Lost Words and Forgotten Worlds

Chapter 1

First Impressions from Qumran Cave 1

I don't know how you feel about puzzles. But love them or hate them, I bet we can agree on two things: they're a whole lot more fun if you have all the pieces and the front of the box. Depending on your disposition to puzzling, the DSS are either the most epic or atrocious puzzle of all time. They're known as "scrolls," but in most cases they're scraps. Apart from a few nearly pristine and largely preserved texts, the collection consists of tattered and torn remains of some 930 ancient Jewish scrolls. Leave these out in the desert for two millennia, and things tend to deteriorate. So we have a lot of puzzle pieces.

Some scroll-scraps are of writings that later land in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament. I'll refer to this shared heritage as "Hebrew Scriptures."1 Most fragments, however, are of writings that were lost, forgotten, or unknown. We had no idea these writings existed until their recovery some seventy-five years ago in the Judean wilderness. In many such cases, we also don't know what the complete and original forms of those works would have looked like in the ancient world.

There you have it: thousands of fragments decayed through years of confinement in caves, an unknown number gone missing through accident or acquisition, and often no clue of what the overall texts are supposed to say. Great. Where do we start?

The initial DSS were recovered in 1947, but waves of discoveries continued into the mid-1950s, with local talent and professional archaeologists combing the cavernous cliffs off the northwest shores of the Dead Sea for more caves. By the mid-1950s, eleven caves-some natural, some carved out by human hands-were found to hold texts. After this initial flurry of activity, the speed of publication slowed to a turtle's pace and spanned several more decades.

As scholars and the public fumed with frustration over pauses in publication and perceived withheld secrets, in the early 1990s a clever hack by a tag team of researchers (Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg) reverse-engineered the entire library of the DSS by digitizing all the textual data of a card catalog concordance into a Macintosh computer database. The catalog had been developed by an early insider publication team working with the scrolls to aid their own work. A copy was made available to Wacholder and Abegg, whose at first controversial move made a brilliant breakthrough: the entirety of the collection was made available to all. Or so we thought.

Around the turn of the millennium, news of unseen fragments circulated. Buyers queued up, checkbooks were opened, and private institutions and museums clamored for the chance to own a piece of alleged Scripture. Not long after this, a band of archaeologists and scholars took to the Judean Desert yet again and discovered what appeared to be more caves that had once held material and textual items related to the scrolls, now lost or looted.2

So why throw all this on the table of already mixed and muddled puzzle fragments? Because first impressions matter. Our first impression of the scrolls must recognize that "discovery" was, and is, ongoing. These are ancient texts, but they are bound to also be part of our modern world. Despite the many unknown variables of sifting, identifying, and deciphering the scrolls, first impressions matter. By reading the fragmentary texts strategically, and at times reading between the lines, the epic jigsaw puzzle of the DSS provides unprecedented insight into the thought, culture, belief, history, and practice of a foundational time for Western culture, formative to biblical literature and foundational for emerging Judaism and Christianity.

IMAGE 1.1: As discovery gave way to sorting and sifting, the early team of scholars working with DSS in the Palestinian Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem (now the Rockefeller Museum) organized fragments between glass plates. While this helped make the texts readily visible for identification, the pressure also damaged some fragments. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

But which handful of puzzle pieces should we choose for our own first impression of the texts?

A Seven Scroll Sample of Cave 1

Our best bet is to wind back the clock to the very first finds of Qumran Cave 1, discovered in the winter of 1946-47. The exact nature of the discovery is, frankly, a tricky story and one I'll save for the next chapter. For our introductory interests it is significant that the initial cache from Qumran Cave 1 reflects the general types of literature of the entire DSS collection that would come to light-so it's a good place to start.

The first finds included seven fragmentary scrolls: two copies of Isaiah (1QIsaiaha and 1QIsaiahb), a commentary on Habakkuk, a rewritten Aramaic rendition of ancestral narratives known as the Genesis Apocryphon, a writing outlining the ideals of Qumran life and thought known as the Community Rule, a liturgical collection called the Hodayot, and an end-times playbook dubbed the War Scroll. Apart from the copies of Isaiah, all these texts were previously unknown. As a group, they provide a snapshot of the scope, content, and context of the DSS collection. They also help front some key insights and questions about the ideas and identity of the group that lived at Qumran.

The Fraternal Twins of 1QIsaiaha and 1QIsaiahb

Let's start our venture on some familiar turf: Isaiah. This beast of a book eventually shows up in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament. Well before this reception, however, Isaiah was an essential read for the group that lived at Qumran. The case of Isaiah provides some immediate and essential insights into scribes and scripture at Qumran.

First, it is significant that there are multiple copies of this book. In fact, 1QIsaiaha and 1QIsaiahb represent but a pair of some twenty-two fragmentary manuscripts of Isaiah in the Qumran collection. While counting manuscripts is not always a reliable method for determining how significant or meaningful a given book was to the Qumran community-remember, this is a damaged and fragmentary library-having a single work in these numbers is one criterion suggesting it was authoritative for the group that penned or preserved the DSS.

IMAGE 1.2: Unlike the pristine specimen of 1QIsaiaha, seen in a sample image last chapter, most other DSS were found in various states of decay. For example, the Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon from Cave 1, was in a near mummified roll. Once dissected, much of its contents could be deciphered but several lines and column sections were lost or damaged. (Image credits: © Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Shrine of the Book; bottom two images by Ardon Bar-Hama)

Second, the scribal hands of these two manuscripts date to the first century BCE (1QIsaiaha) and to around the turn of the Common Era (1QIsaiahb).3 This means we're in a world that was centuries before the Bible and the media form of a book even existed. This is an era of scripture cultivated by scribes on scrolls.

Third, the textual profile of these two Cave 1 copies of Isaiah reveals both great similarities and many differences. Isaiah 41:11 illustrates this, with the main difference noted in italics:

1QIsaiaha: "Look! All who are incensed at you will be disgraced and put to shame. Those who contend with you will all die."

1QIsaiahb: "Look! All who are incensed at you will be disgraced and put to shame. Those who contend with you will become nothing and be ashamed."

These verses mostly parallel one another, but there is a critical variation-you might say a life-or-death situation. This difference-known as a "textual variant"-may seem slight to some, but I'd say a death sentence versus embarrassment is a big deal. Were we to track this against the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures), we would see further diversity within this unity. But we'll save some of those comparisons for chapter 7.

What does this mean for our first impression? The world of Qumran is one where texts, including those of most books of Hebrew Scripture, are still developing. Their core content in most cases was stable, yet not static. While our initial interest in the modern day might be in mining this data for "new" readings that are actually very old, the Qumran community didn't seem to share our Western mindset that insists on fixed forms of texts. The world of Qumran is one where differences were points for conversation, traditions were bigger and better than any single manuscript, and scribes rose to the challenge of both transmitting traditions and innovating texts.

Conversing with and Critiquing Culture in Pesher Habakkuk

Our pair of Isaiah texts hints that scripture was not fixed and scribes were not photocopiers. The commentary (known as a pesher) on Habakkuk from Qumran Cave 1 reveals that the interpretation of scripture was not something that occurred after the Bible was formalized. Rather, scriptural...