In Our Time - The Dead Sea Scrolls

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the revelatory collection of Biblical texts, legal documents, community rules and literary writings. In 1946 a Bedouin shepherd boy was looking for a goat he’d lost in the hills above the Dead Sea. He threw a rock into a cave and heard a hollow sound. He’d hit a ceramic jar containing an ancient manuscript. This was the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of about a thousand texts dating from around 250 BC to AD 68. It is the most substantial first hand evidence we have for the beliefs and practices of Judaism in and around the lifetime of Jesus. The Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of how the texts that make up the Hebrew Bible were edited and collected. They also offer a tantalising window onto the world from which Christianity eventually emerged. With Sarah Pearce Ian Karten Professor of Jewish Studies and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of SouthamptonCharlotte Hempel Professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Birmingham and George Brooke Rylands Professor Emeritus of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of ManchesterProducer Luke Mulhall

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, in 1946, a Bedouin shepherd boy called Muhammad Ed Dieb was looking for a goat he'd lost in the hills above the Dead Sea. He threw a rock into a cave and heard a hollow sound.

He'd hit a ceramic jar containing an ancient manuscript. script. This was the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of about a thousand texts dating from around 250 BC to AD 68. It contains biblical texts, legal documents, community rules, and more literary writings. It's the most substantial first-had evidence we have for the beliefs and practices of Judaism up to the lifetime of Jesus Christ. The Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of how the texts that make up the Hebrew Bible were edited and collected. They also offer a tantalizing window into the world from which Christianity eventually emerged. With me to discuss the Dead Sea Scrolls are Sarah Pierce, Ian Carden, Professor of Jewish Studies

and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Southampton, Charlotte Hempel, Professor of Hebrew, Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Birmingham, and George Brooke, Ryland's Professor Emeritus of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester. George Brooke, when and how did the Dead Sea Scrolls first come to light? Well, you mention, Melvin, the goat, and this is probably late 1946, early in 1947. The Bedouin were very cagey about how the discoveries actually happened for obvious reasons. But the version that I particularly like is that Mohammed Adib indeed found three or four scrolls by throwing a stone and it hit a jar in a cave. as he was looking for the goat.

He went back to the camp and showed one of his fellow Bedouin shepherds these scrolls, and they became interested, and one of them went back the next day or shortly thereafter and found some more scrolls. And this becomes important because we seem to have two lots from this first discovery of Cave 1. In 1949, a couple of years later, Cave 1 was excavated by archaeologists to verify that the scrolls actually came from that place.

Subsequently, between 1951 and 1956, another 10 caves have produced manuscripts in that region. At the same time, people were looking now throughout the Judean wilderness to find manuscripts and other artifacts, possible and several other sites have produced material. There's a fairytale aspect of this, isn't there? What happened to the boy? That we don't quite know. He seems to have lived to be an old man to tell stories, but of the 11 caves that have produced manuscripts at and near the site Kumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, the Bedouin discovered most of them. When were they first gathered together? When did this become, for the world of U-3,

a great event that archaeologists gathered around that this is an amazing. I'm not being hyperbolic. This is an amazing thing we must get down to examine every fragment of this. When did that begin to get underway? Well, it began in 1947. There was a professor Eliezer Sukhainik at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who in November 1947 acquired three scrolls, and that's possibly one of those initial discoveries.

The other scrolls from the first set of seven that were discovered by the Bedouin ended up with Mar Athanasia Samuel, the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan in Jerusalem, and they were taken eventually to the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem for the Americans to have a look at. So to begin with, it was Sukainik and one of two of his colleagues at the Hebrew University, working on one set of scrolls, and he published photographs and transcriptions very quickly, then the Americans working on the other three.

Subsequently, when Cave 4 was discovered in 1952, the number of manuscripts was so great that those in Jordan and at the Palestine Archaeological Museum who were responsible for purchasing the material from the Bedouin, decided they needed to create a scholarly team, and that team began to work, especially on the Cave 4 fragments. But there is a fourth story of scholarly endeavour,

which is the general release of all the scrolls for scholarship in 1991, and that's when there's been a restart of interest in the scrolls. Thank you. Charlotte Haldon Temple. Can you give listeners some idea of the range of scrolls? Yeah, it's around a thousand. Around a thousand? Yeah, most of them are in small pieces,

but we reckon with around a thousand. And the range of material is a block of material that is biblical manuscripts, which is around 200, and those are clearly texts that we could identify more easily. Are we talking about 1K or the whole lot? All of them. Right.

All of them together, yeah. because there were the seven big scrolls from Cave 1 and then the numbers are really made up to a large extent by Cave 4 because that cave had a huge amount of material but a lot of it quite fragmentary some just in small pieces but also some with considerable size sort of broken up pages, columns. So we were able, scholars were able to identify clearly

anything that we'd known before more easily including the biblical material. Then we found material in the original Aramaic of texts that we already knew in other languages, such as, for instance, a work known as one Enoch, which we knew in its entirety from Gaez, classical Ethiopic, and scholars had suspected that it had originally been written in a Semitic language,

and we found the original Aramaic, some of the original Aramaic fragments. and then for me very exciting is a large amount of material that we've never seen before we didn't know it existed at all including Jewish legal material that's very interesting because the teachings that we know from rabbinic literature is that Moses received the written law and the oral law at the same time and it was facefully on the mountain and it was facefully transmitted through a chain of authorities.

And we now know that there was also written law at this earlier period. And then we found exquisite copies also of texts that describe the life and regulations of a community, which was attractively thought then to match the site that was excavated in a settlement in the 50s right near those caves. we also found a war scroll. What was that community called? Are these assains? Well, people argue about that. The term ascines comes from the classical authors. It was thought that based on some similarities,

which admittedly are there, we should then assume these are the ascines. However, I tend to think when we do scholarship with texts, it's a bit like being a chemist in a lab. If you have one petri dish with evidence, which is actually 2,000 years old, and primary data we didn't have before, it's important to keep that separately

from the accounts of other people and then compare it afterwards when you've analysed it. So I think more recently people still acknowledge the similarities to the accounts of the Essenes. A lot of people still think there were Essenes. But I would prefer, and many others would, to actually call it the movement

that at one point settled at Qumran. Did different caves have different sorts of collections Or was each cave, the collection that was there And been put there at different times by different authorities? Anyway, you know the question? No, it's a very good question And it is the case that the different caves Do have a somewhat different character, Cave 1,

had scrolls clearly placed with great care Inside the cylindrical jars that we now call scroll jars And wrapped with linen, whereas in K4 we had a huge amount of materials, some of which is rather esoteric, you might say. So for instance, we have some use of, well, cryptic writing, which may be performative or it may really have been particularly secretive. We have a case where we have words in cryptic writing

that we have in the same text in the normal Hebrew writing. We have several copies of the same text, in K-4. So it seems to be potentially a lot of calendrical learning, technical stuff. Perhaps in my view is something I've written on, that was a sort of particularly learned collection, sort of more scholarly. And then in Cave 11, we have some magnificent scrolls, like the Temple Scroll and a very large Psalms scroll. And in Cave 7, we have some small amount of Greek fragments that may have been a particular scholar. place. Thank you very much. Sarah, Sarah Piers. The text date from the second temple period.

What does that mean? When was it? Right. It's a very long period from 515 BC until 70C. Well, we have to think, first of all, of the first temple period, which begins with the Temple of King Solomon, which was built around 1,000 BC, and was then destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC. So there's a period in which the leadership of Jerusalem is deported to Babylon, the famous Babylonian exile, and much in terms of reconstruction and thinking about the reasons for the destruction of the first temple goes on in that period. So the second temple is the temple that is built and completed in 515 BCE at the command of originally Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who had conquered the Babylonians, and had conquered the Babylonians, and had come. commanded that among other temples in the now Persian Empire, the Jewish temple in Jerusalem should be rebuilt. The second temple period itself, because that's really what we're talking

about here, is enormously varied. Where did the main knowledge of the history of Judaism, let's call it that for shorthand at the moment, come from before the scrolls? From Josephus, from Josephus's writings, and to some extent from Philo's writings as well. Josephus is really our only major source for the Second Temple period, which is the period in which we see the origins of Judaism develop after the rebuilding of the temple, which becomes the Second Temple. What were his dates and what did you write? Josephus is born in 37, exact contemporary of Caligula,

and he dies sometime after 100 CE. He was originally a Jerusalem priest and an aristocrat who traced his lineage to a royal... background. He fought in the first Jewish war against Rome from 66, but he was captured quite quickly and imprisoned by the Romans. And because he predicted the rise to power of Vespasian, who was the general in charge of suppressing the revolt, he was released and joined the Roman side. And stayed with the Roman side, moved to Rome as a member of the imperial household, and that is where he wrote his writings, which are a proud defence and promotion of Jewish history.

in the face of an extremely difficult time for the Jews after the suppression of the first revolt. So he writes, first of all, a history of the Jewish war. And it's in that Jewish war that he writes about the Aesines in particular. So that's of great interest to us. Who we call them a tribe? He calls them a people, Genos, yes. He also writes in his own autobiography,

which he writes towards the end of the century, about having actually experimented in his educational life, with being an Aene for a year and also belonging to other or training with other Jewish movements, the Pharisees and the Sadducees and eventually going off to live with a hermit in the wilderness in order to live the ascetic life.

But ultimately he writes voluminous histories about the lives of the Jews from the creation of the world onwards. Are we finding stuff, or you, people who found the bedrooms and so on, finding material that was not known before. So is this an amazing original discovery as well as being voluminous and filling things out? From the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Yes. Oh yes, absolutely. We're finding a huge amount of material that we didn't know before, as well as, of course, a huge amount of new information about the state of the biblical text itself in very varied forms. So it turns, as it were, what's called the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. That's right, yes, many, many copies. I think Charlotte mentioned the very significant number of biblical manuscripts, and they show the different kinds of texts that were available, that some of the texts we knew from a later period were, for example, the Greek translation of the Bible from Qumran. We have Hebrew examples of a text that's much closer to the Greek translation and shows the origin, the likely Hebrew origin of that, which is different from the traditional Hebrew text. George, the scrolls are thought of belong to a community. We've mentioned there of the Aesines.

Who were there and why they're significant in this story? The Aesines are a group associated with Judea. They are supposedly morally excellent. They have a strict interpretation of the law. Most of them are thought to be celibate by Fylo and Josephus. they strictly observe the Sabbath. These are the characteristics which we find also overlapping with motifs in texts like the rule of the community from the Qumran caves. And that's led people to identify the Qumran community as not a scene strictly, but as some kind of a scene,

given that the community at Qumran was at a maximum size, about 100 people. there must have been many Essenes elsewhere and possibly different types of Essine more different than either Philo or Josephus actually let on. Charlotte, can I come to you to develop this idea of the Ascenes in the community? What do they mean? What do you mean by a community then? What are we talking about? In one sense we mean a community that calls itself the Yachat,

which is a noun that means together. It comes from the root together. And that occurs frequently in the community rule. and we have a sense from the community rule that we are talking about a single community living together. However, we also have another document which shares some aspects with the community rule but is also distinct called the Damascus document

and in that document communal life is described as in a number of different camps. The members of the Damascus community just a shorthand because that's the name of the document are married on the whole. Their children, when they come of age, young men join with an oath. We have references to marriage, to living in camps where there is an overseer. And this overseer gets involved in family life. So a passage that we found in the K-4 material mentions a case where a prospective husband might challenge

his bride's virginity and the overseer gets involved and nominates experienced trustworthy women to come and examine this prospective bride to check whether she is or hasn't been virtuous

before getting married so we know that there were even in that sense professional women involved so it's there are actually it's perhaps better to talk about a movement with several locations in view, but there is

because of the similarities also in terms of their aspirations, something in common, which is why we say a movement, some of whom move to Qumran at some point. Thank you. Sarah, come we turn to the Temple in Jerusalem. What role did that play

in this history that we find? Temple is absolutely fundamental to Jewish life in antiquity. Jewish life completely revolves around it, so people like Josephus and who talk about the importance of Jews staking their life on the defence of the Jerusalem Temple to give you an idea of that. I mean, did they go every day? Some people would go every day.

Priests would be required to attend to offer sacrifices there from time to time. But essentially there would be people going every day, but they wouldn't be the same people. But there was a requirement for male Jews to visit the temple three times a year for the pilgrimage. festival. So it was really key and key to the life of Jews across the world, the world in which Jews lived, because the Second Temple period is a really important period for the diaspora of the Jews. So for diaspora Jews, it's seen as a kind of mother city center for them. It's the key for their self-identification. So if you ask about the place of the temple in the scrolls, Well, I think one of the big takeaways from the discovery of the scrolls

and the complete publication of them is the huge variety of views contained in the scrolls, and this includes big variety of views on the place of the temple. In the early days of scholarship, there was a sense that the community rule in particular gave out the view of the group that they rejected the temple and that there was a history to that rejection which revolved around conflict with the high priesthood in Jerusalem. There's more of a debate now about that question,

but certainly the community rule, there are texts within the community rule that indicate that the community believed itself to be a replacement of the sacrificial cult in Jerusalem, whether this means that the community actually rejected the temple in Jerusalem or not, there is a debate on that question. There is no explicit text among the scrolls that makes it clear that the temple was rejected. But many of the scrolls that could be associated with the movement, as you call it,

Shalota, or which would be compatible with the views of the movement, are highly critical of the temple as it was being run at the time. Could we develop that, Jovi? Yes, so in the community rule, as Sarah mentions, we find very elegant, beautiful passages which seem to suggest that the community thought of itself as the temple. So in a way, the community is a substitute for the temple. But alongside such representations, we also find the manuscript of the temple scroll from Cave 11, which offers a view of, the temple that should have been built but never was in the second temple period or even by Solomon in the first temple period. And the temple scroll is fascinating because it seems to be written out,

copied during the Herodian period. And of course it was Herod the Great, who was the great rebuilder of the second temple just before the time of Jesus, though the work was ongoing. in the temple scroll, there is reference to yet another temple, which God himself will build at the end of time. So there is a lot of discussion about the temple,

the nature of the temple, and what it represents. So again, is this new material as far as scholars like yourself are concerned? Very much so, yes, indeed. It must be very exciting. Well, it is very exciting. It's excitement, partly, is the result of the way in which

information about the scroll, dribbled out slowly until 1991 and then there's been this great chance for a resurgence of interest in the scrolls and a revisiting of the work of the first generation of scholars. Shalgerton, can you tell us what the scrolls tell us about the languages of the time? Languages, I stress that.

Yes, I can, yeah. Please. It may be helpful just to tell our listeners that the Hebrew Bible, despite being called the Hebrew Bible, despite being called the Hebrew Bible, already has two languages in it and includes a number of chapters in Aramaic in the book of Daniel and also some documents that claim to be written by the Persian administration in Ezra. So we can see in both of these biblical books that are quite late

that Aramaic is beginning to make an incursion into the biblical text. Since even from before the Persian period, Aramaic had become an administrative. important language in the region all the way from Mesopotamia to our area. So it's not surprising that we found some Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, but what is very interesting, that most of the scrolls

in Aramaic deal with a period from long ago in the past. What is the whole of the domain in your terms? It deals with figures that are patriarchs and matriarchs, such as Abraham, Sarah, Noah, Levi. So it seems to be used more for a kind of

of age from long ago and what is perhaps no one would have well we all would have expected the biblical text to be in Hebrew but we wouldn't really have expected to have huge texts and scrolls of the life of the community meters long

composed at this period in Hebrew we might have expected that it is Aramaic because of that turn towards Aramaic one potential reason for that move to Hebrew in a community like this which is a very elite community, very learned, very perhaps bit conservative and priestly.

It may have had something to do with the Hasmanian period, which was really a very nationalist victory of the Jewish rebels of the first revolt, where Hebrew is emerging. So we've got these languages there, most of it is in Hebrew, 85%, 12% in 12% in... Aramaic and 3% in Greek. And the Greek pieces are very small,

so people are having quite lengthy scholarly debates on what is translated here. So it is a multilingual environment, with most of it in Hebrew, and it doesn't seem to be entirely random which parts are in Aramaic. Thank you. Sarah. What other scrolls tell us

about the relationship between Judaism and the wider world? of the Eastern Mediterranean. Well, continuing that issue about Greek, the fact that in Cave 7, there were only Greek texts found, indicates probably that at least some people in the community

used them and were able to read them. These are mostly Greek, they're fragmentary, but they're texts of the books of Moses. As far as we know from Jewish tradition that comes to us through, people like Philo and Josephus. The Torah or the Five Books of Moses was translated into Greek in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC. Now, the earliest of those Greek texts is 2nd century BC, so it's only a century later that we're finding them at Qumran. They are among the earliest texts we have of the Greek

Bible. So this suggests at least the acceptability of Greek Bible texts among the community or the people who has them. It's also interesting that that Cave 7 in which only Greek texts were found is very close to the settlement. It's very easily accessible which suggests that people were, you know, using these texts. They were working

texts. So clearly we have a sense of at least the language of the outside world being engaged among the community. In terms of attitudes towards the wider world, the scrolls in general, if we're thinking about the very particular,

ones linked to the movement are generally very hostile to the outside world. They're also hostile. Hostile world is non-Jewish world. Hostile even to the rest of the Jewish world. Absolutely. And to some extent, even more hostile to the rest of the Jewish world because their histories have this sense that their leaders in the past have been betrayed by members of the Jewish elite,

probably in Jerusalem and connected to the high priesthood. George, did the scrolls change your idea, scholars like yourself, idea of Jewish history. The scrolls themselves contain very little direct reference to historical events. There are one or two names from particularly the first century BCE, but it's very difficult to write a diacronic historical narrative on the basis of the scrolls themselves.

But what the scrolls do enable is the kind of thing that Sarah and Charlotte have alluded to, namely the construction of social history for Jews of the period, together with a much deeper understanding of the cultural developments and interactions of the period in which all Jews in Judea were participating. Josephus, when he describes Pharisees, Sadducees, Essin's, is really describing the differences between these groups because he's trying to convince his non-Jewish readership

of the character of these different groups. Since the scrolls have been around, scholars have tended to give more attention to what many Jews had in common, not disallowing that there were differences between these various groups, but allowing a picture that, shows us that there were real debates going on

about the character of God, about the nature of scriptural tradition and how it should be represented in the community. Debates about the temple, as Sarah has discussed. Debates which are relevant, in fact, for our own period, about the nature of kingship and the constitution of Israel, as the Hasmanians had taken upon themselves the role of kings.

And it seems as if the community group of their scenes represented in these scrolls had alternative views about kingship. Thank you very much, Sarah. Jesus Christ is not mentioned in the scrolls, but it strays into the era of Christ. It goes up to about 70 AD, something like that, that we think. What's your take on that?

What's really important in terms of understanding Christian origins and the context of Jesus is that the scrolls give us firsthand a sense of the culture and the variety of Judaism that existed in the later Second Temple period to which Jesus belongs. But Jesus was a Galilean Jew, very far away from Qumran. And of course there are debates about what exactly was Jesus' own meaning. message, but it would appear that fundamental to his teaching are parables and also the working of healing activity. And that sort of activity is not reflected in the scrolls. However, there is the famous story of Jesus in a synagogue opening the scroll of Isaiah, reading from it

and saying, effectively, this text is being fulfilled today as you listen to me teaching. that God is intervening in history and I am part of that. And I get that sense that the commentaries that have been found from Qumran, which are not known from other places, which have been given the technical term Peshireem, there are commentaries which read biblical books as prophecies that will be fulfilled in the future and have been interpreted as having been fulfilled or will be in the future.

And I think that is something that you have in common, at least with those traditions about, about Jesus. In terms of other traditions that go into the New Testament, one would emphasize things in common with aspects of ideas from the scrolls, such as the idea of being in the last days, the final time. That's very important in some of the scrolls, I would say. One of the areas that is really interesting is something that George has pointed out

and he may be able to add to it, that the same big, biblical texts that are the most popular, where we have most copies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is the Psalms, Genesis, Deuteronomy and Isaiah. Again, are also the frontrunners of the texts of the Bible that are used in the New Testament and quoted most frequently, because we have to remember that at the time that the New Testament was written, the Bible was still what is now the Old Testament or the Tanakh for Jews and consulted. So that suggests to me that these particular biblical texts were studied by groups perhaps before Christians had parted together. And because we're dealing with scrolls, it's very interesting that before you have the canon and the form of a beginning

and an end of a collection, not every place would have had all the different scrolls. And we can tell that these Christian communities shared the same favourites. And we also know that much of the historical material all the way from the conquest of the land, all the way through the monarchy, Ezra Nehemiah, all of these texts don't really,

they may have all been lost or eaten by rats in the caves, but it is quite interesting that there wasn't that much interest in them as in the Pentateuch and in Isaiah and the Psalms. Can you tell us what we learned about, George, about the Messianic Apocalypse and the Son of God praise, which keeps coming up? Well, these are two texts of particular interest. What's interesting in the Messianic Apocalypse

is that attention is given to the role of God himself in the Messianic Age. the Messiah plays along. There's debate amongst scholars about whether this Messiah is a priest or a prophet or some kingly figure, but attention is on God himself. What's intriguing is that the text says that in the messianic age, the Lord will accomplish glorious things which have never been, for he will heal the wounded and revive the dead and bring good news. to the poor, which is a pastiche of bits of Isaiah and the Psalms. Intriguingly, in none of the biblical texts cited, is there any mention of revival of the dead? But when Jesus constructs a response to John the Baptist's disciples who come to him, according to Luke and Matthew, to ask, who are you, he replies to them

with a version of Isaiah that includes this very phrase and that seems to imply that Jesus himself was aware of the kind of Jewish traditions which we find associated with the coming of the Messiah in a text like the Messianic Apocalypse. As for the Son of God text

this is a text which we might take most seriously in relation to how the New Testament authors try to describe the messianism of Jesus. This is a text, interestingly, in Aramaic, and seems to belong in the traditions of the book of Daniel. And it has some kind of Jewish seer explaining to a Gentile king, a visionary material,

and it describes this son of God who will be called great, the son of God he will be proclaimed, and the son of the Most High they will call him. Luke, in particular, seems to know this Aramaic tradition because in the interaction between the angel Gabriel and Mary the mother of Jesus in Luke 1, verses 32 and 35,

we find precisely the same phrases being used. as Luke defines Jesus as Son of God, son of the Most High. Can I come back to you, Charlotte? How have modern techniques advanced the study of these scrolls? In some senses, the period from the 40s and 50s when the scrolls were found has also been the beginning of much technological and scientific progress, and the scrolls kind of often featured on that journey alongside the scientific progress. So photography was quite elementary at that time

and any fans of the history of photography can look at the photographer Albinah, Anton Albinah, who photographed a lot of scrolls and you can see the equipment. More recently, we used technology for the Dead Sea Scrolls that was developed by NASA to get really high-pixelated images for a period. But the most recent development is Google technology,

which is multi-spectral imaging of the scrolls that has been undertaken at great scale and is available for any of our listeners to look at at the website of the Leon Levi-Detsi Scrolls digital library which is made available by the Israel Museum where there's also information available. And then the other really interesting developments in terms of scientific support for our work

is the study of carbon-14 dating. Very early on when somebody called Villard Libby at the University of Chicago was working on carbon-14 testing, he tasted a little bit of linen from the Densi Scrolls. But at that time, you needed one to two, three grams, to test something. And the latest technology, which is called accelerator mass spectrometry, requires only a milligram of original material. so that has been used to carbon 14 date

a number of actual scroll materials as well which confirm the general antiquity of the material and the sort of ballpark of when the scrolls were copied. Thank you very much. Sarah, do you think as a result of what Charlotte has been saying the views on the scrolls from persons like yourself have changed a lot of us or have been refined? Oh, I think they've changed enormously since...

Can you give us one of the examples? Yes. Well, so the beginnings are in 1947, and at that point I think it would be fair to say that the general view of ancient Judaism was that it was a rather sad spectacle. That's certainly a view in some Christian traditions that it was often called late Judaism as though it was on the way out and uncreative and unspiritual in its outlook. Also, from a Jewish perspective, it's often described in terms of a normative judoism. or orthodoxy that very much represented an earlier example of what becomes rabbinic Judaism. What we see actually as a result of the scrolls is the enormous variety of Jewish traditions

that are assembled in this collection, including conflicting traditions. And there's a certain tolerance for difference in this collection, which says something about the people who put them together. I think another thing that has changed a great deal, though, is also our... understanding of the relationship between the archaeology of the settlement of Kiyobat Qumran and the scrolls themselves.

And that helps us to have a different view of the history that's likely to lie behind the scrolls of the movement, that they do not begin with Qumran. So early histories of the so-called Qumran community traced it back to the beginning of the Hasmanian period. Which is when, so, well, 150s BC, and the time of the, the first Hasmanyan high priest, Jonathan, whom some people thought was the wicked priest, who persecuted the leader of the group,

who is known cryptically as the teacher of righteousness in the scrolls. We now know from, particularly from the publication of the archaeological reports that was not actually released until the mid-90s, despite the excavations taking place in the 50s. I think the consensus view is now that the settlement, was not started until around 100 to 75 BCE. So the movement must have begun somewhere else. Qumran is not the beginning of the movement.

What is it then? That's the big question. And one of the most interesting studies on this question in recent times, which is by Sydney-White Crawford, is that it represents a library of the Aseans. It's not a headquarters exactly, but it's a library where they stored their treasures and their treasured manuscripts.

and where some people worked alongside copying them, preserving them. We're getting towards the end of the programme now, unfortunately. George, can you give us some idea of the significance of all this, some overall idea? I think the overall significance of the scrolls is that it allows us to redraw our picture of Judaism in the late Second Temple period. we now have access to, if you like, Hillale's bedtime reading or what Jesus might have been looking at and learning from. A whole new picture of Judaism emerges, one which shows an immense richness spiritually,

and we have to be appreciative of all that. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you very much, George, George Brook, Sarah Pierce, and Charlotte Hample, and to our studio engineer, Duncan Hanant. next week the Shimabara Rebellion in Japan in 1637-8 thank you for listening

and the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests was not in the programme that you think we should have had in the programme well perhaps I would start by suggesting that

a couple of things were not in the programme which I would say were important from my point of view. The first is that we've not discussed in any way the religious significance for the modern period of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Modern period, you mean now? Now.

Now. And it seems to me that one of the really interesting features of the scrolls is that they speak loudly of the diversity of Judaism in the late Second Temple period. And in doing that, they allow us to see a richness in Jewish religion, Jewish practice, Jewish belief,

which we had no real idea about from previous sources. And I wish that modern Jews and many modern Christians would appreciate the scrolls in terms of what they tell us about how any religious tradition should enable its diversity rather than look for a narrow, perhaps even fundamentalist form of singularity in approach to things.

The scrolls show us diversity in all its richness. We've talked a lot about the social history that we get from the dead scrolls and we touched on the fact that they are elite text. I think it is important to bear in mind that the great majority of people would not have access to reading any of this at the time. They would certainly not be represented at all in it. And in my view, it is likely that the community included some of these people who were operating on a more menial level and doing jobs.

And we, in one sense, the intellectual richness of it perhaps covers quite a lot of that elite stratum, given how much we now know is in there. But we don't really know too much about from these texts what ordinary people were thinking. One example where we might have some access to that is some apotopeic material that deals with an approach that helps fight off or protect you

from an attack of some kind. We know that in the ancient world death and illness and disability was much more widespread and we have a number of passages even in the community rule in the prayer at the end that you might pray at certain times also at a time when something strikes you suddenly.

So the idea was quite widespread that there were demonic forces at large who might strike you particularly perhaps in the night time or at childbirth. And what's really interesting is that the scrolls way, other than driving out a demon, what we get in the Dezzi Scrolls is one of the responses is to bless God and his mighty deeds. So it's almost by overpowering the power of those forces.

I think that's perhaps something that was more widespread at the time. But we need to have humility about all of the people that were also part of that social history. that we don't get access to and probably did actually play a part of that life, but did not get mentioned. Yes. Would you like to say? Well, I think one of the interesting questions,

which we probably can't answer, is what happened to the people at Qumran. Why did they not go back? Why did no one go back for these very wonderful, valuable collections? We know that there is evidence of mass, destruction at the site, which indicates that the Romans destroyed it in around 68 CE during the course of the first Jewish revolt. We know that they destroyed areas nearby like Jericho at this time. It's possible that Vespasian, the general in charge of the suppression of the Jewish revolt, was at Qumran

leading the command to deal with it there, but we have no evidence of bodies from Qumran. I would just put this together with what Josephus says about the Aesines, and one of the things he really emphasises is how courageous and manly they are, that they're very brave in the face of death. And he explicitly says at the end of his account of the Aesnes, that in the course of the Jewish ones, they were tortured by the Romans

who were trying to force them to betray their ancestral secrets and they died with a smile on their face refusing to give in. So should we combine those traditions? I think our producers coming here. I think we got everything we need. That was true.

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