has never been made public but which is rumored to have been fifty pounds.
The Metropolitan Samuel has sometimes been charged with slyness in his handling of the Dead Sea scrolls, but if occasionally he has exercised guile, I believe that it has been only such wariness in the matter of not showing one’s hand as is quite conventional in the Middle East—a minimum routine requirement in a land where all business transactions are based on a convention of bargaining. I should say, in fact, that, far from having got himself into trouble by trying to be too clever, the Metropolitan has been handicapped by innocence. Not knowing the Western world, it was long, as will later appear, before he was able to profit in any degree proportionate to the value of his unique acquisitions; and he deserves immense credit, one cannot but feel—especially if one takes into account the chapter of ineptitude that follows—for having had the good sense to recognize that hitherto unknown manuscripts from the uninhabited region of the Dead Sea would be likely to prove of interest, and for persisting, in the teeth of discouragement, in sticking by this conviction. With his black and abundant beard, his large round liquid brown eyes, in his onion-shaped black satin mitre, his black robes with their big sleeves, and the great cross of gold and the icon of the Virgin that hang about his neck on chains—with not too much priestly fleshiness and pallor—the Metropolitan is a notably handsome man, who would recall an Assyrian bas-relief if his expression were not gentle instead of fierce. In demeanor, he is dignified, simple, and calm, with a touch perhaps of something childlike. He is not at all an “intellectual,” has no special scholarly interest, but is much devoted to his church, the Syrian Jacobite Church, which long antedates the Greek and boasts that its line comes direct from the Holy See of Antioch, founded by Peter, and that it ruled at one time the whole Christian East. This is one of the five churches permanently represented in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; and the Monastery of Saint Mark is supposed to stand on the site of the house where the Last Supper occurred.
The first thing the Metropolitan Samuel did when he had bought the Hebrew manuscripts was to send one of his priests with the merchant to check up on the story of the cave. The cave was found in the place that the Bedouins had indicated, and in it were found the jars, fragments of the linen wrappings, and scraps of the scrolls themselves. The two men spent a night in the cavern, stifling in the terrible heat—it was now the second week in August—and, having brought no provisions but melons, they decided they could not stay longer. They did not even manage to take away, as at first they had hoped to do, one of the big clay jars. (The Bedouins, however, had taken two and had been using them to carry water.) The problem was now to find out what the manuscripts were and how old they were. The Metropolitan Samuel consulted a Syrian he knew in the Palestine Department of Antiquities, and a French priest at the Dominican Ecole Biblique, a center of archeological research in Old Jerusalem.
The outsider cannot but be struck by the frequent reluctance of the learned world to recognize important discoveries. In connection with the failure of scholars first to recognize, then to acknowledge, the antiquity of the Dead Sea scrolls, Professor W. F. Albright, of Johns Hopkins, has pointed out that “the discovery of Pompei and Herculaneum was in its time relegated to the realm of fiction by outstanding personages, that some archeologists and many more philologians refused to accept the stratigraphical results of Schliemann and Dörpfeld for decades after the beginning of the excavations of Hissarlik [ancient Troy], and that the decipherment of cuneiform was not accepted by all informed students of antiquity until well after the end of the nineteenth century.” There have been forgeries and hoaxes, of course—the false books of Livy, the supplement to Petronius—and the scholar must be on his guard against innocently swallowing such products. Yet there is also at work here the natural instinct to simplify one’s scholarly problems by establishing a closed field. One likes to feel that one has seen all the evidence. One has mastered it and worked out one’s theories, and it is very upsetting—especially if one suffers from imaginative limitations—to be obliged to deal with new material.
In order to understand the importance of the Dead Sea manuscripts and the stubborn incredulity of scholars, one has to realize that, except for a fragment or two, our earliest text of the Hebrew Bible—the so-called Masoretic text—is no more ancient than the ninth century of the Christian era; and that, before that, our main versions of Scripture are the Alexandrian Septuagint, which is a translation into Greek that is supposed to have been begun somewhere in the third pre-Christian century and not finished till two hundred years later, and Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, made in the fourth century. All our knowledge of the word of the Bible has been based on these two translations and this very late Hebrew text (helped out with a Samaritan Pentateuch and some excerpts in early Aramaic versions). It took some courage to face new materials where none had been imagined to exist. “In none of the similar episodes of the past two centuries,” continues Professor Albright, “has there been such a wide refusal on the part of scholars to accept clear-cut evidence.” The first experts consulted by the Metropolitan Samuel gave him no encouragement whatever. The two ablest archeologists then in that part of the world were apparently Mr. G. Lankester Harding, of the Department of Antiquities of Transjordan, and Père Roland de Vaux, of the Ecole Biblique, but the latter at the moment was away in Paris, and to the former the Metropolitan did not succeed in gaining access. The people whom he did see at these institutions told him that the thing was unheard of; the manuscripts could not be old. No effort seems even to have been made to read them till the Metropolitan showed them to a Father van der Ploeg, a visiting Dutch scholar at the Ecole Biblique, who identified one of the scrolls as Isaiah but was discouraged by the scholars of the school from pursuing the matter further.
The Metropolitan now took the scrolls to the Syrian Patriarch of Antioch, who thought they could not be more than three centuries old but suggested consulting the professor of Hebrew at the American University in Beirut. The Metropolitan went to Beirut but found the professor away on vacation. He decided to study the problem himself, and, coming back to Jerusalem, he got his friend from the Department of Antiquities to supply him with some books on the Hebrew alphabet. The Syrian archeologist assured him that he was wasting his time, that the scrolls were “not worth a shilling,” but the Syrian brought to the monastery a Jew from the New City, a Mr. Tovia Wechsler, who was something of a Hebrew scholar. This visit of Mr. Wechsler, according to the Metropolitan’s account, occurred toward the end of September. Mr. Wechsler, however, remembers it as having taken place in July, and his statement about it is also at variance with what was later known definitely about the scrolls. He, too, was unable to believe they were as old as the Metropolitan hoped. Mr. Wechsler pointed at the table on which the manuscripts had been laid—about this he and the Metropolitan are agreed—and declared, “If that table were a box, and you filled it with pound notes, you couldn’t even manage the value of the scrolls if they are two thousand years old, as you say.” He did not credit the story of their having been found in a cave by the Dead Sea. He noticed, in examining one of them, that corrections written in the margins and fillings-out of the columns at the bottoms, where the text was becoming obliterated, had been made in an ink that contrasted by its clearness with the ink of the original copyist, and he drew the inference from this that the scroll “had been in use by a very poor community for a considerable time and had only recently been abandoned.” He jumped to the conclusion that the manuscripts had been stolen from a Palestine synagogue at the time of the anti-Jewish Arab riots of 1929. He recognized a text of Isaiah and observed that it differed slightly from the Masoretic text. The second of the manuscripts he looked at he believed to be a Haftaroth scroll—that is, a selection from the Prophets of lessons to be read in synagogues. But no Haftaroth have ever turned up among the known Dead Sea scrolls, and the Metropolitan says that what Wechsler must have taken for a Haftaroth scroll was a manuscript of the Torah (the Pentateuch) which was shown him on the same visit but which had nothing to do with the Dead Sea ones. Among these, as was afterward found, were three non-Biblical books which had never been seen before, and others think that Mr. Wechsler must hastily have taken one of these for a modern synagogue scroll. To this theory Wechsler replies that it reminds him “of the story about the man who related that he had seen a camel and, after having circumstantially described the animal, was asked by someone in his audience, “Maybe you saw a cat?” The whole incident remains rather obscure. When the matter was later looked into by the American School of Oriental Research, the only Hebrew manuscript the searchers found in the library of the monastery was a relatively modern Torah.
“Needless to say I felt discouraged,” the Metropolitan has written, “but somehow I still felt they were wrong.” One may at first find it surprising that a man of such importance in Jerusalem—the equivalent of a Western archbishop—should have taken so long a time to discover the competent authorities, who were right there ready to hand, but one is often surprised in Jerusalem at the lack of knowledge and interest shown by the various groups in one another’s affairs. In the published discussion of the scrolls one finds, for example, that the Metropolitan Samuel is sometimes referred to as “the Patriarch,” and in talking with scholars in the New City, on a recent visit to Israel, I was astonished by their vagueness about him; some imagined him to be still in his monastery, though he had left it in 1948. It will be noticed that the Metropolitan, in his efforts to deal with the scrolls, almost always had recourse to other Syrians. In the Middle East, it seems, your church is your social world, and you know little, apparently, of any other. Even in the United States, the congregations of the four different Syrian churches mix little with one another, and an American is sometimes puzzled, in crossing a frontier in the Middle East, to be asked for his “nationality” when he has already registered his American citizenship; “nationality,” he learns, means “religion.” At any rate, it seems to have been only by chance that the Metropolitan Samuel did finally get in touch with an institution that could help him, and even then the contact had no results. It happened that a Jewish doctor called at the monastery to inquire about renting a building that was a part of the Church’s property. The Metropolitan took the opportunity to ask him about the scrolls. This visitor did the obvious thing; he called up President Magnes, of the Hebrew University. Dr. Magnes, a few weeks later, sent two men from the university library. They said that they would have to consult an authority on these subjects and asked to photograph a few columns of one of the manuscripts. The Metropolitan gave his consent, but the librarians never came back. On the same afternoon, also summoned by the doctor, a Jewish antiquity dealer arrived at the monastery. He recommended that pieces of the scrolls be sent to certain dealers in Europe and the United States. “This,” says the Metropolitan Samuel, “I declined to do.”
It is not clear whether the failure of the men from the library to come back, as they promised, to the monastery was due to the troubled conditions or to the absence of E. L. Sukenik, the University’s head archeologist. In any case, Professor Sukenik returned at the end of November, and was told by a Jerusalem antiquity dealer (not the one who had visited the monastery) that some manuscripts from a cave on the Dead Sea were in the hands of a dealer in Bethlehem. This dealer was the buyer of contraband to whom the Bedouins had first brought the scrolls. He had got wind of their having some value and had bought up the remaining manuscripts. These were the three scrolls that the Metropolitan Samuel had not had a chance to buy. The man showed Sukenik a fragment, and the latter wrote in his diary, “Today I have been shown a piece of a scroll. I do not dare to write down what I think of it.” This happened on November 29, 1947, the day the partition of Palestine was voted by the United Nations. Sukenik consulted his son, an officer in Haganah, the underground Jewish defense, as to whether the roads were safe enough for him to make the journey to Bethlehem. “As a military man,” says the younger Sukenik (now General Yigael Yadin), “I answered that he ought not to make the journey; as an archeologist that he ought to go; as his son—that my opinion had to be reserved.” Open and savage hostilities broke out the next day. The Arabs tried to isolate the Jews by cutting off their communications with Tel Aviv; they ambushed the Jewish buses, burning them and shooting them up. But Sukenik got through to Bethlehem and brought back the second lot of scrolls, which turned out to consist of three manuscripts (one of them in three pieces) and a handful of fragments, and when he read them, he became so excited that he seems to have forgotten the war. At a time when—early the following year—the Arab Legion was shelling the offices of the Jewish Agency, in the middle of New Jerusalem, between three and five every afternoon, he did not hesitate to call a press conference at this dangerous place and hour, promising important news. To attend it required some nerve. An American correspondent fainted in the street on the way, and had to be carried in by his colleagues. The reporters were flabbergasted when Sukenik, who seemed quite unperturbed by the flashing and banging about him, announced the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls—except for a few scraps, he told them, the first ancient Hebrew manuscripts ever known; he thought they must be as old as the first or second century B.C. They heard the name of Isaiah, and something about a hitherto unknown work to which Sukenik had given the title “The War of the Children of Light Against the Children of Darkness.” At the moment this was mentioned, a shell burst. The reporters had at first been rather peevish at having been asked to risk their skins for old manuscripts, but they ended by being impressed by the scholar’s overmastering enthusiasm.
It was, however, not till February of 1948 that the Metropolitan Samuel succeeded in making contact with someone who could tell him about his scrolls. It was remembered by one of his monks, Brother Butros Sowmy, that he had been well received, ten years earlier, when he had had occasion to visit the American School of Oriental Research, and he suggested calling them up. This was done, and Brother Sowmy and the Metropolitan took the scrolls there on February 18th and showed them to the then Acting Director, Dr. John C. Trever. The Director, Dr. Millar Burrows, of the Yale Divinity School, was away on a trip to Iraq. Dr. Trever, a younger, less experienced man, was not able at once to estimate, as Professor Sukenik had done, the probable age of the manuscripts, but when he began to suspect what they were, he too became much excited. “Remembering the box of slides in my desk,” he writes in the Biblical Archaeologist, “on ‘What Lies Back of Our English Bible?’ I thumbed through them for the section on early Hebrew manuscripts. One glimpse at the picture of the British Museum Codex from the ninth century assured me that these scrolls were far older. The next slide was of the Nash Papyrus, a small fragment in the Manchester Library in England containing the Shema and the Ten Commandments.” Now, the so-called Nash Papyrus, which was bought fifty years ago from an Egyptian dealer by an Englishman, is written in an archaic script which at that time was hardly known, and it had usually been regarded as the oldest Hebrew manuscript in existence. It has been dated by various authorities from some time early in the second pre-Christian century to some time toward the end of the first century A.D. So it was natural that Dr. Trever should also have become exhilarated when he saw that “the similarity of the script in the papyrus and the scrolls was striking.” But, he adds, “the picture was too small to help much.” He had no camera there, so he copied out a passage from one of the scrolls and eventually identified it as a part of Isaiah. He also persuaded the Metropolitan to allow him to photograph all the scrolls, convincing him that their value would be much increased if they were published and an interest in them was stimulated. This decision, as we shall later see, was in some ways a very fortunate and in other ways a rather unfortunate one.
But nothing could be done at once. In the course of the battle for Jerusalem, the power had been cut off, and it was doubtful whether it would be possible to photograph the manuscripts. While Dr. Trever and a colleague, Dr. William H. Brownlee, were waiting, they looked up, by kerosene lamps, everything they could find in the library that might throw light on the Nash Papyrus. By midnight they felt quite certain that the new Isaiah scroll was as old as, if not older than, this. “Sleep,” writes Dr. Trever, “came with greater difficulty. The added evidence kept racing through my mind. It all seemed incredible. How could we be right?” The next morning the power came on, but there were fifty-four columns of Isaiah alone, and they were far from having got through them by noon, so the Syrians from the monastery stayed to lunch. “The hour of fellowship around the table we shall long cherish,” Trever writes, “for it gave us a feeling for ecumenical Christianity, and it brought us closer in our friendship and understanding of the Syrians.” The Metropolitan, of course, was delighted that his faith in the antiquity of the scrolls had finally been justified. Not wanting to give away the cache to anyone who chose to go there, he had at first told the people at the School that the scrolls were uncatalogued manuscripts that had turned up in the monastery library, but later, when they had gained his confidence, he gave them the whole story. Dr. Trever thereupon explained to him that the antiquities law of Palestine required that all such discoveries should immediately be reported, and the Metropolitan assured him that in future he would scrupulously coöperate with the Department of Antiquities and the School. After lunch, they returned to their task. Parts of the scrolls were in pieces, and they had to fit them together. They fastened them with Scotch Tape on the back, but presently the tape gave out. They had been able to get through only two when the Syrians had to return to the monastery, but the Metropolitan left them two more, which turned out to be two sections of a single document. The smallest of the scrolls was so stuck together that they decided it presented a problem which would have to be carefully studied, and the Metropolitan took it away.
Dr. Trever at once sent off prints of columns of the Isaiah scroll to Dr. Albright, of Johns Hopkins, one of the greatest living Biblical archeologists and an authority on the Nash Papyrus, which he had studied intensively over a period of years. Trever heard from him by air mail on March 15th. He had written, the day he received the prints, “My heartiest congratulations on the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times! There is no doubt in my mind that the script is more archaic than that of the Nash Papyrus. . . . I should prefer a date around 100 B.C. . . . What an absolutely incredible find! And there can happily not be the slightest doubt in the world about the genuineness of the manuscript.”
In the meantime, Professor Sukenik had heard—but not till after he had bought the three manuscripts—from one of the University librarians who had been to the monastery of the existence of the other five scrolls. Yet another Syrian merchant, having learned of Sukenik’s interest, seems to have offered, without the Metropolitan’s knowledge, to arrange to sell Sukenik these. Late in February, he came to the monastery and asked for permission to show them to Sukenik. The Metropolitan produced the photographs, but the go-between objected that these were too small. At a time when the fighting was fierce and the current again cut off, Sukenik met the Syrian merchant at night on the neutral ground of the Y.M.C.A., and with a flashlight examined the manuscripts. He persuaded the man to let him take them home, and kept them for two days, copying out several columns of Isaiah, which, to the owner’s annoyance, he published. (There was a second Isaiah scroll—but in a very fragmentary state—among those that Sukenik had purchased.) He was eager to buy this other lot of manuscripts, and repeatedly sent emissaries to the monastery, but the Metropolitan Samuel had already signed an agreement with the professors at the American School, according to the terms of which he allowed them to publish the texts they had photographed, if they did so within three years. The Metropolitan, in return, was to receive fifty per cent of the profits from such publication.
The Americans at the School were eager to visit the cave, but the state of war made this impossible. The Mandate was to end at midnight of May 14th, when it was plain that the Jews and the Arabs would finally be left to fight it out, and, for the scholars, the most pressing problem was to get out of the way in time. Before this had been arranged, the Metropolitan one day, without warning, sent a taxi, accompanied by a bodyguard, to bring Dr. Trever to the monastery. The American was apprehensive, but as soon as he arrived at Saint Mark’s, he was reassured to see its master standing at the top of the stairs and greeting him with a smile. “He took me into his office and handed me a folded sheet of paper. Within the fold was a piece of one of the scrolls! Instantly I recognized it as a portion of the Habakkuk scroll, for the color of the leather on which it was written, the script, the size, and the shape all coincided. The edges were eaten away by worms, as was the beginning of that scroll, and it looked exactly like the missing right-hand part of the first column, the absence of which had been such a disappointment to Dr. Brownlee when he was studying it. Half of a previous column was on it, proving that the scroll had originally had at least one more column at the beginning. . . . Needless to say, I lost little time in getting this new fragment photographed also.” Dr. Trever was made even happier when “the Metropolitan informed me that Brother Butros had left that morning with all the manuscripts, to take them to a place of safety outside Palestine.” This was what the Americans had recommended. They themselves got away a few days later. The Mandate came to an end. The British simply departed. They had refused to allow their control to be transferred to any other body or to legalize a local militia. They were leaving the Jews and the Arabs already at one another’s throats, and were counting on the seven Arab states arrayed against the small Jewish colony to fall upon it and destroy it or drive it out. The Arabs, under Brigadier Glubb, formerly of the British Army but now ranking as an officer of the Arab Legion, immediately began to shell the ancient Jewish quarter, which was isolated in the Old City. The Monastery of Saint Mark stood very close to it and caught the fire from both sides. Brother Sowmy was killed, and the monastery suffered damage which the Metropolitan estimates at thirty thousand pounds. He did not, however, leave Jerusalem till the autumn, when the conflict had still not been settled. After sojourns in Transjordan and Syria, he sailed for the United States and arrived at the end of January, 1949, bringing the scrolls with him. Dr. Burrows, now back at Yale, had encouraged him to come to this country. The American School had arranged to publish the text of the scrolls, and the Metropolitan hoped that this would help him to sell the originals. But we must drop at this point his adventures with these, for here a new chapter begins.
II
Père Roland de Vaux, of the Ecole Biblique, and Mr. G. Lankester Harding, of the Department of Antiquities, now Jordanian, not Transjordanian, lost no time, when the war was over and the time of year was favorable (February, 1949), in visiting the cave where the scrolls had been found. They worked there nearly a month, and collected many smaller fragments, and a great deal of broken pottery. This was thought to be mostly late Hellenistic, but there were also some pieces of a Roman lamp and a Roman cooking pot, and these latter gave rise to a theory—for which there was no real evidence—that they had been left in the cave by Origen, the early Church Father and editor of the Biblical texts, who fled from persecution to Palestine in the first half of the third century, and who says that he found near Jericho some Biblical manuscripts in a jar. The predominantly Greek pottery seemed to show that the manuscripts could not have been written later than the first Christian century. From the shards of the jars they calculated that the cave must once have contained a collection of at least two hundred scrolls.
When the word got around to the Bedouins that the manuscripts from the cave were valuable, they began to look in other caves, and in the latter part of 1951 they turned up at the Ecole Biblique with handfuls of crumbled papyrus and parchment that were obviously the remnants of similar scrolls. De Vaux at once called up Harding and told him that they must move to take over the search. They descended on the Dead Sea on January 21, 1952, with the Bethlehem Chief of Police and two soldiers from the Arab Legion, and were guided by the Bedouins to a group of caves, about fifteen miles south of the original cave, very high in the steep cliffs. Other Bedouins, upon their arrival, came swarming out of these holes like chipmunks. A few of these pilferers were sent to jail with light sentences, and the Department of Antiquities hired the rest to carry on the search. Harding and de Vaux now officially took over the exploration of all the region. There were four of these caves—very large ones, about a hundred and fifty feet long and fifteen feet high and wide. They had been lived in at various periods. The earliest traces of human habitation went back to the fourth millennium before the Christian era. There were objects from the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, and many relics from the Roman period: a whole equipment for living—lamps, picks, javelin points, nails, needles, combs, buttons, spoons, bowls and plates made of wood, a chisel, a scythe, and a trowel. There were also twenty Roman coins dating from Nero to Hadrian. Nine of these belonged to the years—132-35 A.D.—of the Second Revolt of the Jews against the domination of the Romans. There were many fragments of manuscripts and potsherds that had been used for writing—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic. There were several letters in Hebrew—one of them a most amazing discovery: a note evidently written in the midst of the war by the Jewish leader Bar-Kochba, in which he bawls out one of his captains. He speaks of “the Galileans,” but without making it plain whom he means or what sort of role they are playing. (If these Galileans are Christians, we know that, in loyalty to Jesus, who had said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” they had refused to support Bar-Kochba.) Père de Vaux, from all this, has concluded that the original cave was a stronghold of the Jewish resistance and was eventually raided by the Romans. Two of the Roman coins are stamped with the galley of the Tenth Legion, and there are shreds of Torah scrolls, which look as if the Romans had torn them up.
But these findings, though, of course, of great interest, are not relevant to our main subject and have apparently no connection with the discoveries of Qumrân—the name of the wadi, or ravine, near which the first scrolls had been found. These were now to be sensationally added to. The French monk and the English official had hardly finished with these other caves when new fragments of manuscripts were brought them from a cave near the first one found. They then set out to examine systematically all the caves in the Qumrân neighborhood. They entered two hundred and sixty-seven, and in thirty-seven of them found pottery and other relics of human occupancy. In twenty-five of these, the pottery was identical with the jars from the original cave. Several of the caves contained scrolls that, unprotected by jars, were in a state of disintegration, often buried under layers of dirt. The fragments of these collected ran into the tens of thousands. It was becoming more and more apparent that a library had been hidden here—a library that seems to have included almost all the books of the Bible, a number of apocryphal works, and the literature of an early religious sect. The Essene sect had been thought of—for reasons I shall presently explain—as soon as the first scrolls were read. Mr. Harding and Père de Vaux had already, long before finding the new manuscripts, had the notion of investigating a hitherto neglected old ruin not far from the original cave, and in November of 1951 had started digging it out. This ruin was buried on the shore between the cliffs and the sea, a little to the south of the cave, with only a bit of stone wall showing above the ground. It has been known to the Arabs as the Khirbet Qumrân (“khirbet” means “stone ruin”). A French traveller in 1851 believed it to be a remnant of the ruins of the Biblical Gomorrah. Later archeologists have thought it a small Roman fort. It had never attracted much attention, but it has been now almost completely excavated by Mr. Harding and Père de Vaux. What has been made to emerge is astounding—a very ancient stone building, with from twenty to thirty rooms and thirteen cisterns for water, and with a good deal of its equipment intact. On one side of it, between it and the sea, lies a cemetery with more than a thousand graves. The building has the look of a monastery, and a convergence of evidence seems not merely to suggest but almost beyond question to establish that it was one of the habitations, if not actually the headquarters, of what has been known as the Essene sect. But before we describe it further, we must explain who the Essenes were.
A good deal had already been known about this sect from three writers of the first century A.D.—Pliny, Josephus, and Philo. Pliny’s description is brief but important in the present connection, for it locates the Essene community exactly where this building and the library were found. “On the western shore of the Dead Sea, the Essenes have withdrawn to a sufficient distance to avoid its noxious effects—a solitary people, and extraordinary beyond all others in the whole world, who live without women and have renounced all commerce with Venus; and also without money, having the palms for their only companions. They constantly renew themselves from the steady stream of refugees that resort to them in large numbers, men who, weary of life, have been driven by the vicissitudes of fortune to adopt their manner of living. Thus through thousands of centuries, incredible though it may seem, a people has perpetuated itself in which no one is ever born. So useful for recruiting their number is the disgust of other men with life. Below them the town of Engadda [Engedi] once stood—in its palm groves and general fertility second only to Jerusalem, but now a heap of ashes like it. Beyond this is Masada, a fortress on a rock, and itself not far from the Dead Sea To this point Judea extends.”
This seems definitely to identify the monastery, but it is all that Pliny tells us. He is summarily and tersely Roman; his point of view is alien and rather ironic. But Philo and Josephus, both Jews themselves, have a good deal more interest in this Jewish order. The thousands of centuries with which Pliny credits it must either refer to the future or simply be due to his vagueness. It seems probable, from Josephus’s account, that the Essenes had had their rise in the middle of the previous century. For Philo, the Alexandrian scholar, who had something of the monastic temperament himself, the Essenes supplied an example to illustrate the thesis of his “Treatise to Prove That Every Good Man Is Also Free.” In this and in another passage, quoted by the historian Eusebius, he gives us accounts of the manners of the Essenes that are appropriate to his purpose and congenial to his own personality. But since Philo’s accounts are partly duplicated by the fuller account in Josephus, it is easier to base one’s description on this, noting Philo’s divergences from it and his amplifications of Josephus’s points. A historian and man of affairs, Josephus portrays the Essenes somewhat more realistically than Philo, and, since he was once a member of the order himself, his account of it must stand as authoritative. During his lifetime, Josephus tells us, the three principal sects of the Jews were the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. He himself, by the age of nineteen, had, he says, been through all three of them, and had also spent three years in the desert, mortifying his flesh, with a holy hermit named Bannus, who clothed himself only with what grew on trees, ate only such food as grew wild, and disciplined himself to chastity by constant cold-water baths. From these various religious experiments, Josephus had emerged as a Pharisee. He later took an active part in the wars of the Jews with the Romans; but the struggle for Jewish independence was already becoming desperate, and the drive toward asceticism, retreat from the world, had evidently been strongly felt by him. He deals with the Essenes at much greater length than with either of the other sects.
The Essenes, says Josephus, are bound together more closely than these other sects: they constitute, in fact, a brotherhood that has something in common with the Pythagoreans. They have quite renounced pleasure, identifying it with vice, and school themselves in temperance and self-control. “Marriage they disdain, but they adopt other men’s children, while yet pliable and docile, accepting them as their kin and molding them in accordance with their own principles.” (Philo differs from this; he says that there are no youths or children among them, that only the mature are admitted.) “They do not, indeed,” Josephus continues, “on principle, condemn wedlock—the propagation thereby of the race—but they wish to protect themselves against women’s wantonness, being persuaded that none of the sex keeps her plighted troth to one man.” (Here Philo confirms Josephus.) The Essenes have renounced riches, also; they eat only the simplest fare, and they wear their clothes and their shoes to shreds before they will provide themselves with new ones.
Philo says that there are more than four thousand Essenes, Josephus that there are about four thousand (a large number for Palestine in those days). “They occupy no one city,” says Josephus, “but settle in large numbers in every town.” Philo, too, describes them as “dwelling in many towns of Judea,” but says that they avoid the large cities and prefer to “live in villages.” The great point that is made by both is that the Essenes have organized communities that are grouped around a center, where they come together for meals and to which they are always responsible. They hold all their goods in common. New members must surrender their property to the order, and all must contribute to it their earnings. In return, they get everything they need. A steward, or manager, does all the buying and handles all the money. Keeping anything back is severely punished. Even the clothing is common property. They are supplied, says Philo, with thick cloaks for winter and light mantles for summer. There is no buying or selling among them, and anyone can take anything for nothing from his “brother,” but they cannot give presents to relatives except with the permission of their superiors. When they travel, they carry nothing along with them except arms to defend themselves against bandits, for an Essene will be cordially received by any Essene community. There is, in fact, in every town where the Essenes have established a community, a member of the sect appointed to welcome arrivals from elsewhere and to see that they are taken care of. The sick are supported, if they cannot work; the old people are cared for, says Philo, even if they are childless, as if they had many children. Most of them, says Josephus, live to be over a hundred.
They cultivate the earth or devote themselves to peaceful arts (Philo). They are farmers, shepherds, cowherds, beekeepers, artisans, and craftsmen. They will not make instruments of war. They will not engage in commerce; they know nothing of navigation. There are among them no slaves and no masters. They maintain a fraternal equality, believing that human brotherhood is the natural relationship of men, which has only been destroyed in society by the competition of the covetous. They read much in the writings of the ancients, says Josephus (hence, no doubt, the many scrolls in the caves), yet (Philo) they do not cultivate the logical side of philosophy, do not expend “any superfluous care on examining Greek names” (by which is evidently meant such subtle discussions of words as one gets in the dialogues of Plato), but only occupy themselves with the moral side. They study medicinal roots and the properties of stones (these were probably charms); they are inspired in foretelling the future (several instances are given of this). They pay scrupulous attention to cleanliness and are always washing themselves. Their habits of defecation, for the Middle East of those days, were remarkably sanitary. They considered it defiling to rub oil on themselves—which must have exposed them painfully to the brutalities of the Mediterranean sun. They were compelled to keep a dry skin, and they always dressed in white. “In their costume and deportment,” says Josephus, “they resemble children under rigorous discipline.”
Their whole day is subjected to this discipline. They do not converse before the rising of the sun; they only recite traditional prayers, in which they entreat the sun to show himself. After this, they go out to their work, at which they continue till the fifth hour (about eleven o’clock). They pay no attention to weather, says Philo, and never use it as an excuse for not working, and they return from their work rejoicing, as if from an athletic contest. They then wash themselves with cold water, put on their linen raiment, and proceed to their refectory as if to a shrine. Here they sit down in silence, and are served by the baker with loaves, and by the cook with a plate with a single course. The presiding priest says grace and prays again at the end of the meal, after which they lay aside their linen clothes, treating them as holy vestments, and go back to their work in the fields or shops. At evening, they dine again, with any guests who may happen to be with them. No chatter or uproar; they speak in turn. “To persons from the outside,” Josephus says, “the silence of those within gives the impression of some awful mystery.” Silence for the Essenes is very important. When ten, say, are sitting together, one of them will refrain from speaking if the other nine desire to be silent. They are stricter in observance of the Sabbath than any of the other sects, but they do not, like them, offer animal sacrifices; they do not believe in this practice, asserting they have purer lustrations of their own. The Essenes are, in consequence, excluded from the court of the Temple in Jerusalem, and apparently they never go near this center of Jewish worship. In doctrine—whereas the Sadducees do not believe in immortality and think the soul dies with the body—the Essenes regard the body as corruptible but hold that the soul is imperishable. Emanating from the finest ether but dragged down by a natural spell, the soul becomes caught in the prison of the body, but, once set at liberty by death, it rejoices and is borne aloft. Like the Greeks, the Essenes believe that the more virtuous souls have reserved for them, somewhere beyond the sea, a final place of retirement, where there is no snow or rain or heat, and which is always refreshed by a gentle breeze, while the baser ones will be committed to a murky and turbulent dungeon, where they will suffer eternal torment.
Josephus and Philo agree in emphasizing the general respect in which the Essenes are held. They surpass, the former declares, both the Greeks and the barbarians in virtue, and they have succeeded for many years in keeping up their high level of discipline. Both writers bring home to us the horror of the world from which the Essenes have withdrawn but which, morally, they have been able to stand up to. The Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes (inheritor of the Near Eastern section of the empire of Alexander the Great) had set up his statue of Zeus, “the abomination of desolation,” to be worshipped by the Jews in their Temple. They had successfully, under the Maccabees, revolted against the Seleucid tyranny—but only, before very long, to see their own rulers, among them the Herods, become as corrupt and as cruel as the foreigners they had displaced—and they had later, in 70 A.D., been defeated by the armies of the Roman Titus, which, like those of Nebuchadnezzar, had destroyed their Temple. “Though at different times,” says Philo, “a great number of potentates of every variety of disposition and character have occupied their country, some of whom have endeavored to surpass even ferocious wild beasts in cruelty, leaving no sort of inhumanity unpracticed, and have never ceased to murder their subjects in whole troops, and have even torn them to pieces while living, like cooks cutting them limo from limb—till they themselves, being overtaken by the vengeance of divine justice, have at last experienced the same miseries in their turn; others again, having converted their barbarous frenzy into another kind of wickedness, practicing an ineffable degree of savagery, talking with the people quietly but, through the hypocrisy of a more gentle voice, betraying the ferocity of their real disposition, fawning upon their victims like treacherous dogs, and becoming the causes of irremediable miseries to them, have left in all their cities monuments of their impiety and hatred of all mankind, in the never-to-be-forgotten miseries endured by those whom they oppressed; and yet no one, not even of those immoderately cruel tyrants, nor of the more treacherous and hypocritical oppressors, was ever able to bring any real accusation against the multitude of those called Essenes, or Holy Ones. But everyone, being subdued by the virtue of these men, looked up to them as free by nature, and not subject to the frown of any human being, and have celebrated their manner of messing together, and their fellowship with one another—their mutual good faith is beyond description—which is sufficient proof of a perfect and supremely happy life.” Josephus also speaks of this fortitude and of the admiration it compels: “They make light of danger, and triumph over pain by their resolute will; death, if it comes with honor, they consider better than immortality. The war with the Romans tried their souls through and through by every variety of test. Racked and twisted, broken and burnt, and made to pass through every instrument of torture, in order to induce them to blaspheme their Lawgiver or to eat some forbidden thing, they refused to yield to either demand, nor ever once did they cringe to their persecutors or ever shed a tear. Smiling in their agonies and mildly deriding their tormentors, they cheerfully resigned their souls, confident that they would receive them back again.” Except for what Josephus calls the “tremendous oaths” exacted from an initiate joining the order, they refuse to swear any oath, saying that “one who is not believed without an appeal to God stands condemned already,” and “any word of theirs,” he says, “had more force than an oath.” He tells us that Herod the Great, in the days when he was not yet king and his political position was dubious, excused the members of the sect from taking an oath of loyalty, but makes it clear that this was due to one of them having “slapped him on the backside,” seeing him in the street one day, and having predicted that he would one day be king. This Essene had also predicted that Herod would later go bad, but the only half-Jewish Herod, who was hated by the Jews, could afford, by the time he was reigning, to forget the unfavorable part of the prophecy and was glad to indulge the Essenes.
In reading these contemporary accounts of the Essenes, we are struck by two kinds of resemblance. For one thing, the modern traveller is often reminded of the Zionist and Israeli collective farms that are known as kvutzoth and kibutzim. Here the property is held in common, as that of the Essenes was; the purchasing is done by a manager or a management. The members of these communities have in some cases even shared their wardrobe, putting on any clothes that would fit them, as the Essenes did their winter and summer cloaks. Like the Essenes, they bring up adopted children—in the case of the Israeli communities, orphans and refugees. They have had to face tyrants as terrible as any that the Essenes fled from, and it has given them the same sort of impulse toward natural brotherhood that inspired the monasteries of the Essenes.
But the thing that we are immediately struck by is the resemblance of the Essenes to the Christians. You have the doctrine of human brotherhood; you have the practice of ritual washing, of which baptism is a prominent feature; you have communism, which the early Christians practiced among themselves (Acts 2:44-45: “And all who believed were together, and had all things common; and they sold their possessions and goods, and distributed them to all, as any had need”). You have phrases that bring Christian echoes. One finds Philo, for example, saying that the Essenes did not “store up treasures of silver and gold” or “acquire vast sections of the earth out of a desire for ample revenues,” and remembers Matthew 6: “Lay not up for yourself treasures on earth,” etc. When Josephus tells us that the Essenes held the body to be corruptible but the soul immortal and imperishable, we think of First Corinthians 15:53: “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.” You have the courage to defy the Romans, the “making light of danger,” and the “triumph over pain.” And—what is very important—you have the fact, which both Philo and Josephus make clear, that the Essenes, though of Jewish birth, have not come together on a basis of race, “for one does not speak of race when it is a question of voluntary acts.” The Essenes have been brought together by their “zeal for virtue and by the passion of their love for mankind” (Philo). It seems obvious that the monastic tradition of the Christians must ultimately have derived from the Essenes, and there has always been a theory that Jesus was originally an Essene. This problem we must leave till later, when we discuss the unexpected revelations in connection with the origins of Christianity that have resulted from the Dead Sea scrolls. We should also remark, at this stage, that there were elements in Essenism that sound as if they had come from Persia or Babylonia: the non-Jewish rite of baptism and the early-morning practice of sun worship.
Now, the manuscript pieced together by Trever from two of the Metropolitan’s scrolls turned out to be the Manual of Discipline of an early monastic order, and a comparison of this new document with the descriptions of the Essenes quoted above has left very little doubt as to what this order was. If the passage from Pliny identifies the monastery, the detailed account by Josephus identifies the Manual of Discipline, which was found in the cave near the monastery. Josephus must have studied this handbook, or one very much like it. His summary of Essene procedure tallies almost exactly with the Manual We learn from both these documents, for example, that the Essene principle of human brotherhood was combined with a stringent hierarchy. The candidate, Josephus tells us, is not admitted the first year. He is given his white clothing, his loincloth, and a small mattock for digging his own latrines. “He is brought into closer touch with the rule and is allowed to share the purer kind of holy water, but is not yet received into the meetings of the community.” He has then to be tested for two years more, and if he qualifies at the end of that period, he is allowed to share the common food, but he must swear “tremendous oaths: first that he will practice piety toward the Deity, next that he will observe justice toward men: that he will wrong none, whether of his own mind or under another’s orders; that he will forever hate the unjust and fight the battle of the just; that he will forever keep faith with all men, especially with the powers that be, since no ruler attains his office save by the will of God; that, should he himself bear rule, he will never abuse his authority nor, by his dress or by any other external marks of superiority, allow himself to outshine his subjects; to be forever a lover of truth and to expose liars; to keep his hands from stealing and his soul pure from unholy gain; to conceal nothing from the members of the sect and to report none of their secrets to others, even though tortured to death. He swears, moreover, to transmit their rules exactly as he himself received them; to abstain from robbery; and in like manner carefully to preserve the books of the sect and the names of the angels. Such are the oaths by which they secure their proselytes.” The humility imposed on the Essene, the commitment not to “abuse his authority” or to display “external marks of superiority,” may remind us of the “Let not yourselves be called masters, for Christ is your only master” of Matthew 23:10 . Yet with the Essenes, the grades of seniority are maintained in the strictest fashion at the community meals and elsewhere. “So far,” says Josephus, “are the junior members inferior to the seniors that a senior, if but touched by a junior, must take a bath, as if after contact with an alien.”
The injunction to keep faith with the powers that be may remind us of the “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” of Matthew 22:21. So inevitably does it seem to be true that definitive political defeat, the disappointment of practical hopes, gives rise to an intensive development of the more unworldly kind of religion. An obvious recent example is the efflorescence of mysticism in Russia after the failure of the revolution of 1905. We are today going through something similar, at a time when disillusion with socialism, following a breakdown of the older system, has been driving bewildered idealists to look for support to the various churches. Now, the Jews, in the days of the Essenes, had succeeded in reviving their state under the leadership of the Maccabees, but had later taken a terrible beating at the hands of the more organized and “modern” Romans. The Essenes, who, though they possessed certain doctrines and followed certain practices of their own, were still basically Judaistic, had to assume, like the Old Testament prophets, that their miseries had been willed by God. The Jesus of the Christian Gospels seems to belong to a later stage, when God has been dissociated from Caesar; but once this break has been made, the Christian is in a stronger position than the priests who drew up the Essene oaths. The Essenes are smarting and sullen—we find their attitude toward their enemies stated bitterly and in most unchristian terms in the Manual and other writings; but the Gospels have a heartening ring of audacity and spiritual freedom. Yet it was also, as it now appears, the sectarians that had framed these oaths who were preparing, by their precept and discipline—“to report none of their secrets, even though tortured to death”—the resounding moral triumph of the Crucifixion.
Our main interest at this point, however, is to check the Manual of Discipline with the accounts of Josephus and Philo. You find here the property held in common and entrusted to a Custodian of Property (the phrase is that of the Manual, in Dr. Brownlee’s translation); the devotion to the Lawgiver, qualified by the substitution of “a fragrant offering of righteousness and perfection” for the traditional animal sacrifice; the lustrations in holy water; the insistence on self-control (one is fined for giving way to anger); the subordination, within the order, of “the lesser” to “the greater, in regard to goods and means;” the common table and the sacred repasts; the speaking in turn; the prerogatives of the majority, who can even keep someone from talking if the sentiment of the company is for silence; the prohibition—also mentioned by Josephus—against “spitting into the midst of the session of the many.” You have the probationary period—of a year, says Josephus; the Manual does not specify exactly—at the end of which the neophyte is permitted (similar phrases are used) to “draw close” to the order; then two more years of novitiate, in the course of which he is allowed to share in the “purification” (Manual), “purer kind of holy water” (Josephus), but not yet admitted to the meetings; if he successfully completes this novitiate, he swears the “tremendous oaths” and thereafter partakes of the common meals. You find also in the Manual of Discipline a good many other details that are not in Josephus or Philo. There is the whole code of censure and punishment, by which the discipline of the sect was enforced, that is omitted from Philo’s idyllic picture. This system is rigorous and drastic enough, but Josephus explains that the Essenes were “just and scrupulously careful in their trial of cases, never passing sentence in a court of less than a hundred members.” But the decision, once reached, is irrevocable. Those who are expelled from the order find themselves in a difficult situation, for the oaths they have taken forbid them any food not prepared by the order, and they may try to live on grass and “waste away.” But the order will then sometimes take pity on them thinking they have been punished enough, and has actually received a good many back. “One shall not speak to his brother,” says the Manual, “in anger or in complaint . . . nor shall he hate him [in the uncircumcision] of his heart—though he shall reprove him on the very day so as not to incur guilt because of him. Indeed, a man shall not bring accusation against his fellow in the presence of the many who has not been subject to [previous] reproof before witnesses.” Dr. Brownlee, in a note to his translation of the Manual, points out that Matthew 18:15-17 “gives us the clue for interpreting the passage. Jesus specifies three stages for dealing with an erring brother: (1) personal reproof; (2) reproof before witnesses; (3) reproof before the Church.”
One very important aspect of the teaching of the sect is indicated only by Josephus—as it were, incidentally—when he is summarizing the oaths; the new member is made to swear “that he will forever hate the unjust and fight the battle of the just.” In the Manual we find this theme elaborated at length in a section that describes the division of all mankind into two antithetical groups, dominated, respectively, by a Spirit of Darkness and a Spirit of Light. The Children of Darkness are angrily denounced. Though it was wrong to hate a brother in the faith, or even to lose one’s temper, it was a duty to loathe and to curse the alien and wicked people that was dominated by the Spirit of Darkness We shall later, when we come to the other scrolls, return to this feature of the literature of the sect. It is enough for the present to say that the Children of Darkness were probably the Romans, at the hands of whom the Jews had suffered so much.
III
The landscape of the Dead Sea wilderness is monotonous, subduing, and dreadful. This country is completely impersonal. It is a landscape without physiognomy; no faces of men or gods, no bodies of recumbent animals, are suggested by the shapes of the hills. “Nothing but monotheism could possibly come out of this,” said one of my companions, who knew Palestine well. “There’s no crevice for a nymph anywhere.” The already fading grass of spring—my visit was in early April—had the look of greenish mold on enormous loaves. Tawny without warmth, of a dun not enriched by shadow, these mounds also somewhat resemble—it is the only living image one can think of—the humps of the camels that graze them, dull yellow and gawkily bending, with their dusty-white calves beside them. One hillside is flecked by a herd of black goats. Here and there, all alone in the emptiness, squats motionless a Bedouin woman, who, though she seems as unperceptive as a boulder, is keeping an eye on a camel or goat; and we pass a few torn and black Bedouin shelters that might be the old tents of Abraham. A watchtower, now deserted, is still standing in a place where, before the war, a plant run by Jews made potash, and there are ruins of a little inn that was fought over by Jews and Arabs, who pretty well knocked it to pieces, and finally plundered by Bedouins. As the road begins to drop below sea level—at the bottom, almost thirteen hundred feet—you feel pressure increasing on your eardrums, as you do coming down in a plane.
Arriving at the Sea itself, you find two or three simple buildings, where a British officer of the Arab Legion presides over the “Dead Sea Fleet.” This consists of a few small motorboats that are kept here to patrol the frontier, since Israel begins just south of here, not far from where Pliny said Judea stopped. He has two little mongrel dogs, and he is able to invite us to tea. The Dead Sea is a dull, pale blue that reminds one of the Great Salt Lake, and the hills across the water that wall it in are of yellows and purples and blues and browns so dull that such words for color are almost too vivid to refer to them. One of them is Mount Nebo, from which Moses, when he had rescued his people from Egypt and wandered for years in the wilderness, looked across at the Promised Land.
We jolt in our jeep over backbreaking rocks, where the track of an ancient road has lately been just made out. The all but bare ground is rusted with streaks of some reddish plant, and dabbed here and there with statice, a dreary little white everlasting. The palms that were noted by Pliny as the only companions of the Essenes must have disappeared centuries ago. The only forms of vertebrate life that we see as we drive toward the monastery are a hawk and a crow contending for some small animal that the crow has caught but that the hawk has forced him to drop. The crow is reluctant to leave his prey, but the hawk keeps on circling, incisively and slowly, and the crow has to keep a sharp watch on him. There are scorpions and vipers here, several of the latter of which the excavators have had to kill. It recalls that “great and terrible wilderness” of which Moses speaks in Deuteronomy 8:15, “with fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground, where there was no water.” There are no fish in the heavy sea, but only microscopic animalcula. The landscape has something, perhaps, of Greece, yet there is nothing of the exquisite spectrum of violet, mauve, and blue that is a function of the fluid Greek light. One is aware of neither light nor darkness. It is as if one were sunk below them; to live here seems a sort of burial. The visitor from the modern world, confronted by the blank of this region, is forced to make an effort of imagination to convince himself that anything interesting can ever have happened in it. Yet one finds oneself here in the “wilderness” where the word of God came to John the Baptist, and, not far to the north, where the Jordan flows into the Dead Sea, is the place to which Jesus came to be baptized by John. This arid depression in the earth is also that wilderness where Jesus is supposed to have fasted for forty days. In driving here, we passed the mountain upon which, according to tradition, Jesus was tempted by Satan, who showed him from it the kingdoms of the world. On the equally desolate opposite shore, Herod the Great built Machaerus, the formidable stronghold described by Josephus, where John the Baptist was imprisoned and beheaded by the younger Herod. This fortress was built on a very high rock with deep ravines on every side, and enclosed by a great wall that had hundred-foot towers at the corners. When Judea fell finally to Titus, Machaerus was the last fortress taken. The Romans caught a spirited youth called Eleazar and scourged him in sight of the citadel, then erected a cross in plain view and threatened to crucify him. This caused the Jews to surrender, and the garrison, as promised, were allowed to go free; but the Romans made a point of murdering the seventeen hundred men in the town at the foot of the cliff and enslaved their women and children. And across the lake from Machaerus, to the place to which our jeep has now brought us, the Essenes once resorted to worship God and to save their self-respect from these infamies; to turn away from the Way of Darkness and follow the Way of Light.
Their monastery, built crudely of gray blocks of stone, still stands, as was noted by Pliny, some distance away from the shore. The cliff rises steep behind it, and one catches sight, here and there, of the dark cracks of natural caves such as the one in which the first scrolls were found. Between the Dead Sea and the monastery spreads the cemetery of a thousand graves. Père de Vaux has opened nineteen of these, and they are all more or less the same. The skeletons lie on their backs, with their heads in the direction of the south, and their hands crossed on the pelvis or stretched straight along the sides. What is singular about these graves is that there is almost nothing in them but bones. Only one of those opened contained a coffin. It is unusual to find ancient graves without some sort of funeral objects—ornaments or weapons or receptacles for food, signs of rank or distinction, or equipment for the journey to the other world. The absence of such objects in these graves would seem to be perfectly appropriate to the reported austerity of the Essenes, but it makes them rather uninteresting to excavate. There have, however, been found in them, among the fragments of jars that seem to have got there accidentally, a few that belong to a type which has not hitherto been known except for a single specimen. This specimen, dug up from the citadel of Jerusalem, has been dated in the first B.C. century, before the constructions of Herod the Great. Père de Vaux has now ceased to explore the graves, but he has pretty well established one important point. The bones are very fragile and were sometimes found crushed, but a careful examination shows that one of the skeletons is certainly a woman’s, and that two or three others may be. To have women connected with the order at all was, in general, as we have seen, contrary to the practice of the Essenes; but Josephus—as it were, in a postscript—explains that there is a branch of the sect that does allow members to marry: “They think that those who decline to marry cut off the chief function of life, the propagation of the race, and, what is more, that, were all to adopt the same view, the whole race would very quickly die out. They give their wives, however, a three years’ probation.” Pliny, it will be remembered, says specifically of this community that it did not admit women, but in this case his information may have been out of date or inaccurate.
Before going on to the monastery itself, I must give some account of Père Roland de Vaux, who does not in the least resemble any of the conventional conceptions of a typical French priest. It may be that the French character is today to be seen at its best not in the literary men, the politicians, and the antiquated generals about whom we mostly hear but in persons who have been lucky enough not to share in the decay of France, who have had some overmastering interest that kept them out of the country or sustained them through the years of demoralization. One felt, in reading “The Silent World,” by the deep-sea diver Cousteau, that there, rather unexpectedly, was to be seen something of true French greatness: good sense combined with daring, the capacity under all conditions—in this case, the resistance to inhuman pressures, breathing from a tank at the bottom of the sea—for realistic and accurate observation, for exercising a cool intelligence. Such figures, it seems to me, are more satisfactory than most of the people one reads about in, say, André Gide’s journal, or even than Gide himself. I had of Père de Vaux, in his different department, an impression somewhat similar: intellect, expertness, fortitude, tenacity, an element of daring, and—what now seems so rare in France—effectiveness. He has brown eyes of the high-powered headlight kind that seem magnified by his glasses’ thick lenses, and long, white, regular teeth that are always displayed in talking. His sharp nose is of a salience and aquilinity that strongly suggest the Old Testament, as does his coarse, bristling brown beard. With his belted white flannel Dominican robe, the hood of which falls back on his shoulders and at the belt of which hang his beads, he wears a beret, heavy shoes, and what look like substantial blue golf stockings. He tells stories extremely well, continually smokes cigarettes, and altogether has style, even dash. In the archeological world, there persists a curious legend that, before becoming a Dominican, Père de Vaux was an actor in the Comédie Française. This is, I think, a gratuitous inference, drawn from his eloquence as a speaker and from something that suggests a stage presence, by the scholars of the American School, who do not perhaps appreciate how much time and work it takes to qualify as an actor at the Comédie. The story has, in any case, been denied with amazement by de Vaux himself, who explains that his education has been “wholly classical and clerical.” I did not find him theatrical; he seemed to me quite unselfconscious, and intent on his work with a gusto that amounted almost to voracity. I was struck by his vigor one day when I happened to see him striding out of the Tenebrae service at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, quickly outdistancing the rest of the crowd—in what I suppose was a dark robe of ceremony, his face burnt a brown brick-red, his boarlike nostrils and beard pressing on to their next destination. On the site of his excavations, among the ruins and rocks, he climbs on short legs like a goat. He evidently loves the rough side of it: he discards his clerical costume and puts on working clothes. He has camped out on the “dig” for days. Once the men shot a hyena, he tells us. They ate it; it was “very good,” something like wild boar. They hung it a long time, then boiled it, spicing it well. I could imagine him proceeding intrepidly along the almost razor-back top of a narrow and wall-like formation, in a cave in the prow of which one of the biggest caches of scrolls was found. This cave had been spotted by a Bedouin when a partridge he had been hunting flew into it. It is situated high in the rock, and at first they used ropes to climb into it, but they later made a hole in the top of the ridge and thus opened another entrance, which had to be approached along this ridge. It looked almost like tightrope walking, but Père de Vaux said that it had not taken him long to come to feel as much at ease with it as if it had been merely a question of going up and down stairs in his own house.
He was delighted to take people there, but the very idea made me giddy. It even made me giddy to climb with him to the top of the monastery’s highest wall—fifteen feet above the ground—and to perch there, clinging to the wall, while he expounded the building to us. He was giving us a bird’s-eye view. The main structure presents a large rectangle, ninety-eight by a hundred and twenty feet, made of rudely cut blocks of stone, joined with an earthen mortar. There are windows, and the walls inside are plastered. The floor is paved with pebbles. Layers of ashes seem to show that the roofing, probably made out of the Dead Sea reeds, had eventually been burned, and the empty mold left by the trunk of a palm suggests that it was used as a beam or for some kind of central support. In the northwestern angle stood a two-story tower, evidently used for defense, the basement of which was a storehouse. Inside the monastery proper there are a kitchen, which has been identified by the oven and the hole in the wall for a flue, and what was presumably the refectory of the sacred repasts, close to which were found, neatly stacked, about a thousand jars and bowls. Another chamber, seventy-two feet long, has the look of an assembly room, with a platform of stone at one end that may perhaps have served as a pulpit from which the sacred books were read. A room with tables and benches, constructed of plaster and brick, was evidently a scriptorium, where the scrolls were copied out. Three inkwells were also found here—one of bronze, which has turned green, and two of terra cotta, turned black—in which there is still some dried ink. The brotherhood presumably made their pens from the reeds that grew by the shore. There is a pottery, with a kind of round nest of stones, which may have held the potter’s wheel, and a mill for grinding grain, of which the two parts, for some reason not known, turned up in different rooms. Lying about in various places were nails, locks and keys, hoes, scythes, and pruning knives. There was a jar that resembles exactly the jars in which the first lot of scrolls were preserved, as both resemble the fragments found in 1952 in the newly discovered caverns; and there are lamps that match those in the caves.
Among the most striking features of the monastery are the six large cisterns, with steps leading down into them, upon which the inmates depended for water. Into these cisterns they evidently canalized the rains, which descended by a trough from the hills and of which the supply was undoubtedly scant. Père de Vaux says that only twice in all the months of the three years he has worked here has he seen any water come down from these hills. The Essenes must have had to store, in the relatively rainy season, all their water for the rest of the year. And they had, also, on the surface level, seven smaller cisterns—of which some of the piping can still be seen—that must have been used for the lustrations and the baptisms of which so much is said in the literature of the sect (seven, for the Jews, is a mystical number). There are even two little cupped hollows in the room where the scrolls were copied, which must have been basins for washing in connection with this holy work. Another basin is probably a cesspool. Unaccountably, one finds here and there the traces of some more pretentious building—square stones and sections of column that must once have been the parts of a portico or colonnade, and two queerly placed bases of columns set close together in the ground, as if they had been stands for something. Scattered through the building were about four hundred coins. No coins have been found in the Qumrân caves, and this perfectly fits in with what we are told by Philo and Josephus: that the finances of the Essene brotherhood were entirely handled by a manager. De Vaux has concluded that the members of the community lived in the nearby caves, and also in huts or tents—since pottery and large forked poles have been found stuck away in crevices or sheltered by overhanging rocks in a way that would seem to indicate that they had been concealed or stored by people who were living outside the caves. The building would have been their center, to which they would have been fully admitted only after they had completed their probation.
To trace the conclusions to which Père de Vaux has been led by the evidence supplied by this site and by the known facts of history enables one to feel some of the beauty and experience some of the excitement of the methods of modern archeology, which have developed now so far past the stage when the excavator plundered the “dig” for objects of conspicuous interest, leaving the various layers—which might represent whole cities, whole periods—in chaos. The procedures in use at present aim at something like scientific accuracy, and record every stratum successively before digging on to the next. From the pottery, the coins, and the stonework, and from various other indications, Père de Vaux and the men working with him have arrived at the following chronology of the history of the Qumrân building. There have been found, first of all, some remnants of a very ancient Israelite wall, which de Vaux dates about 700 B.C., and which he believes to have had no connection with the later developments of the site. The later construction, he thinks, was begun in the late second century B.C. The first close sequence of coins commences with the Seleucid Antiochus VII, in 136 B.C., and runs through the Hasmonean rulers to 37 B.C.—that is, it covers the period of Jewish independence and extends to the accession of Herod the Great. The next group begins with the reign of his son, Herod Archelaus (4 B.C.—6 A.D.), and extends to 68 A.D. There would seem to have been an interval, then, when the building was left unoccupied. (Two coins from this interval between the two sequences may be easily accounted for by their happening to have been still in circulation when the building was eventually reoccupied.) Another big gap occurs between 68 and 132 A.D.; but there are thirteen coins that belong to the period of Bar-Kochba’s final revolt against the Romans, from 132 to 135, and all of these later coins were found in the same level of soil.
In view of the fact that there are many coins from the reigns of the late Jewish kings, John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus, Père de Vaux thinks it probable that the monastery was built in the reign of the former (136-106 B.C.) and occupied during that of the latter (104-78 B.C.). The whole period of the occupancy of the Essenes would have extended from the end of the second century B.C. up to the year 68 A.D. But how to explain the hiatus between 37 and 4 B.C.? Certain signs seem to show that the monastery was damaged at some point by an earthquake. There is a fissure that runs all through the steps to one of the big cisterns and that can be traced in the rest of the building; the tower has been reinforced with stones that are banked about the base; and there is a room with a propped-up wall that appears to have been closed and condemned. Now, the date of this upheaval would seem to be determined, again, by the invaluable Josephus, who tells us that in the seventh year of the reign of Herod the Great, not long before the battle of Actium—which would put it in the spring of 31—Judea was shaken by an earthquake in which thirty thousand people were killed. The building could not have been reoccupied—as the coins of Archelaus show—till somewhere near the beginning of the Christian era. But why did the community wait thirty years before moving back into the monastery? Père de Vaux has suggested that there is documentary evidence which may throw some light on this problem, and this I shall explain in a moment, when we arrive at the document in question. It may be noted, in the meantime, that loads of debris, apparently left by the earthquake, were removed from the building and piled outside, where they are still to be recognized.
But the Romans got the Essenes in the end—either killed them or caused them to flee. In the second year of the first Jewish revolt—67-68 A.D., when the second sequence of coins ends—the building must have been destroyed. There are broken-down walls, signs of burning, and iron arrowheads lying about. After the Roman operations of 67—we return to Josephus’s narrative—the Tenth Legion was encamped at Caesarea, on the Mediterranean, and in June of the following year Vespasian paid a visit to Jericho and the Dead Sea. He was curious to find out for himself whether the latter was as heavy as people said, and he had some of his men who could not swim thrown into the water with their hands tied behind them. He noted that they rose to the surface. A few of the monastery coins seem to belong to this Roman visit, since one of them is stamped with an “X,” which would indicate the Tenth Legion. The legionaries must have remained there at least well into the reign of Titus—sometime after 79 A.D.—as is shown by three coins stamped “Judæa Capta.” This Roman post is explained by the special facilities of the monastery site for keeping a watch on the shore from the mouth of the Jordan to Râs Feshkha, and overlooking the whole northern half of the sea. The Romans had also to deal with the fortress of Masada, not far south of the monastery. This had been captured in 66 by the Jews, who had slaughtered the Roman garrison and who succeeded in holding it till April of 73, three years after the fall of Jerusalem. There was only one point that was vulnerable, and this the Romans finally breached with a battering ram, but their way was then blocked by a bulwark, newly put up by the occupants, which the besiegers eventually burned. Inside, they found only two women and five children alive. All the rest of this stubborn remnant of nine hundred and sixty Jews had been induced by their leader to kill themselves. He had reminded them, according to Josephus, that they had “long ago resolved never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than God himself.”
That the ruin was used again during the second Jewish revolt is indicated by the coins from that period. Ten of these pieces of money were found in a dugout at the bottom of the tower. Whoever now occupied the building had shut off the whole southeastern end of it. “The building has changed its function,” says de Vaux. “It no longer shelters the general services of an organized community. It serves only as habitation for a limited group of persons, who lodge in the little rooms, cook their bread in the oven . . . protect themselves from attacks . . . and keep a lookout in the tower.” When the Romans had subdued this second revolt, the building was abandoned forever. Two Arab and three Byzantine coins that were discovered at the surface level must have been left by travellers who camped there.
IV
We do not know what became of the Essenes, but we do know a good deal more now—since the discovery of the Dead Sea library—about what had been happening to them, how they lived, and what they believed. It ought to be said at this point that the evidence of the ancient coins—which seems to show that the occupancy of the sect, preceded no doubt by their presence in the region, must have extended from about the last third of the second pre-Christian century (with a thirty-year interruption) at least till 68 A.D., the eve of the victory of the Romans—appears definitely to settle, in a general way, the dating of the manuscripts, about which, before the excavation of the ruin, there had been much rather violent controversy. We can form no idea, of course, except from internal evidence, as to when the works copied were written, but it seems clear that the copies could not have been made any later than the descent of the Romans, at which time the manuscripts were hidden in caves—like the one de Vaux risked his neck to reach—that were as hard to get at as possible. This fits in with the date assigned by Albright, who, arguing from the paleographical evidence, immediately put the Isaiah scroll at about 100 B.C.; with the conclusions of the pottery experts, who said that the jars were pre-Herodian and dated them not later than the end of the last century B.C.; and with radiocarbon tests, which, applied to the linen wrappings, gave a range of possibility between 168 B.C. and 233 A.D.
Not only did the documents found combine with the passages in ancient writers and the discovery of the monastery itself to make it possible to form some conception of a remarkable religious movement of which little hitherto had been known, but, in relation to certain other late Hebrew writings, known but not fully understood, which had already been assigned to this same general period, the new manuscripts at once set up what may be likened to both a chain reaction and the clustering of iron filings around a magnet.
First of all, there were the so-called Zadokite fragments These are parts of a document or documents discovered at Cairo in 1896, in clearing out a medieval synagogue. The manuscripts are supposed to date from some time between the tenth and the twelfth centuries A.D., but the original writings must derive from the same source, and hence date from the same period, as those of the Dead Sea monastery. This seemed obvious from the first lot of scrolls, since the Zadokite fragments expound the same doctrines, deal with the same events, and even make use of the same language as the Manual of Discipline and others of the scrolls; but the matter has now been put beyond doubt by the finding in one of the other caves of several fragments of the Zadokite text. I shall not, therefore, list the close resemblances between these and the other documents; I shall simply count them in with the others when I come to describe, in a moment, the history and doctrine contained in this whole body of writing. Two points should, however, be mentioned. Neither these fragments nor the Manual of Discipline nor any other of the writings yet read ever refers to the members of the sect as Essenes. In the Manual, as in the fragments, its priests are always the “sons of Zadok,” and its laity is not given any special name. This discrepancy has been explained by the theory that the sect were called Essenes, “Holy Ones,” only by outsiders. In future, I shall follow the example of other writers on the subject in referring to the Dead Sea order simply as “the sect” or “the brotherhood.” We know from the ancient descriptions that the Essenes regarded themselves as reformers, and these fragments describe a conflict with the official priests of Jerusalem that resulted—the second point to note—in a migration of the sect to Damascus. This migration, Père de Vaux suggests, may account for the abandonment of the monastery over the unexplained period of thirty years.
But, besides the so-called Zadokite work (sometimes known as the Damascus document), there are at least four apocryphal Old Testament books that evidently have close connections with the literature of the sect—the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Enoch, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Assumption of Moses. These works have been dated somewhat differently by two of the leading scholars in this field of Old Testament apocrypha—R. H. Charles and C. C. Torrey—but the divergences are not very great, and Charles and Torrey are agreed that these writings were produced, in their present form (chronologically, in the order named), between the second half of the second century B.C. and the early years of the first century A.D. Though they had hitherto been known only in translation—Greek, Latin, or Ethiopic—it had already been assumed that the originals were in Hebrew or Aramaic. This assumption and the dating are now confirmed by the tieup with the Dead Sea scrolls. Aside from the internal evidence of subject and phraseology, we have a reference to the Book of Jubilees in a passage of the Zadokite fragments, in connection with the novel calendar which the dissident sect adopted and which cut them off—since their holy days now came on different dates—from orthodox Jewish worship; and a fragment of Jubilees itself as well as a fragment of Enoch, in what are evidently the original Hebrew texts, have turned up among the Qumrân writings.
A tieup with the literature of the Christians is shown by the direct quotation in the New Testament Epistle of Jude (14) of a passage from the Book of Enoch; by an obvious reference in Jude 9 to an episode in the Assumption of Moses—the struggle, over the body of Moses, of the Archangel Michael with Satan; and by passages in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, to which we shall come in a moment. And there are also unmistakable resemblances between all these pre-Christian or non-Christian writings and certain works that had once been accepted as part of the Christian canon but were later rejected from it.
An extra dramatic touch was given the whole situation when Professor Otto Eissfeldt, of Halle, in connection with the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, called the attention of scholars to a document—first published in 1901—that must date from near the beginning of the ninth Christian century. This was a letter from a Patriarch of Seleucia to a Metropolitan of Elam. “We have learned,” the Patriarch wrote, “from trustworthy Jews who were then being instructed as catechumens in the Christian religion, that some books were found ten years ago in a rock dwelling near Jericho. The story was that the dog of an Arab out hunting went into a cave in pursuit of game and did not come out again; its owner went in after it and found a chamber in the rock, in which there were many books. The hunter went off to Jerusalem and told his story to the Jews, who came out in great numbers and found books of the Old Testament and others in the Hebrew script; and, since there was a scholar well read in literature among them, I asked him about many passages which are quoted in our New Testament [as] from the Old Testament but are not found anywhere in it, either in copies in the hands of the Jews or in those in the hands of the Christians. He said [that] they are there and can be found in the books discovered there. When I heard this from the catechumen and had also interrogated the others without his being present, and heard the same story without variations, I wrote about it” to friends in that part of the world and asked them to look up these manuscripts and check “whether the passage ‘He shall be called a Nazarene’ [Matthew 2:23], and other passages quoted in the New Testament as from the Old Testament but not found in the text which we have, could be discovered anywhere in the Prophets . . . That Hebrew told me,” the Patriarch wrote, “ ‘We have here found more than two hundred Psalms of David among our books.’ . . . I have, however, received from them no answer to my letter on these points, and I have no suitable person whom I can send. This is as fire in my heart, burning and blazing in my bones.” The passages the Patriarch inquired about can, however, hardly be expected to turn up among the Dead Sea documents. They are obviously of Christian origin, and the literature of Christianity probably did not begin to be written down till after the destruction of the monastery. But the ninth-century searchers of the caves might well have found in the Book of Enoch the prophecy invoked by Jude as well as—in a work that, as we shall later see, turned up among the first lot of scrolls—a good many unknown psalms.
Thus today a whole set of documents, never before understood in relation to one another, seem perfectly to fan into place and acquire a new significance as belonging to the literature of the Dead Sea sect or representing, in some earlier or later phase, the tendencies it represents. There takes shape a whole missing chapter for the history of the growth of religious ideas between Judaism and Christianity—a chapter which, as Albright has said, “bids fair to revolutionize our approach to the beginnings of Christianity. Rabbinic studies,” he adds, “are even more directly affected, and it is safe to say that nothing written on the sectarian movements of the last three centuries of the Second Temple can escape thorough revision in the light of the evidence now available and still to be published.” More recently he has said that it will now “be necessary to rewrite all our New Testament background material, since the new sources fill an almost total blank in Jewish literature between the latest apocrypha and the earliest rabbinical sources.” One may cite here, also, the opinion of one of the leading French Hebrew scholars, M. André Dupont-Sommer, Professor of Semitic Languages and Civilizations at the Sorbonne and Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, who has published two books on the scrolls. Of the hitherto so puzzling literature of the pre-Christian apocrypha, he writes, in the first of these books, “All questions of literary and historical criticism relative to this literature must be entirely reconsidered. We are confronted with a whole mass of documents the historical study of which presented extreme difficulties, since so many of the allusions they contained remained for the most part indecipherable. But now the religious history of the last two centuries before our era has been illuminated by new light; a thousand details in the writings of this period now become intelligible, emerging at last from chaos.”
I have mentioned the apocryphal documents of the “intertestamental” period, which were known in translations before the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. In connection with these scattered writings, it was already fully realized that they belonged to a transitional literature between Judaism and Christianity. The invocation of the Saviour-Messiah becomes more important and pressing than in the canonical books, and the new writings more and more take the form of apocalypses—that is, of supernatural visions which reveal past, present, and future under the guise of a phantasmagoria of symbolic persons and animals, divine and diabolical beings, celestial and infernal phenomena. The situation is summed up by Charles in his introduction to the second volume of his great edition of the apocrypha. The Judaic Law of the Pentateuch had come, he says, by the third pre-Christian century, to be conceived “as the final and supreme revelation of God . . . there was now no longer room for independent representatives of God appearing before men, such as the pre-Exilic prophets.” According to Zechariah, writing in about 300 B.C. from the conservative priestly point of view, a man could be, or ought to be, put to death for setting himself up as a prophet. The result of this was that a writer who had had a new revelation was forced to ascribe his account of it to one of the canonical prophets or one of the Pentateuchal patriarchs. The late apocryphal writings are put forth, in many cases, as the utterances of Enoch or Moses, Jeremiah, Baruch, or Isaiah. One such work, the Book of Daniel, got into the regular canon, although—in the Hebrew Bible, not the Christian one—it was not admitted to the company of the Prophets but relegated to the section of miscellaneous Sacred Writings. This work, which purports to deal with events of the Babylonian Captivity, is actually designed to apply to the struggles of the Jews of the Hellenic period against their Seleucid king, Antiochus Epiphanes, and it contains, in Daniel’s visions and Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, the first extensive examples of the apocalypse in its characteristic form. The problem for the scholar or historian was to work out the correspondences between the fantastic happenings described in this apocalyptic literature and actual recorded events, and this task was made rather difficult by the tendency of Jewish writers to see everything from the standpoint of God; lacking our Western historical sense, they mix up past, present, and future and refer to contemporary persons under the names of legendary figures.
Now, two of the first lot of Dead Sea scrolls belong to this apocalyptic type. One of these—the one that Sukenik, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, described to the correspondents in the midst of the Arab shellfire—was called by him “The War of the Children of Light Against the Children of Darkness.” (This had been known only in part to the authorities I have here relied on, since Professor Sukenik died before he had finished editing it, and the complete Hebrew text has only just now been brought out in Israel by his son, General Yigael Yadin.) The other of these unknown works represents a special variation, itself also hitherto unknown, on the familiar apocalyptic form. Ostensibly a commentary, verse by verse, on the canonical prophet Habakkuk, it is in reality a history of happenings that were recent at the time it was written but that are chronicled here in terms of the assumption that Habakkuk was prophesying them. Both these documents deal with a war, and in both cases the enemy are called the Kittim. Kittim is a name that originally and properly meant the people of Kition, a city in Cyprus, but it was later applied by the Jews, with their still rather dim ideas of their Mediterranean neighbors, to the Eastern islands in general, to Macedonia, and even to Italy. In “The War of the Children of Light,” we hear of the “Kittim of Asshur,” evidently the Syrians, the Seleucids, and the “Kittim of Egypt,” evidently the followers of the Ptolemies. In the Habakkuk Commentary, they are simply the Kittim, but their practices and methods are described with a certain amount of particularity; we are told that they are “swift and valiant in battle,” that they are “a source of terror . . . to all the nations, that they are “insolent toward the mighty” and “mock at kings and chiefs,” that they “scorn the fortresses of the people” and “surround them” and “lay them in ruins,” that their captains “take command” and then disappear one after the other, that they plunder the people they conquer and afterward saddle them with taxes, and that they “put many to the sword, young men, adults, old men, women and children, and have no pity for the fruit of the womb.” All this would appear to apply to the Romans better than to anybody else. The disappearance of the leaders one after the other might well describe the situation that prevailed during the civil wars, when consuls and generals were always being changed. The fact that the Kittim are also said to “devour all the nations like an eagle” would be equally appropriate for the Romans, whose standards had eagles on them, and the identification would seem to be clinched by the custom attributed to this enemy of “sacrificing to their standards.” “Their arms,” says the author of the Commentary, “are themselves the object of their religion.” The cult of the battle signa among the Roman legions is attested by a number of ancient writers. Though all scholars do not agree in identifying the Kittim with the Romans, the conclusions of General Yadin, in a study of “The War of the Children of Light,” appears to confirm this hypothesis. He believes that certain weapons assigned to the enemy are to be recognized as Roman short swords, and that many of the military details of the conflict described in this scroll can apply only, or would best apply, to the period of Julius Caesar. The Kittim of Asshur and the Kittim of Egypt would be Syrians and Egyptians allied with the Romans.
M. Dupont-Sommer, whose arguments I have summarized above, believes that the Commentary was most probably written in the year 41 B.C.—that is, three years after Julius Caesar’s death. He has also attempted to identify in it two figures who are never named but who are evidently of great importance to the history of the Dead Sea sect. One of these is a Teacher of Righteousness, a priest who has been favored with divine revelations and is the leader of a community, a party, the members of which are poor and who call themselves the New Covenant. The Teacher is referred to as the Elect of God. He insists on the strictest observance of the Law, yet is at odds with the priests of Jerusalem. He has been persecuted by a Wicked Priest sometimes referred to as the Prophet of Untruth or the Man of Untruth, who has “swallowed him up in the heat of his anger,” has “dared to strip him of his clothing,” and has struck him “in the execution of iniquitous judgments,” when “odious profaners have committed horrors on him and vengeance on the body of flesh.” (I am following Dupont-Sommer’s rendering. Other scholars translate these passages differently. I shall return to this problem later.) But the persecutors are to be punished; “so, at the end of the festival, on the resting of the Day of Atonement, he [the Teacher of Righteousness] appeared in splendor unto them for the purpose of swallowing them up, and that they might stumble on that fast day, the sabbath of their resting.” (This rendering is Dr. Brownlee’s, as are those that follow.) And we are told that the Wicked Priest, “in the sight of the Teacher of Righteousness and the men of his counsel,” has been given by God “into the hands of his enemies to abuse with smiting that he might be consumed with bitterness of soul, because he has done evil against His elect.” It should be mentioned that among the three scrolls bought by Professor Sukenik is a collection of some thirty psalms, which have been called the “Thanksgiving Hymns.” (The complete text of these hymns has now at last been published by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; only five of them up to this time were generally available to scholars.) These are thought to have been composed either by the Teacher of Righteousness himself or, in honor of him, by a disciple, who acts as the prophet’s mouthpiece. The author of these psalms, says Yadin, “speaks eloquently of his persecution and of the persecution of his people, and then for more than twenty pages gives thanks, in majestic language, for his deliverance from his enemies.” We do not know whether the deliverance is prophesied or has actually taken place. Although you have, here again, descriptions of weapons and tactics of war, you have no clear historical data.
Who is this Teacher of Righteousness, and who is this Wicked Priest? I have spoken of the close similarities between the Manual of Discipline and the Zadokite fragments. A new link in the chain of evidence was supplied when it was noted that the Teacher of Righteousness also figures in the Zadokite work and that in both cases his followers are said to be bound by a Covenant or New Covenant. The word “covenant,” furthermore, is used throughout the Manual of Discipline in referring to the members of the order. It will also be seen from the description above of the followers of the Teacher of Righteousness that this, too, coincides with the picture I have put together from Josephus and Philo. The Prophet of Untruth and the Man of Untruth both appear in the Zadokite fragments, and, assuming that these are names for the Wicked Priest, Dupont-Sommer finds in Josephus a figure whose role seems to correspond with what we are told about the Priest. This is Aristobulus II, one of the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty, High Priest of Jerusalem as well as King, who ruled over the Jewish state for three and a half years (between 67 and 63 B.C.), who was arrested in 63 and imprisoned by Pompey in Rome, who escaped and returned to Palestine but was caught and sent back in irons—so that he must have been forced, “in bitterness of soul,” to take part in Pompey’s triumph—and who was finally, in 49, poisoned in prison by Pompey’s supporters. There is one striking piece of evidence in favor of this identification. The Commentary speaks of “the house of Absalom and the men of their counsel, who were silent at the reproof of the Teacher of Righteousness and did not help him against the Man of Untruth, who had rejected the Law among all peoples.” Now, we know from Josephus that Aristobulus had an uncle named Absalom and had married his daughter.
As for the Teacher of Righteousness, this may have been a general title that was given to a succession of Messiahs. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, the earliest references known to the Messiah as “the Elect One” and “the Righteous One” occurred in the Book of Enoch, which Charles assigned to the early years of the first B.C. century; and these names not only appear in the literature of the Dead Sea sect but are applied in the Gospels to Jesus—as is the phrase “the Son of Man,” which is found for the first time in Enoch. There were certainly several persons accepted as Messiahs by various writers in various circumstances, yet these documents from the Dead Sea cave do seem to refer to a specific man. A number of suggestions have been advanced. The theories and the arguments about them are too complicated to summarize here. The literature of the subject is already enormous. No conjectures have yet really been proved, since there has been found no conclusive way of identifying persons and conflicts transposed, in the Jewish way, into terms of apocalypse with the actual historical events chronicled by such Hellenized Jews as Josephus and the author of Second Maccabees.
But if definite events and the actors in them are hard to pin down as history, the doctrines and the mystical symbols are not so easily mistaken. These are not in all cases consistent; they must belong to a religious movement that extended through some two and a half centuries, but it is obvious that a certain theology not only runs through all this group of late apocryphal documents and the literature of the Dead Sea sect but extends to the New Testament. It will not be possible here to trace the whole intricate web of cross references and interrelations that threads these writings together. I shall have to confine myself to describing the principal elements of this school of Messianic Jewish thought.
One of its most important doctrines, then, is the morality of the Two Ways, quite unknown to the ancient Hebrews, which appears in so many of these documents. One finds in this literature again and again the Way of Darkness and the Way of Light, the Spirit of Darkness and the Spirit of Light, the Children of Darkness and the Children of Light. The Light is Truth, and the Darkness Falsehood. The Messiah, the Teacher of Righteousness, is opposed to a Demon of Evil, most frequently known as Belial or Beliar. The Way of Good leads to salvation, the Way of Evil to torment. There is to be a Last Judgment at the end of time—equally unknown to ancestral Judaism—when the Messiah shall divide the world. He, the Elect One, shall save the Elect, the people of the New Covenant. The wrongs they have suffered at the hands of their enemies will finally be avenged. But, in the meantime, they must keep themselves holy by means of the sacred repasts (presided over by a priest), purgation by baptism, and constant washings. There are three references in the Zadokite fragments to the “well of living water” that saves, which seem to anticipate the conversation of Jesus with the woman of Samaria at the well, when He speaks of the “spring of water welling up to eternal life,” and the several New Testament passages that associate baptism both with such Old Testament references as those of Jeremiah to God as a “fountain of living waters” and with spiritual regeneration through Christ. The living waters of Jeremiah are a metaphor, but it seems clear that the water of the Zadokite fragments, taken in conjunction with what we know of the ceremonies of the sect, is something more than a metaphor We find, for example, in the Manual of Discipline the following significant passage: “And then God will purge by His truth all the deeds of man, refining for himself some of mankind in order to abolish every evil spirit from the midst of his flesh, and to cleanse him through a Holy Spirit from all wicked practices, sprinkling upon him a spirit of truth as purifying water to cleanse him from all untrue abominations and from wallowing in [or being defiled by] the spirit of impurity —so as to give the upright insight into the knowledge of the Most High and into the wisdom of the sons of Heaven, to give the perfect way of understanding.” It may be, as I have mentioned above, that baptism, as well as sun worship, had already reached Palestine from the East; in this connection, the doctrine of the Two Ways, with their Spirits of Light and Darkness, recalls the Two Spirits of Zarathustra and the later Persian theology of Manichaeism, that regarded the world as the object of a struggle between two spirits of Light-Good and Darkness-Evil, which existed independently of one another, instead of as the work of an omnipotent God who had created both Good and Evil—a religion which, originating in the third A.D. century, for a time gave Christianity some fairly severe competition.
The doctrine of the Two Ways is found, however, in a document that has become a part of Christian literature yet has always remained rather mysterious. Before this document was actually discovered, it had been known, from the ancient lists of canonical and non-canonical writings, that there had once existed a work called the “Didachē,” or “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.” It had also been suspected that some work, referred to by scholars as “The Two Ways,” had been used and partly incorporated into a number of early church manuals and writings of the apostolic fathers. In 1882, the German Catholic scholar Adam Krawutzcky attempted a reconstruction of “The Two Ways,” and it is one of the dramatic accidents of scholarship that in the very next year, 1883, a newly found Greek text of the “Didachē” should have been published by a Greek Metropolitan of Constantinople—a text that began “There are two ways . . .” and the first section of which was obviously the unknown work that Krawutzcky had been trying to reconstruct. His guesses were confirmed to an astonishing extent the next year, a fragment of a Latin version of what was clearly the same document was also brought to light, and it was seen that this did not contain the specifically Christian references that were a feature of the Greek “Didachē.” It was now thought by certain scholars that “The Two Ways”—I quote from the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica—“had the appearance of being a Jewish manual which had been carried over into the use of the Christian Church.” “But this,” the Britannica adds, “is of course only a probable inference; there is no prototype extant in Jewish literature.” There can be now, however, little doubt as to the source not only of “The Two Ways” but also of the second part of the “Didachē,” which is a manual of church ordinances. You have here, just as you have in the Manual of Discipline of the Dead Sea monastery, the two ways of light and of darkness that lead respectively to life and to death, and that are presided over each by its angel, and you have, also, the similar language of the “strife” that goes on between them and the “crown” that the good man may win. You have the baptism (in the “Didachē,” preceded by fasting), which we know to have been fundamental to the ritual of the sect, and you have a sacred repast, which involves broken bread and a cup of wine, but at which the wine represents “the Holy Wine of Thy [God’s] son David,” and the bread the “life and knowledge which Thou didst make known to us through Jesus, Thy child.” Note that, though Jesus is mentioned here, there is nothing about the Christian atonement. It had sometimes been believed hitherto that the ceremony of the bread and the wine in the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper was based on the blessing of the bread and wine in the Jewish celebration of the Passover; but Professor Karl Georg Kuhn, of Göttingen, has pointed out, in a study of the development of the Eucharist, that the Passover ceremony is a family affair, at which both men and women are present and at which the father presides, whereas the primitive Christian Communion, in the tradition of the Last Supper, had for participants only men, who were the members of a limited circle, and was presided over by the head of a congregation. We have seen that the banquets of the sect were sacred and a very important part of its ritual. Professor Kuhn believes that the Christian Communion derives from these, and that the atonement was introduced into it by Jesus himself. But this is not, as we have seen, in the “Didachē,” and others believe that it was introduced later.
The discovery, among the fragments found in the first Qumrân cave, of two columns that were thought at first to be the missing beginning of the Manual of Discipline but were recognized later as a separate document increases the plausibility of this theory that the ritual of the Last Supper ultimately derives from the sect. Professor Kuhn had not seen these when he wrote, and they have not yet been published, but it is known that a procedure is here prescribed that has even more striking resemblances to that of the Christian Communion. The Messiah and the priest officiate, and they proffer the bread and the wine to the other persons present, who receive them in order of rank. The whole thing is a liturgical anticipation of a banquet expected in Heaven, and it may be that the Messiah here mentioned is not supposed to be actually present—if the Teacher of Righteousness is meant, he had probably long been dead—but that the priest was acting in his name, as the Christian priest does for Christ. It has also been suggested that an incident in Luke’s description of the Last Supper has a significance that can be understood only in connection with the ritual of the Manual: “A dispute arose among them as to which of them should be regarded as the greatest. And he [Jesus] said to them, ‘The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as the one who serves.’ ” We do not know what the relation of Jesus to the Essene order was, but it sounds as if, on this occasion, he was deliberately upsetting its protocol. We have learned from Josephus how rigid among the members of the sect was the hierarchy based on seniority, and the language of “greatest” and “youngest” is very much what we get in the Manual, which talks about “greater” and “lesser.”
V
As soon as one sets out to study the controversies provoked by the Dead Sea scrolls, one becomes aware of a certain “tension.” “During the past three years,” wrote Dr. Albright in 1951, “there has been a debate about the chronology of the scrolls which has at times attained the status of a veritable guerre des savants. It is an astounding chapter in the history of learning in some ways without parallel.” But the tension does not all arise from the at first much disputed problems of dating, and the contention about the dating itself had, perhaps, behind it other anxieties than the purely scholarly ones.
The elements of the situation, of which I was already, though vaguely, aware, were pointed up for me in a piquant manner by an evening I spent in Israeli Jerusalem with a distinguished Jewish scholar from Prague, Mr. David Flusser. I had just read, in the Israel Exploration Journal, an interesting paper by Flusser, connecting still another apocryphal book, the so-called “Ascension of Isaiah,” with the Dead Sea literature. Flusser’s theory, though not implausible, is hardly supported by such evidence as seems to be pretty conclusive in tying together the other documents. But Flusser is a learned and intelligent man, who is very much worth listening to on the subject of the scrolls, with which, though this is not his field, he has recently been occupying himself. I had met him in the library of the Hebrew University and asked him to come to see me, and he arrived at the King David Hotel, precipitately, abruptly, hatless, with his briefcase in his hand, and the moment we sat down in the lobby, quite without a conventional opening—since he knew that I was looking for light on the subject—he began to talk about the scrolls. He was dynamic, imaginative, passionately interested. I had heard about his absorption in ancient texts—which he seems always to carry about with him while waiting in queues for his marketing. The important thing, he said at once, was not the polemics about the dates but what was implied by the contents of the manuscripts. He started in English but asked if he could speak French. His English was bad, he said, and few people understood Czech. (I had the impression that German was not often spoken in Israel.) Hebrew he had learned, he added, rather late in life; “My best language here is really medieval Latin.” I knew that he was primarily a student of medieval subjects, but asked him with whom he spoke Latin. “With the Jesuits,” he replied. I had been told that if you asked him a question, it would take him three hours to answer, and I could see now what people meant, but he was neither a bore nor garrulous. On the contrary, I have rarely known a scholar who expressed himself—with his material at his fingertips—so brilliantly and so much to the point. He would give me, to each of my questions, a full and closely reasoned answer, and stop when he had covered the ground. All the texts that were needed he had brought in his briefcase, and he handed me a Greek Testament for me to follow the Pauline Epistles while he held before me the Hebrew texts and translated them fluently into Greek, demonstrating that not only the doctrine but the language itself was exactly the same. I do not remember now the passages he read, but one of them must have been the description of baptism from the Manual of Discipline, quoted above, which might well have been juxtaposed to the Epistle to Titus, 3:5: “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewal in the Holy Spirit.” On the doctrine of Election, of salvation by grace, that is implied in such a statement and that dominates the Pauline Epistles, Mr. Flusser talked with much animation. “For the doctrine of Election,” he said, “we have now a new genealogy: the Teacher of Righteousness, Paul, Spinoza, Calvin, Hegel, Marx—one of the most disastrous of human ideas, the doctrine of predestination!” Such were the pressure and tempo of Mr. Flusser’s talk that he was carried at one point to lengths that had no parallel in my experience of even the most enthusiastic talkers. Not only did he raise his voice, when some insight had taken possession of him, quite oblivious of the people sitting near us and as if he were lecturing in a classroom, but at the climax of one of his arguments—though we had tried to get away from the orchestra by going to the farthest corner—the music impinged on our conversation, and Flusser, caught up by a familiar tune, actually sang a few bars of his exposition, as if it were part of an opera, then pulled himself up and returned to prose, as he put his text back in the briefcase.
I was already beginning to realize the explosive possibilities of the subject, and I now heard these described with candor. “Les chrétiens sont dérangés,” Mr. Flusser declared. “Les juifs sont dérangés aussi. Moi, je ne suis pas dérangé!” It had already been made very clear to me at the Hebrew University that the sect had “grown up inside Judaism, but had nothing to do with Judaism,” and I had seemed to note also, on the Christian side, a reluctance to recognize that the characteristic doctrines of Christianity must have been developed gradually and naturally, in the course of a couple of hundred years, out of a dissident branch of Judaism. This was what was upsetting to the scholars, who were mostly, on the Christian side, either Anglican divines, Roman Catholic priests, or Presbyterian or Methodist ministers, and, on the Jewish side, if not Orthodox Jews, at least specialists in the literature of Judaism, who approached it with a certain piety. An independent scholar like Flusser, not committed to any religion, had no reason for being upset. “C’est très désagréable pour tout le monde,” he said to me on another occasion, “sauf pour ceux qui s’occupent des apocalypses—ils sont contents.” He seemed even to regard it as a little risky to come to grips publicly and boldly with the implications of the scrolls, but he enjoyed his informed detachment, and there were moments when I almost felt that the Devil had sent him to Jerusalem to make the most of the situation. Mr. Flusser is a short, stocky man, with sharp little cold green eyes that glint behind rimless glasses under modestly Mephistophelean eyebrows, and red hair that stands straight up from his forehead. And he delights in deadpan humor, which, if one does not show signs at once of appreciating his ironic intent, he underlines with a harsh, dry laugh. I have seen him disconcert other scholars by insisting that the errors in sacred texts and the ignorant misreadings of them were really the constructive element in the history of civilization, since the religious ideas that have had most success have mainly been founded upon them. Yet Flusser is much respected and his scholarly work is quite sober, nor has he anything of the polymath’s cynicism; he is quite positive in his profession of his own humanistic creed. I joined him, when we later removed to the bar, in a toast to what he called “le vrai saint esprit”—the Holy Spirit, as the πνεΰμα άγιον and שדו קחור, had been flitting about our corner of the lobby—that humanity carries with it. And he talked to me with admiration of the character of the Teacher of Righteousness, of which he felt he had been able to form some idea through reading the whole of the text of the then still unpublished Thanksgiving Hymns—a courageous man, he believed, who had lived his defeat with dignity. There was nothing of Jesus, said Flusser, in the morality of the Teacher of Righteousness, for Jesus had taught people to love their enemies, and the Teacher felt nothing but hatred for his and expected the Lord to avenge him. Nor, Flusser pointed out, was there anything in the doctrine of the Teacher’s followers of the Christian idea that salvation is to be gained by believing in Jesus, who will take all our sins away.
I later attended with Flusser and two younger Israeli scholars an evening session of lectures devoted to the Dead Sea scrolls. At dinner, he provoked a protest from them by announcing that, since the function of apologetics was fundamental to science, he did not object to apologetics. He went on, disregarding a murmur, to explain that, in spite of this, he always distrusted people who, like one of the speakers on the program, invariably began by explaining that their opinions were quite objective and did not represent special pleading. This session on the scrolls was interesting. The speeches, which were all in Hebrew, were translated to me by one of my other companions. The inhibitions of the Jews in regard to the scrolls were brought out by a well-known Israeli scholar, Mr. A. M. Habermann, who said that the Jewish scholars had sometimes been shy of these documents, for fear of their destroying the authority of the Masoretic text of the Bible, and that they sometimes took the attitude—which the speaker regretted—that the subject was of less interest to Jews than to Christians. Yet the large auditorium was packed. It was the Passover holidays, and this evening session was merely one feature of a week of lectures especially given for teachers, many of them from out of town, who seemed to attend these sessions in preference to other entertainment. They began at, I think, half past eight in the morning and went on till eleven at night. All were on Biblical subjects. I had the impression that thee talks on the scrolls were of special interest to the audiences, and when Flusser, who had also spoken, came back at the end to join us, he exclaimed, in a terrific pun—megilloth is the Hebrew word for scrolls—“Tout le monde est mégillothmane!”
The next morning I crossed over to Jordan, where I stayed, in Old Jerusalem, at the American School of Oriental Research. Dr. Frank M. Cross, Jr., of the McCormick Theological Seminary, in Chicago, who was working on the new material, was Annual Professor at the School, and the resident director was Dr. James Muilenburg, of Union Theological Seminary , who had been studying some new fragments of Ecclesiastes and had come to the conclusion that this pessimistic and rather sophisticated book could not have been written so late as has hitherto been supposed but must belong to the third or fourth, rather than to the second, pre-Christian century. These last years—with their findings of Egyptian tombs, the excavations of Paestum, Pompeii, and Athens, the plumbing of the millennial layers of Jericho, and the deciphering at last of the Minoan script—have been a heyday for archeologists, and the excavation of the monastery, the reading of the Dead Sea manuscripts, have been followed with intense eagerness. It seemed to me very regrettable that the barrier between Israel and Jordan should be cutting off from one another the two groups of Semitic scholars who—at the Palestine Archaeological Museum, in Old Jerusalem, and at the Hebrew University, in New—have been working on, respectively, the new harvest of fragments and the three Sukenik manuscripts. The people at the University know nothing of de Vaux’s discoveries except what they learn at long intervals from the reports in the Revue Biblique (a quarterly published in Paris but edited by de Vaux from Jerusalem), and they must wait for the texts to be brought out in installments—which will mean a matter of years—by the Oxford University Press. At the same time, till the very recent publication of the Hebrew University texts, the Christian scholars had no access to them. In Israel, at the session the night before, I had listened to an expert in rabbinics, a tall, lean, black-bearded man, wearing a flat-topped black cap, who looked like a rabbi himself, explaining—from a study of the photographs of the complete Isaiah scroll—that it showed every evidence of having been executed in strict conformity with rabbinical rules. But no scholar with this kind of competence can examine the newly found manuscripts, for no Jew is admitted to Jordan and no Jew known to be such is left there. Thus the enmity between Jew and Arab is contributing to the obstacles and touchiness of this curious situation, which has also been a little affected by the rivalry between Jews and Christians. You sometimes find Jewish scholars implying that their Gentile opponents do not really know Hebrew well enough to arrive at a sound opinion, and, on the other side, non-Jewish Hebraists taking a lofty and offhand tone on the value of rabbinical studies.
The moment of maximum strain in the discussion of the Dead Sea documents may, perhaps, be fixed on the day—May 26, 1950—when Professor Dupont-Sommer read before the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres a paper on the Habakkuk Commentary. Dr. Brownlee, writing of this in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research of December, l953, refers to Dupont-Sommer as “the very original French orientalist,” calls the paper “dramatic,” and says that it “caused a sensation.” “What evoked the most astonishment,” Dr. Brownlee continues, “was his disclosure that the Teacher of Righteousness, founder of the sect of the scrolls, was in some respects an exact prototype of Jesus, particularly as a martyred prophet, revered by his followers as the suffering Servant of the Lord In Deutero-Isaiah” (Second Isaiah, the unknown author of the later chapters of the Book of Isaiah).
Let us turn to Dupont-Sommer’s own statement of his views in his book “Aperçus Préliminaires sur les Manuscrits de la Mer Morte” (translated under the title “The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Preliminary Survey”), published the same year that the paper was read. “Everything in the Jewish New Covenant,” says M. Dupont-Sommer, “heralds and prepares the way for the Christian New Covenant. The Galilean Master, as He is presented to us in the writings of the New Testament, appears in many respects as an astonishing reincarnation of the Teacher of Righteousness. Like the latter, He preached penitence, poverty, humility, love of one’s neighbor, chastity. Like him, He prescribed the observance of the Law of Moses, the whole Law, but the Law finished and perfected, thanks to His own revelations. Like him, He was the Elect and the Messiah of God, the Messiah redeemer of the world. Like him, He was the object of the hostility of the priests, the party of the Sadducees. Like him, He was condemned and put to death. Like him, He pronounced judgment on Jerusalem, which was taken and destroyed by the Romans for having put Him to death. Like him, at the end of time, He will be the supreme judge. Like him, He founded a Church whose adherents fervently awaited His glorious return. In the Christian Church, just as in the Essene Church, the essential rite is the sacred meal, whose ministers are the priests. Here and there, at the head of each community, there is the overseer, the ‘bishop.’ And the ideal of both Churches is essentially that of unity, communion in love—even going so far as the sharing of common property. All these similarities—and here I only touch upon the subject—taken together, constitute a very impressive whole. The question at once arises: to which of the two sects, the Jewish or the Christian, does the priority belong? Which of the two was able to influence the other? The reply leaves no room for doubt. The Teacher of Righteousness died about 65-63 B.C.; Jesus the Nazarene died about 30 A.D. In every case in which the resemblance compels or invites us to think of a borrowing, this was on the part of Christianity. But on the other hand, the appearance of the faith in Jesus—the foundation of the New Church—can scarcely be explained without the real historic activity of a new Prophet, a new Messiah, who has rekindled the flame and concentrated on himself the adoration of men.”
These conclusions, Dr. Brownlee adds, “aroused much opposition, partly inspired by the fear that the uniqueness of Christ was at stake, but securely grounded upon a careful study of the texts adduced by Dupont-Sommer himself and proving the tenuousness (if not impossibility) of the constructions that he had placed upon them.”
Indeed, if one examines the two passages of the Habakkuk Commentary upon which M. Dupont-Sommer mainly bases his theory that the Teacher of Righteousness was martyred—I have given them, in the section above, in Dupont-Sommer’s own translation—one finds that they do not necessarily imply this interpretation. In the one case, Habakkuk 2:7, there is a gap of two lines, where the bottom of the manuscript has been broken off, and it is the translator who has filled this in with “He [the Wicked Priest] persecuted the Teacher of Righteousness.” The context seems to make it more probable that—as other translators have assumed—it is the Wicked Priest himself upon the “body” of whose “flesh” the “odious profaners committed horrors and vengeance.” In the case of the other passage, Habakkuk 2:15, the words that Dupont-Sommer translates “Thou hast dared to strip him of his clothing” may mean also “intended him to go into exile” (Brownlee), “desired his exile” (de Vaux). These points were made by Père de Vaux, in the Revue Biblique, in a review dated Jerusalem, March, 1951, and de Vaux believes also that the words of the Commentary translated by Dupont-Sommer as “he appeared to them all resplendent” imply not a transfiguration on the part of the Teacher of Righteousness but that the subject of the verb is the Wicked Priest, and he shows that the verb itself has also been found in a sense—that of merely revealing oneself—quite remote from its original meaning of causing oneself to shine.
It would seem that Dupont-Sommer has here overplayed his hand. Yet the Teacher of Righteousness was persecuted, he does seem to have been regarded as a Messiah; and the French scholar, in his second volume, “Nouveaux Aperçus sur les Manuscrits de la Mer Morte,” published in 1953 (and now translated as “The Jewish Sect of Qumrân and the Essenes”), is able to call attention to the fact that one of the apocryphal works already mentioned above as connected with the doctrine of the sect, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, contains the following passage: “And now I have learnt that for seventy weeks ye shall go astray, and profane the priesthood, and pollute the sacrifices. And ye shall make void the law, and set at nought the words of the prophets by evil perverseness. And ye shall persecute righteous men, and hate the godly; the words of the faithful shall ye abhor. [And a man who reneweth the law in the power of the Most High, ye shall call a deceiver; and at last ye shall rush (upon him) to slay him, not knowing his dignity, taking innocent blood through wickedness upon your heads.] And your holy places shall be laid waste even to the ground because of Him. And ye shall have no place that is clean; but ye shall be among the Gentiles a curse and a dispersion until He shall again visit you, and in pity shall receive you [through faith and water].” When R. H. Charles edited the Testaments, he regarded this part of it as “unintelligible,” and in his translation he put certain passages in brackets, as I have left them in the extract above, in order to indicate that he assumed them to be Christian interpolations. But there is now no need thus to exclude them, and the passage seems perfectly appropriate if one applies it to the Teacher of Righteousness. The “Christos” of the Greek text, who figures also in other passages, is translated by Charles as “Christ,” but since “Christ” is merely the Greek for the Hebrew word “Messiah,” both meaning “Anointed One,” this does not imply that the references are not to the Teacher of Righteousness; and, if they are, it would appear that the Teacher did actually die at the hands of his enemies. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is, besides this, full of ideas and language that are strikingly similar, on the one hand, to the literature of the sect and, on the other, to that of Christianity. “The Two Ways” here turns up again, and Dr. Charles, writing forty years ago, clearly showed that “many passages of the Gospels exhibit traces” of the Testaments and that “St. Paul seems to have used the book as a vade mecum.” “There are over seventy words,” it appears, “which are common to the Testaments and the Pauline Epistles, but which are not found in the rest of the New Testament.” The most striking parallel, perhaps, is that between Matthew 25:35-36 and a passage from the Testament of Joseph 1:5-6. It is impossible to doubt that the former is an imitation of the latter or that both were derived from a common source.
(Testaments)
(Matthew)
And the promises of the Sermon on the Mount are anticipated in several places: “And they who have died in grief shall arise in joy; and they who were poor for the Lord’s sake shall be made rich; and they who are put to death for the Lord’s sake shall awake to life.” The gospel of forgiveness is all through the Testaments, and there occurs here the first known conjunction—which was to be repeated in Mark 12:19-31—of the precept of Deuteronomy 6:5 to “love the Lord thy God with all thine heart,” etc., and that of Leviticus 19:18 to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” (The injunction to love one’s “neighbor” or “brother” turns up also in the Book of Jubilees and the Zadokite fragments; and the great rabbi Hillel, of the Talmud, who flourished in the first century B.C. and thus belongs to the same general period, is supposed to have said to a Gentile who had come to him and challenged him to convert him by teaching him the whole of the Torah during the time that he, the Gentile, could stand on one foot, “What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow; this is the whole law.” The conversation reported by Mark has a certain resemblance to this.)
Dr. Brownlee, in the paper already quoted, still maintained that though Dupont-Sommer had succeeded, in his second book, in “laying the foundation of his view somewhat more securely,” he had “failed to bring it to rest safely upon incontrovertible proof texts.” But he went on to say that “Dupont-Sommer often has an uncanny knack for being ultimately right (or nearly so), even when his views are initially based on the wrong texts! So also in the present case there is a doctrine of a suffering Messiah in the scrolls, but not (so I believe) where Dupont-Sommer found it. This is found in a passage of the Manual of Discipline, not then published, and in a passage not yet discussed in this connection.” Now, one of the most impressive pieces of evidence that can be adduced from the Old Testament in support of the claim of the Christians that the advent of Jesus as Messiah had been prophesied in the ancient text is, of course, the chapter (53) of Second Isaiah that speaks of a Suffering Servant, “despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows,” who has been “wounded for our transgressions” and yet by whose “stripes we are healed.” If this is not Jesus, the Christians have asked, who can it possibly be? The scholars have proposed Israel, the unknown Second Isaiah himself, the real Isaiah, or Jeremiah. None of these seems satisfactory, and Dupont-Sommer has suggested that Second Isaiah may date from a period as late as that which is dealt with in the literature of the sect. These later chapters of Isaiah had long been assigned to the Babylonian Exile, two hundred years later than the original Isaiah, and it had already been admitted that still later additions were possible. Why, now asks Dupont-Sommer, could these passages not have been written after the death of the Teacher of Righteousness? And “now that the alert has been sounded,” he says, “many passages of the Old Testament must be examined with a fresh eye. Wherever it is more or less explicitly a question of an Anointed One or of a Prophet carried off by a violent death, how is it possible to avoid asking whether the person indicated is not precisely our Teacher of Righteousness?” He mentions certain passages from Daniel, Zechariah, and Psalms, and he says, of the passages in Second Isaiah called “Songs of the Servant of Yahweh,” “For twenty centuries people have been asking who was this gentle and humble Prophet, this suffering righteous man whose agony has saved multitudes; the truth is that, apart from Jesus, the Christian Messiah, only one such is known in the whole of Jewish history—and this one has only been known for a very short time. It is the pious Master who was martyred by Aristobulus II. It is not a single revolution in the study of Biblical exegesis that the Dead Sea documents have brought about; they will mean, one begins to foresee, a whole torrent of revolutions.”
It is impossible for the layman to estimate the value of this hypothesis. I shall simply mention here that Brownlee has discovered in one of the Dead Sea Isaiahs a variant from our Hebrew text that stresses the Messianic idea, and that he associates this passage, as Dupont-Sommer does, with the Messianic references In Zechariah and Daniel (9:24-27: “the Anointed One,” who is to be “cut off”). Dr. Brownlee does not commit himself to the theory that this Messiah is the Teacher of Righteousness, but he does try to connect the “refining” and “sprinkling” referred to in the Manual of Discipline and associated with giving the adepts an “insight into the knowledge of the Most High,” as well as the statement in the Manual that “God has chosen them to be an eternal covenant,” with the language of Second Isaiah in the chapters on the Suffering Messiah. This would seem to make it probable that Jesus “intended to give His life [as] a ransom for many in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy”—prophecy that, if it did not derive from, was cherished and elaborated in, the literature of the Dead Sea sect. It would appear, in other words, that Jesus may well have found prepared for Him by the teaching of the sect a special Messianic role, the pattern of a martyr’s career, which He accepted, to which He aspired.
When the Manual of Discipline was discovered, the purgations by sprinkling that appear in it made the scholars at once think of John the Baptist, and there was even, at first, some idea that he might be the Teacher of Righteousness. John the Baptist is supposed to have been born—perhaps in Hebron—not very far away from the monastery; “the word of God” came to him, says Luke, “in the wilderness,” which must have meant the bald and sub-sea-level mountains that stand between the monastery and civilization; and his ministry, according to Luke, was in “all the regions about the Jordan.” He not only had the practice of baptism in common with the members of the sect but he seemed to be following their principles (Luke 3:11) when he preached to “the multitudes” who had come to be baptized by him, “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise.” Like the sect, he expected the Messiah, and like the sect—as Dr. Brownlee reminds us—he invoked, in this connection, the Second Isaiah: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord.” But the sect lived together in this wilderness, whereas John, in the Gospels and Josephus, always appears as a lone ascetic, like Bannus, the desert saint at whose feet Josephus had sat. What, then, was John the Baptist’s relation to the sect? Dr. Brownlee suggests that John may have been one of those “other men’s children” that Josephus says the Essenes adopted and “molded in accordance with their own principles.” “And the child grew,” says Luke (1:80), “and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness till the day of his manifestation to Israel.” This would give us an explanation of the otherwise rather unaccountable circumstance that John’s childhood was spent in the desert. I have nowhere seen it suggested that John was at odds with the sect; but, in connection with his desert diet of locusts and wild honey, one remembers the expelled Essenes, who resorted to living on grass because they had sworn an oath never to eat any food not prepared by the brotherhood.
But what was the relation of Jesus to the ritual and doctrine of the sect, which the Gospels so persistently echo? Could he have been actually a member of the sect during those early years of his life when we know nothing about him—where he was or how he occupied himself—or was his contact with it, as Albright believes, chiefly by way of John the Baptist? We must remember that Bethlehem itself is not very far from the monastery. The Bedouins were on their way there when they found the scrolls in the cave. Now, John and Jesus, according to Luke, were relatives on their mother’s side. Jesus, in his late twenties and hardly younger than John, came down, we are told, from Galilee in order to be baptized by him, and fasted forty days in the wilderness. Not very long afterward, apparently, John was arrested by Herod, and then the ministry of Jesus began. We know very little, of course, about the first thirty years of Jesus’s life—what he had read or by whom he had been influenced. We can feel behind the pages of his followers the fire and dynamic force, the power to melt and to magnetize, of an extraordinary personality. But we know also that the rites and the precepts of the Gospels and Epistles both are to be found on every other page of the literature of the sect. Some scholars believe, in the light of the scrolls, that the Gospel according to John, which hitherto was thought to have been written late and under the influence of the movement—part Persian, part Platonic—that goes by the name of Gnosticism, must actually have come out of the sect and be the most, instead of the least, Jewish of all the Gospels. You have, at the very beginning of John, the conflict between Light and Darkness, and thereafter many such phrases as “the spirit of truth,” “the light of life,” “walking in the darkness,” “children of light,” and “eternal life,” which occur in the Manual of Discipline. And you have also, in the Manual, a passage that parallels almost exactly the description of the Logos (“Word”) which stands at the beginning of John and which has hitherto been thought to derive from the Gnostics. Manual 11:11 reads, “And by His knowledge everything has been brought into being. And everything that is, He established by His purpose; and apart from Him, nothing is done.” John 1:2-3: “He was in the beginning with God; and all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”
What, finally, is the evolution that leads from the morality of the sect—which imposes fraternal forbearance among the members of the order itself and which insists upon charity to the poor, yet condemns and declares war on an enemy who is trying to crush it—to the later morality of Jesus, which is marked by occasional flashes of pugnacity (“I have come not to bring peace, but a sword”) yet is dominated by the principle of forgiveness? How reconcile “The War of the Children of Light,” which is full of soldierly weapons, with Philo’s first-century statement that the Essenes do not make weapons, or its mention of animal sacrifices with Josephus’s so positive assertion that the Essenes had given these up?
The answer is, no doubt, that we are dealing here with the successive phases of a movement. The defiance of the Teacher of Righteousness, the pacifism of Philo’s Essenes, and the turning of the other cheek of Jesus mark the stages of Jewish defeat. We can see clearly in the Bible how the Jewish God has been modulated from the savage and revengeful Jehovah, who is feared and propitiated in the Pentateuch, to the God of mercy and love who begins to be conceived by the later prophets. In the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs—assigned by Charles to the end of the second pre-Christian century—meekness and mercy are emphasized almost to the same degree that they are in the Gospels themselves. Is it that here the resentment of defeat is already giving way to resignation, the resignation of political helplessness; that neither Jews nor sectarians can hope to prevail, and that he who believes himself to be, or is believed by his followers to be, the desperately expected Messiah can preach only a moral salvation through faith in a non-militant God and the righteousness of the individual? The sword that Jesus is bringing, in the quotation from Matthew (10:34) above, is the zeal for his own gospel, which will set the son against the father and make “a man’s foes those of his own household.” Yet in all this there seems still some conflict between, on the one hand, forgiveness and renunciation of the world and, on the other, combativeness and worldly ambition. In the language of the Sermon on the Mount, there is what seems a strange vacillation between promising, on the one hand, to “the poor in spirit” “the kingdom of heaven,” and, on the other, to “the meek” that “they shall inherit the earth.” In the supposedly much earlier Testaments—in the passage already quoted, which seems obviously a prototype of the Sermon on the Mount—the “poor” are to be made “rich.”
If, in any case, we look now at Jesus in the perspective supplied by the scrolls, we can trace a new continuity and, at last, get some sense of the drama that culminated in Christianity. We can see how the movement represented by the Essenes stood up for perhaps two centuries to the coercion of the Greeks and the Romans, and how it resisted not merely the methods of Rome but also the Roman ideals. We can guess how, about a half century before its refuge was burned together with the Temple of the Jewish God, this movement had inspired a leader who was to transcend both Judaism and Essenism, and whose followers would found a church that was to outlive the Roman Empire and ultimately be identified with Rome herself. Under the pressure of these harrowing centuries, the spirit of the Essene brotherhood, even before its expulsion from its sunken base, had already thus made itself free to range through the whole ancient world, touching souls with that gospel of purity and light to which the brotherhood had consecrated itself, and teaching the contempt of those eagles which they had noted—with evident astonishment—that the army of their enemy worshipped. The monastery, this structure of stone that endures, between the bitter waters and precipitous cliffs, with its oven and its inkwells, its mill and its cesspool, its constellation of sacred fonts and the unadorned graves of its dead, is perhaps, more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity.
One would like to see such problems discussed, and, in the meantime, one cannot but ask oneself whether the scholars who have been working on the scrolls—so many of whom have taken Christian orders or been trained in the rabbinical tradition—may not have been somewhat inhibited by their various religious commitments in dealing with such questions as these. It is surprising to the layman, and inspires respect, to find that the ablest of these scholars have been bringing to what a couple of centuries ago must have been for such men of the church almost a domain of pure myth a keenness and a coolness that seem quite objective. On almost any aspect of the scrolls that demands special learning and special research, you may find, by one of these churchmen, an acute and exhaustive study; and yet one senses a certain nervousness, a reluctance to take hold of the subject as a whole and to include it in the historical context. On the Jewish side, as Habermann says, it is a fear of impairing the authority of the Masoretic text, and also, one gathers, a resistance to admitting that the religion of Jesus could have grown in an organic way, the product of a traceable sequence of pressures and inspirations, out of one branch of Judaism; on the Christian side, it is, of course, as Dr. Brownlee says, the fear “that the uniqueness of Christ is at stake,” as well as a reciprocal resistance to admitting that the morality and mysticism of the Gospels may perfectly well be explained as the creation of several generations of Jews working by and for themselves, in their own religious tradition, and that one need not assume the miracle of a special magnanimous act of God to allow the salvation of the human race. Do these prejudices and preconceptions play some role in certain stubborn attempts—apparently, against all the evidence—on the part of such scholars as Solomon Zeitlin, of Dropsie College, in Philadelphia, and G. R. Driver, of Oxford, to date the scrolls very late?
New Testament scholars, it seems, have almost without exception boycotted the whole subject of the scrolls. The situation in this field is peculiar. It is precisely the more “liberal” scholars in Britain and the United States who have been most reluctant to deal with the scrolls, for the reason that these liberals tend to assume that the doctrines known as Christian were not really formulated till several generations after Jesus’s death, and especially, as I have said, that the Gospel of John came late and was influenced by Gnostic thought. Professor Albright believes that the doctrine of John was “already either explicit or implicit before the Crucifixion,” that the material relating to Jesus—though it was not written down till later—must go back to before 70 A.D. (by which date, according to the evidence of the coins, the Romans would have driven out the sect), and that it represents authentic memories and correctly reflects Jesus’s teaching. These new documents have thus loomed as a menace to a variety of rooted assumptions, from matters of tradition and dogma to hypotheses that are exploits of scholarship. How gingerly, in many quarters, the approach to the scrolls long remained has been shown in a striking way by the disturbing but air-clearing effects of the writings of Dupont-Sommer.
Professor Dupont-Sommer occupies a unique position in the controversy of the scrolls. I had noticed, in reading his books, that (so far as my experience goes) he was the only one of all these scholars who invoked the authority of Renan. The author of the “Histoire du Peuple d’Israël” and the “Origines du Christianisme” calls attention to the first emergence in the “intertestamental” apocrypha of certain characteristic Christian themes, and M. Dupont-Sommer refers to this. I was therefore not surprised, when I met him, to find that he is conscious of carrying on what may be called the Renanian tradition. Renan is “vieux,” he told me, in the sense that he now dates, but his method of writing religious history is valid. M. Dupont-Sommer himself occupies the chair of Hebrew at the Sorbonne, whereas Renan was professor at the Collège de France, but their roles are somewhat similar, and Dupont-Sommer is the present director of the project over which Renan presided and of which he sometimes said that he regarded it as the most important work of his life, the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, or Collection of Semitic Inscriptions. Dupont-Sommer, when one meets him, presents a remarkable example of a phenomenon encountered so often that it cannot be due wholly to coincidence. Just as biographers sometimes look like their subjects and ornithologists are often birdlike, so Dupont-Sommer in person astonishingly resembles Renan. He is round-faced and short and rotund, bland and urbane and smiling. This smoothness has perhaps a slight tinge of the priestly—for, as Renan first studied for the priesthood, so Dupont-Sommer was once an abbé. He is now, he says, “un pur savant,” without any religious affiliations, and to an inquirer in the same situation it is pleasant and reassuring to find that the great secular seekers for truth, as well as the Teachers of Righteousness, may establish their lasting disciplines. Such an inquirer comes finally to ask himself whether anyone but a secular scholar is really quite free to grapple with the problems of the Dead Sea discoveries. There may have been just a shade of the sensational in the manner in which Dupont-Sommer originally propounded his thesis in connection with the Habakkuk Commentary. Other scholars were certainly shocked, and a reference to the broken text will show, as I have said, that he has filled in the gaps in a somewhat highhanded fashion. Yet the fact, after all, remains that this independent French scholar has made so far the only attempt on any considerable scale to recover the lost chapter of history and to put it before the public. You can buy his two admirably written books—in the series L’Orient Ancien Illustré—at any first-rate bookstore in Paris. They are at present the sole source—aside from a few mostly perfunctory articles in newspapers and magazines—from which it is possible for the world at large to form any idea of the interest and scope of the contents of the Dead Sea scrolls. The whole subject, though the first announcements made news in 1948 and 1949, has largely since been hidden from general knowledge in periodicals and monographs. And it is impossible to explore this literature without becoming aware that the impact of Dupont-Sommer has not merely been to rouse resistance. It is evident that two of the ablest men who have concerned themselves with the scrolls—H. H. Rowley and Père de Vaux—have, in spite of their strong criticisms and their reservations, in some respects been led to revise their views more nearly to conform with his.
It must, however, be left to the scholars to criticize scholarly theories. The layman can but try to calculate whether a scholar committed to the Christian faith has anything really at stake in dealing with the possible debt of the morality and practice of Christianity to those of the Dead Sea sect. For anyone who believes that the Son of God was born into the family of a carpenter of Nazareth, in northern Palestine, and that he took part in the other specific events chronicled in the Gospels, should it be any more difficult to admit that he had been trained in the discipline and imbued with the thought of a certain Jewish sect, and that he had learned from it the role that he afterward lived of Teacher, Messiah, and martyr? Or will the explanation of Jesus—as well as of Paul—in terms of pre-existent factors, the placing him and visualizing him in a definite historical setting, inevitably have the effect of weakening the claims of divinity that have been made for him by the Church? Anyone who goes to the Gospels from the literature of the intertestamental apocrypha and that of the Dead Sea sect must feel at once the special genius of Jesus and be struck by the impossibility of falling in with one of the worst tendencies of insensitive modern scholarship and accounting for everything in the Gospels in terms of analogies and precedents. The writings of the pre-Christian prophets and saints are often, though not always insipid. Properly to judge them, however, one would have to know them in the Hebrew, which, in the case of the apocryphal writings, has usually not survived, and one must pay attention to General Yadin when he says of the Thanksgiving Hymns that he “doubts that any language other than the original Hebrew can convey the depth of emotion and the spiritual beauty of these verses.” Yet even in their nonclassical Greek, the Gospels still convey an electrical power; they can move and excite and convert. I have spoken before of the moral audacity, the sense of spiritual freedom, that one gets from certain scenes in the Gospels; and such a dramatic narrative as that of John 18-19 (Jesus arraigned before Pilate) must surely have been inspired—like Plato’s account of the trial and death of Socrates (whether literally true or not)—by a noble and commanding personality. Neither Hillel nor the author of the Testaments nor, apparently, the Teacher of Righteousness ever stirred and drew people as Jesus did. And yet, as Albright has said, it is now for the first time possible to “elucidate the New Testament historically in the light of the immediate background of John the Baptist and Jesus.” Will this process of elucidation inevitably have the effect of making Jesus seem less superhuman, till he has come to appear miraculous only in the sense, say, that Shakespeare is miraculous, in relation to his predecessors? Professor Albright himself evidently does not think so, for he elsewhere declares that “the historian cannot control the details of Jesus’s birth and resurrection and thus has no right to pass judgment on their historicity. The decision must be left to the Church and to the individual believer, who are historically warranted in accepting the whole of the Messianic framework of the Gospels or in regarding it as partly true literally and as partly true spiritually—which is far more important in the region of spirit with which the Christian faith must primarily deal.”
Yes: only the believer can answer this. But for one who is not concerned with the theological problem, the implications of the scrolls are reassuring. The point of fundamental importance was put to the present writer in a precise and conservative way by Professor Burrows, of Yale. “We now realize,” he said, “that there was much more variety and flexibility in Judaism than had ever been supposed.” To anyone who has given thought to the peculiar and strained relations that for centuries prevailed between Jews and Christians, and that in some quarters still continue, it must be plain that behind these antagonisms lies an ancient, deep-seated fear on the part of each of these groups of the other. The Christians, brought up on the Gospels, have never been able to forget that the Jews rejected Jesus and demanded his death. For centuries—as I learn from a Jewish historian, Dr. Cecil Roth—they could not believe that the Jews were sincerely convinced that their Judaic theology, their ritual and their law, were the true ones, given them by God through Moses; the Christians were convinced that the Jews knew better, and that their refusal to accept the Christian faith was due to a stubborn perversity that must have the Devil behind it. It was a Christian objective to convert the Jews, and when they always failed in this, they were furious. The assumption of Jewish depravity gave the followers of Christ carte blanche—not merely with a good conscience but with fervor and exaltation—to penalize, tax, torture, and slaughter the Jews, under the sign of the crucified Jesus. On the Jewish side, the moral sense was outraged, and the bitterness to some extent still lingers, that the communicants of a religion whose Deity is a God of Love and whose Saviour brings salvation through mercy should, for example, inaugurate a crusade to the Holy Land to rescue the tomb of this Saviour by massacres of their Jewish compatriots. If the Christian has never ceased to be horrified by the callousness of the Jews toward Jesus, the Jew has never ceased to be shocked by what seems to him the hypocrisy of the Christians. All these antiquated prejudices and limitations sound crude enough when thus stated baldly, but the present is hardly the moment to take lightly the baleful power of fanaticisms and superstitions, and it would seem an immense advantage for cultural and social intercourse—that is, for civilization—that the rise of Christianity should, at last, be generally understood as an episode of human history rather than propagated as dogma and divine revelation. The study of the Dead Sea scrolls—with the direction it is now taking—cannot fail, one would think, to conduce this.
In the meantime, this work is going forward at what is evidently a vigorous pace. In the handsome modern Palestine Museum, in Old Jerusalem, built with Rockefeller money, which has so admirably been designed to fit into the architectural landscape of blunt yellow towers and blank old walls, yet which makes you feel, once inside, that you are luxuriously back in New York, in a new wing of the Metropolitan, the fragments of the Dead Sea documents gathered by Père de Vaux and Harding are being examined. Père de Vaux presides over this, and there are only three scholars authorized to decipher and report on the manuscripts—J. T. Milik, a Polish Roman Catholic priest; Mr. John Allegro, of Manchester; and one American expert: last year Professor Cross, of Chicago, at the present time Monsignor Patrick W. Skehan, of the Catholic University of America. The tens of thousands of fragments—there has been no attempt to count them—have been put away in boxes. The utmost pains, of course, have been taken to keep separate the contents of the different caves and the pieces found in groups. These range in size from morsels as large as your hand, which may include a whole column, to crumbs with a single letter. Some believe that it will take fifty years to sort them all out and decipher them, but the energetic de Vaux is more hopeful and thinks they may get through them in ten. The fragments selected for study are set out on long tables in a large, white-walled room. They are mostly of leather, but a few are papyrus. In color, they range from the darkest brown to an almost paperlike paleness, so that they give the impression of autumn leaves that have lain in the forest all winter. The ones that are being studied have been flattened under plates of glass, but before they can thus be smoothed out, they have to be rendered less brittle by being put into a humidifier, a bell glass containing moist sponges. When they are taken out of this, they are cleaned with a camel’s-hair brush dipped in alcohol or castor oil. Sometimes they flake at the touch of the brush and have to be backed with tape. Sometimes they turn quite black, in which case they are photographed with infra-red rays and examined through a magnifying glass. The first problem is to bring together—through a study of the various hands of the scribes and the substances on which they have written—the pieces that belong together. The scholars work on this in a small inner room, equipped with concordances, dictionaries, and all the relevant texts. The concordance may place a fragment as coming from a Biblical book or a known non-canonical work, and others will be found to fit it.
The whole harvest of the fragments is not yet in; there are still hundreds in the hands of the Arabs, who have been making things more difficult by cutting the large pieces into strips and selling them one after the other at successive interviews—raising the price for the second piece, asking still more for the third, etc. To put a stop to this, it has been necessary to offer special baksheesh in proportion to the size of the pieces. It is estimated by Père de Vaux that fifteen thousand dollars is still needed to buy the rest of these fragments. It has been harder than one might suppose to raise the money required to purchase the mass of material that was carried away by the Arabs. A hard-and-fast rule has been made that the fragments must not be dispersed till everything has been classed and deciphered under Père de Vaux’s supervision. Of course this is very wise; it is important to keep them together for comparison and coördination, but the effect has been somewhat to discourage institutions of learning from acquiring sets of these fragments, since any institution that buys them, as Manchester and McGill Universities have done, will not get them till they have already been read and published.
As one bends over the tables with the fragments under glass, one recognizes here and there—it is astonishing how beautifully clear much of the writing remains—the inextinguishable “tetragrammaton,” the unutterable name of God. (The awe with which this name was treated is carried to a further remove in the Habakkuk Commentary, where it is written in archaic Hebrew—that is, in Phoenician-characters; and it should also be mentioned that fragments of various Biblical books among the later finds have added to the very few specimens known of manuscripts in Phoenician.) Here are most of the books of the Bible, though sometimes in an unfamiliar text or a text that corresponds with the Greek of the Septuagint but not with the Masoretic Hebrew, and there are also non-canonical books, unknown as well as known. One wonders what new revelations may still come to light from these tatters. With what eagerness the scholars must hover over these layers of old leaf mold spread out here!—an eagerness perhaps not unmixed, at moments, with apprehension.
The finds that, among these materials, have, I gather, caused most excitement and are arousing most expectation are two as yet unread rolls of copper. Strips of copper like these, it seems, have hitherto not been known. They were found in one of the Qumrân caves that otherwise proved rather disappointing, one on top of the other, resting against the wall. It is supposed that they were hastily hidden there, and that access to the cave was soon afterward made impossible by an earthquake. These copper strips have been rolled with the writing on the inner side, but the stylus has incised so deeply—it must have been pounded in—that the text can be partly made out in relief. The difficulty is to unroll these strips. They are green with oxidization and would crumble if subjected to pressure. Bits of them have been sent to Johns Hopkins in the hope of discovering some method by which they can be made more flexible. If this fails, they must be cut into sections. It has been calculated that, if put end to end, the two rolls would make a strip more than eight feet long.
It was suggested at first that these strips were inscriptions from the walls of the monastery, and some have even imagined that they might come from the walls of the Temple, in which case they would have been taken down just before it was burned by the Romans in 70 A.D., and hidden away in a cave, about a mile and a quarter north of the monastery, when the monastery, too, was in danger. But Professor Kuhn, of Göttingen, who has recently visited Jerusalem and studied the rolls in the Museum, has come to a different conclusion. Deciphering as much of the text as can be read in reverse on the outside layers, he has found a succession of numerals accompanied by the word for “cubit” and a word that may mean either “buried” or a place—a ditch or a cave—in which something might be buried, as well as phrases such as “above,” “on this side,” “in the room,” that seem to refer to locations. He believes that the strips are a list of the treasures of the monastery (the word “gold” has been made out), with directions for finding the places in which they have been hidden from the Romans. They cannot, he thinks, have been plaques on the walls, since there are no signs of rivets or nails, nor does the text leave wide enough margins to make it possible that they may have been framed. One of the rolls consists of two separate strips, which can be seen to be fastened together, just as the strips of leather are in the scrolls, and this has led Professor Kuhn to suppose that, like the scrolls themselves, they were meant to be unrolled and read. The members of the brotherhood, about to flee, would have written out their inventory on copper and put it in a cave by itself in the hope that it might survive, as leather scrolls might not do, the systematic wrecking of the Romans. If this turns out to be true, the archeologists may have before them a veritable Gold Bug treasure hunt.
VI
And now let us return at last to the Metropolitan Samuel, who bought the first lot of scrolls and persisted in believing in their antiquity, who allowed them to be photographed by the scholars of the American School in Jerusalem, and was encouraged by these Americans to come to the United States in January, 1949. The Metropolitan was hoping then to sell the scrolls to some institution of learning, but this has been more difficult than the Americans had led him to believe. The publication of the texts by the School did not have the effect that had been predicted of exciting an interest in buying the manuscripts; on the contrary, it diminished their market value. Since the texts were available to scholars, there was no need to have the manuscripts in their libraries. The Metropolitan had signed an agreement that the American School should publish within three years his texts, and that he should receive, in return, fifty per cent of the profits from the published texts. But the process of publishing Hebrew texts along with photographic facsimiles is a very expensive one. The first volume of the Dead Sea manuscripts cost the American School eight thousand dollars, and, though it has now gone into a second edition, it has been only in the last year that the Metropolitan has been able to collect any royalties: about three hundred dollars. Before this, the only revenue he was able to derive from the scrolls consisted of a few small fees that were paid him for exhibiting them in museums.
In the meantime, an outcry had been raised by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, whose director is the British Harding, that the Metropolitan Samuel had had no right to take the scrolls out of the country, and that the Americans had no right to publish them and had connived with the Metropolitan in committing an illegal act. It was intimated that steps would be taken if he ever came back to Jerusalem. The American reply to this declares that it was precisely the men at the School who had explained to the Metropolitan the antiquities law of Palestine, with which he was not familiar; that they themselves had reported the scroll to the Department, and that, even before that, the Metropolitan, at the time he was looking for an expert opinion, had had them shown to the people of the Museum, and that in neither case had anybody connected with the Department manifested the slightest interest; and, finally, that when the Metropolitan at last took his scrolls abroad, his monastery was being bombarded by the crossfire of Jews and Arabs (the latter under the British Brigadier Glubb), and that, in the general chaos the English had left, there was no safety for priest or manuscript, and no government, and hence no law, for antiquities or anything else. One recognizes at once in Jerusalem, whenever this subject is broached, the familiar Anglo-American feud that one has run into so often in Europe where the two nationalities have come together. The Yankees, say the British, have as usual been guilty of sharp practice; the Americans retort that it was they, after all, who realized the importance of the Metropolitan’s manuscripts, that the Museum was built with American money, and that American scholars are now being penalized by being kept to a minor role in the deciphering of the fragments. I might add, in support of our side, that I was told by Professor Dupont-Sommer that European scholars are grateful to the men of the American School for so promptly making the texts available. Dr. Burrows, of the Yale Divinity School, has been active in connection with the scrolls, and the Library of Yale University at one time considered acquiring the manuscripts, but finally decided not to. Those interested in the scrolls have complained—not without a certain justified bitterness—that the Library has had no difficulty in raising a sum that has been quoted at four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in order to buy the Boswell papers but could not produce the probably smaller sum that would have bought what are, without any question, the most precious discoveries of their kind since the texts of the Greek and Latin classics brought to light in the Renaissance. This was all the more unfortunate because everything had not yet been published. There was a group of fragments of Daniel that the Metropolitan had not released, as well as a whole manuscript that had not even been read.
It was this manuscript, the smallest of his lot, that the Metropolitan had taken home with him, the day of the photographing, when the layers turned out to be so stuck that it could not be easily unrolled. It has not been unrolled yet, but from two fragments detached from the back, it has been found to be written in Aramaic in “a very neat and fine script.” These pieces have been deciphered by Dr. Trever, who identified the word “BT’NWŠ” with the feminine name Betenos in the Ethiopic text of the Book of Jubilees. Betenos was the wife of Lamech, one of the patriarchs in the early part of Genesis, and the identification seems established by a passage that reads, “Then I, Lamech, hastened to go in unto Betenos.” Now, in an ancient list of apocryphal works, a Book of Lamech is mentioned, and it has been thought that this must have been embedded in the later Book of Enoch—Enoch was an ancestor of Lamech. But the reading of the manuscript stopped there. The Metropolitan took it to the Fogg Museum, in Cambridge, and the Museum authorities told him that the scroll was gummed together by a gluey substance like tar, which presented a problem in organic chemistry. In view of the objections raised by the Jordanians to the Metropolitan’s title to the scrolls, the Museum insisted on insuring them against possible suits on this ground, and the money to cover the premium was found by Dr. C. H. Kraeling, of the Chicago Oriental Institute. The situation was, of course, unusual, and since Lloyd’s would not undertake a policy, it took the director of the Fogg some time to arrange for one. The Metropolitan was asked, also, to sign a waiver that he would not hold the Museum responsible in the event of damage to the scrolls. In the meantime, he had taken them back, and he must have become discouraged about getting the work done by the Fogg, for he eventually dropped the whole matter. He complains that whereas in the Middle East agreements are made by word of mouth and usually lived up to by the parties, he has found that in the United States you are always being asked to sign papers, which turn out not to guarantee anything. He has, for example, always had to sign agreements in connection with exhibiting his scrol1s, and he has made a point of stipulating that no photographs of them should be taken. Such an agreement was, however, violated when the scrolls were shown in Chicago at the Oriental Institute. A scholar who wanted to check on a disputed passage of Isaiah managed to photograph a word that was blurred with infra-red rays. The Metropolitan discovered this later when he came upon a learned paper based on this photograph.
In the meantime, the scrolls were not sold, and the scholars were becoming impatient and worrying for fear the manuscripts might be deteriorating. The Metropolitan, when he brought them to the United States, had put them in a safe-deposit vault, and he had made them the charge of a trust, the trustees of which were Syrians of the Metropolitan’s own church. All business connected with them was to be transacted in the name of the trust, the proceeds from selling them were to be handled by it, and the money was to be devoted to church work and education. By this time, the Metropolitan had announced that he would not sell the Lamech roll separately. Since the value of the other manuscripts had fallen with their publication, he would now have less chance of disposing of them without the inducement of the unread scroll. He had decided to sell them in a lot, but not to set a definite price on them. He offered to have them appraised by experts. That he should have had to wait in vain for an American buyer throws into relief the false values of the market for rare books in this country. One remembers the one hundred and fifty thousand dollars paid by Dr. Rosenbach for a copy of the Bay Psalm Book, the one hundred and six thousand paid by him for a Gutenberg Bible, the fifty thousand for the first version of “Alice in Wonderland.” The difficulties about the Metropolitan’s title may possibly have had something to do with the reluctance of learned institutions, but undoubtedly the principal obstacles were the relative poverty of such institutions—divinity schools and seminaries—as are interested in Biblical manuscripts and the high susceptibility of rich collectors, cultivated by the book dealers through decades, to first editions of classics that are perfectly accessible to everybody.
Last summer, General Yigael Yadin (the son of Professor Sukenik) visited the United States. He remained from the middle of May to the end of the first week in July. He and Albright discussed these scrolls, and Yadin then decided to try to raise the money from Israel. He wrote the Metropolitan a letter, to which he received no reply, and he concluded that it would not be possible for the Syrians, under the circumstances, to sell the scrolls openly to Israel. There was always the possibility that the Jordanians would appeal to the authorities and try to prevent them from leaving the country or that Jordan would bring a suit in the United Nations. The General’s attention, however, was drawn to an ad in the Wall Street Journal that appeared during the first three days of June under the heading “Miscellaneous for Sale”:
The Syrians, becoming anxious, had resorted to this device. Yadin, without letting his name appear, applied to purchase the scrolls, using as intermediary a lawyer not associated with Israeli business, who negotiated the sale through a New York bank. The Syrians were never told that the manuscripts were going to Israel, and so ought to be held by the Jordanians quite innocent of selling them to their enemies. The price was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. There happened to be a hundred thousand available in the treasury of an organization called the American Fund for Israeli Institutions, and Yadin persuaded his government to lend the remaining one hundred and fifty. An American millionaire in the paper business, Mr. D. Samuel Gottesman, of New York, offered to repay the money to the fund and the Israeli government. The whole matter was kept a secret until the scrolls had been transported to Israel. This, of course, took place some time ago, but the purchase of the scrolls for Israel was not announced till February 13th of this year, when Premier Sharett explained that they would be housed, with other ancient documents, in a museum to be built for the purpose and to be called the Shrine of the Book. The first manuscripts found in the Qumrân cave are thus at last united in New Jerusalem. The Lamech scroll will now be opened, and the Hebrew University will publish its text. This will be of great interest to scholars, since it is the only known specimen of literary Aramaic from the period of four hundred years between the Aramaic of the Book of Daniel in the early third century B.C. and that of the Scroll of Fasting, a document of the second century A.D.
The Metropolitan Samuel has been living in Hackensack, New Jersey. There are in the United States four churches of his confession—one of them in West New York, not far away—and a single one in Canada. He has been travelling around among them, but his position has been rather difficult, for there has never been a metropolitan of the Syrian Jacobite Church in this part of the world before, and there is really no see for one. Exiled from the pomp and antiquity of his monastery in Old Jerusalem, he has taken a little cottage in a suburban section of Hackensack, where, supported by the Syrian congregation of the town, he has been living in modest comfort. I went to call on him there last May. His new-painted Colonial house stood out, in its whiteness and neatness, among the shabby frame buildings about it. One crossed a small, well-tended front lawn of glaring New Jersey grass to find his name and his rank, in the ancient Syrian lettering called estrangelo, spanning in wrought iron an ornamental glass outer door. He seemed an exotic figure with his dark and magnetic eyes, his Assyrian beard and enveloping robes, the sober black of which was set off by a lining of brilliant puce. He told me that a good many of the Russian priests now in the United States have, except when officiating, discarded their priestly robes and taken to business suits, but that he has kept on wearing his. The furniture was modern American; two bookends had heads of Lincoln. But on the mantelpiece was a Syrian prayer book underneath a painting of Christ, and on one side of the fireplace hung a glowing, ruby-studded crosier. He has made of this mantelpiece an altar, and he holds before it Sunday services for his congregation. He was planning at that time to have built for himself a small cathedral in Hackensack.
I called on him again this February. I did not know that the scrolls had been sold. He greeted me with radiant good humor and explained that he had disposed of the manuscripts to a buyer who, for unknown reasons, would not allow his name to be revealed. The Metropolitan himself had seen only the vice-president of a bank. He entertained me with a sumptuous Syrian lunch of vegetables, salads, fruits, and cheeses. The principal dish was fish, and the Metropolitan explained to me that in his Syrian Jacobite Church three days in February were appointed as a special Lent, to commemorate the fasting of the Ninevites when Jonah had preached to them and caused them to repent. This fast is a unique institution of the dissident Eastern churches. He told me that the money from the scrolls would be spent on education and church work for the Syrian Church in the Middle East. He was not clear, has perhaps not decided, what he himself will do now. There is no question, in any case, that he will still be performing his archiepiscopal duties, untroubled by the controversies provoked by the scrolls. ♦
