The Ancients - The Dead Sea Scrolls: Jesus, John the Baptist & Essenes

Episode Date: October 1, 2023

Part 2/2. Of unknown authorship, the Dead Sea Scrolls - also known as the Qumran Scrolls - are some of the most important ancient documents ever discovered. Found by a young boy in a cave by the Dead Sea, the scrolls offer invaluable insight into what life was like in Qumran and the surrounding areas 2 millennia ago. But who, if anyone, actually lived there, and what does John the Baptist have to do with it?In our second episode on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Tristan is once again joined by Dr Jodi Magness from the University of North Carolina, to help us understand the invaluable nature of these artefacts. Looking at how Jewish religion was organised at this time, early examples of etymology, and even some millennia old puns - what can we learn about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and why are they so valuable in our understanding of the ancient past?The Ancients has been nominated in the History category at the Signal Awards! Help us win Gold by casting your vote here!Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's episode, where we are continuing our story, our two-part episode with Dr. Jody Magnus, all about one of those great discoveries from the Holy Land, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Now, in part one, Jody explained the archaeology discovered at the nearby ancient settlement of Qumran and what that archaeology has revealed about its inhabitants who lived there at the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls some 2,000 years ago. Now, there are lots of different theories about almost everything about Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, I must add, but Jody believes, and it seems most likely, that the people who used, who created the Dead Sea Scrolls in antiquity, well they were the community that lived at Qumran. Now in this second part, Jodie, she continues the story. We're going to be looking at who these people were and why Jodie believes them to be the Essenes, a Jewish sect with a fascinating history. Of course, we're also going to be talking more about the scrolls

themselves, don't you worry. Jesus and John the Baptist too. So get ready. Jodie is a force of nature. Lots of amazing detail coming your way in the next 40 minutes. So without further ado, here's Jodie. So getting back to the scroll. So this is a very interesting collection of literature. It's Jewish religious literature. And that's interesting because if you look at other scrolls, ancient scrolls that have been found in the area of the Dead Sea, not connected to Qumran from, you know, slightly later periods for the most part, they're not a corpus like this. They include all different kinds of things, mostly a lot of personal documents, for example, like wedding contracts and personal correspondence and deeds to land and stuff like that. None of that among the Dead Sea Scrolls, nothing like that.

So this is some people have referred to it as a library. It is a library in the sense that there's a deliberate process of selection involved, and it's not somebody's personal archive of personal documents. And it's not somebody's personal archive of personal documents. And before I go on, I should mention that the 11 caves at Qumran, ultimately 11 caves were found to have scrolls. Some of those caves were discovered by archaeologists and some were discovered by Bedouin. And altogether, the remains of over a thousand ancient scrolls were found in those 11 caves. Now, for the most part, yeah, wow, indeed. But for the most part, what we have are just small fragments surviving from what were originally complete scrolls. But originally, these are remains of approximately a thousand different scrolls.

And about a quarter of them are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible. And sometimes we have multiple copies of individual books, like multiple copies of Isaiah, multiple copies of Deuteronomy, multiple copies of Psalms, like that. But in addition to those biblical books and works that are related to biblical books but are not included in the Bible, in addition to that, there are works that can be described as sectarian, which again means these are works that were composed by members of this sect, not necessarily at Qumran. Members of this sect lived all over the country, and some of these works were brought to Qumran from elsewhere. But these are works that were composed by members of this sect for their internal use, which described their

particular beliefs and practices and worldview. And examples of sectarian works would include the Damascus document, the community rule, which way back used to be called the manual of discipline, the war scroll. Maybe the temple scroll. There's debate about the temple scroll. Many people don't think that it's a sectarian composition, but there are works like The Temple Scroll, which aren't necessarily sectarian compositions, but are kind of weird and which somewhere in the first half of the second century BC against a background of events that is a little bit complicated. Basically, the sect, and now again, I'm going to go into the things where every single thing that I'm saying, somebody will disagree with, but I'm saying stuff that's pretty mainstream. The sect originally apparently was founded by and led by dispossessed Zadokite priests. So what the heck is a dispossessed Zadokite priest? So Zadokite, by the way, is spelled Z-A-D-O-K-I-T-E. Way, way back before

the time of Qumran, when Solomon, this is centuries earlier, Solomon built the first temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the first temple dedicated to the God of Israel on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, he appointed a man named Zadok, Z-A-D-O-K, to officiate as the first high priest in that temple. And from that point on, all of the high priests who officiated in the temple traced their ancestry back to Zadok, and they became known as the Zadokite line of high priests. Now, in the first half of the second century BC, through a very complicated series of events, the Zadokites lost control of the priesthood in the Jerusalem temple, and it was usurped by other priestly families that were not Zadokites. And by the way, Judaism, again, differed a little bit from most other ancient religions in that not everybody could serve as a priest. And in most other ancient religions in the Greek and Roman world, you could serve, you know, most people were eligible to serve as priests. Sometimes even women

could serve as priestesses if you donated enough money to the temple, right? But that wasn't it in Judaism. In Judaism, in order to serve as a priest, in order to be a priest, you had to be born into a priestly family. So it's a caste system. Ancient Judaism had a caste system. So there was a priestly caste. And today, by the way, anybody who's named Cohen, or some variation of that name, Cohen is the Hebrew word for priest. Anybody who's named Cohen today is ultimately from a priestly family, at least supposedly, right? Because that name becomes, and it's given through the father. It's traced back through the father. So anybody, Cohen, Khan, whatever, any kind of variation of that name. So this is still actually preserved in Judaism today.

Likewise, by the way, the Levites who were the attendants of the priests in the temple also, right? They're another separate cast. And so today, anybody with the name Levine, Levi, whatever, Levi, whatever, they're Levites, right? So what happens in the first half of the second century BC is that the priesthood in the Jerusalem temple is usurped by priests who are not Zadokites, not members of the Zadokite family. And the Zadokites become dispossessed, and they never again regained control of the priesthood in the Jerusalem temple. And at this point, the Zadokite family is a very big, you know, pretty powerful family. And different branches of this family go off in different directions. And one branch of this

family, by the way, stayed in Jerusalem and accommodated with the ruling powers and became part of the Jerusalem elite and become known as the Sadducees. Sadducee and Zadokite are exactly the same word in Hebrew, Stokene. Another branch of this family goes to Egypt and they're the Oniads and they established that alternate temple in Leontopolis. And another branch of the family apparently was instrumental in founding, and at least initially in leading, members of this sect that eventually, not immediately, but later settled at Qumran. And this was a sect, this branch again, this was a sect which believed that the current temple in Jerusalem was polluted, that the priests who had taken over were impure and unfit to serve, that they were doing things all wrong. And so they then sort of withdraw and constitute themselves

as this sort of substitute temple or, you know, desert tabernacle, and I think, you know, offered their own sacrifices at Qumran and awaited the day when they would regain control of the temple in Jerusalem and do things the way that they thought things should be done. And we learn from the scrolls and also, by the way, from our outside authors like Josephus, that it was not easy to become a member of this sect. It was full membership was only open to a very small segment of the overall population. So it was a very exclusive sect in order to qualify, not just for admission, in order to be eligible to apply for admission. You had to be an unblemished adult

Jewish male. Unblemished meaning that you could not have any physical or mental handicaps or disabilities so that rules out most of the population so if you were an adult male and you were you know you had some sort of a disability forget it females forget it children forget it non-jews forget it you could not you could not even apply for admission and once you did apply for admission you had to go through a two to three year long process of initiation to be admitted. Why did they have this weird parameter of, you know, unblemished adult Jewish male? That's because if you were ultimately admitted as a full member, you adopted the lifestyle of a priest serving in the Jerusalem temple. And one of the biblical requirements for priests serving in the Jerusalem temple is that they

had to be unblemished at all Jewish males, right? Again, you had to be a member of the cast, but you had to fulfill those criteria. So if you wanted to join the sect, you had to first fulfill those criteria. And then when you did apply, this long period of initiation involved, they were like examinations of your fitness to be a member of the sect. If you reached a certain point, you had to surrender your personal possessions to the sect because they practice the pulling of possessions. And then if you were admitted as a full member, you were living your life like

the lifestyle of a priest, which is a very difficult lifestyle because it means that you had to observe a very high level of Jewish ritual purity. So you had to be careful about who or what you came into contact with. So you would not become ritually impure. You could only consume the pure food and drink of the sect. It was specially produced pure food and drink. So ritually pure, not just kosher, ritually pure. So it's a really hard lifestyle. And it kind of raises the question of why you know, why anybody would actually want to, you know, join this kind of a sect. And I'll get to that in a minute. But before that, let me just say one more thing that we learn about from the scrolls. And that is that we learn about who their leader was, either the initial leader or the refounder of the sect. They referred to the

leader of the sect as a guy named the Teacher of Righteousness, or nick refounder of the sect, they refer to the leader of the sect as a guy named the teacher of righteousness or nicknamed the teacher of righteousness. So one of the peculiarities of the sectarian's roles is that a lot of times when they refer to real people, people who actually lived, they refer to them not by their real names, but by nicknames. So you get the teacher of righteousness, his opponent, the wicked priest, another guy, the man of lies, the lion of wrath. And one of the games the scholars play is trying to identify these nickname figures with known historical figures. And if you go online, which I don't advise doing, but if you go online and you Google around who the teacher of righteousness is, you're going to come across a lot of theories

that he was Jesus or John the Baptist or James the Just. And that's certainly not the case because the scrolls that refer to the teacher of righteousness were composed well before the time of Jesus. And in fact, the very nickname teacher of righteousness tells us who he is, not specifically, but generally, because the nicknames are not just nicknames, they're puns in Hebrew. They're Hebrew puns. To understand the pun, you kind of have to understand Hebrew, but I'll try and explain for teacher of righteousness. Teacher of righteousness in Hebrew is morehatzedek. Morehatzedek, literally teacher of the righteousness. Tzedek is righteousness. Now, in Hebrew, you write without vowels, like other Semitic languages, like Arabic, for example.

You just write, I know it sounds weird to somebody who doesn't know Semitic languages, but you write without vowels, so you just have consonants. And if you know the language, then you know what the vowels are. So tzedek, righteousness, is written Z-D-K. Z-D-K. Now, you can vocalize Z-D-K as tzedek, but you can also vocalize it as Sadok, Zadok. And so teacher of righteousness is actually, it's a pun, he apparently was a Zadokite priest. And so their initial leader or founder or re-founder maybe was a guy referred to as the teacher of righteousness who apparently was one of these dispossessed Zadokite priests. Exactly which one, we don't

know. There's a lot of scholarly speculation. But at any rate, okay, so this again hints at sort of the initial history of the sect. Going back then to this kind of lifestyle. So we learned, by the way, from the scrolls that members of this sect lived in towns and villages and cities around the country. There even was a group in Jerusalem, by the way. Most members apparently were married and had families. There's nothing in the sectarian scrolls that requires celibacy of full members, which makes sense because ancient Jewish priests were not

celibate. They were married and they had families. But when they went to the temple, and so what happens is in ancient Judaism, the priests served in what were called courses or rotations. So they would go to the temple for a couple of weeks, they would serve their rotation, and then they would go home to their families. So if we think about a group that's modeling their lifestyle along those lines, then it makes sense that they were married and had families, but maybe on some occasions, they would leave their families for a certain period of time, maybe to go to Qumran, we don't know, but whatever. But apparently, most of the members were married and had families. Certainly, we have sectarian scrolls that legislate for family

situations, marriage, divorce, childbirth, and so on. But it's possible, and there's been speculation among scholars, it's possible that maybe some members just carried this to its logical conclusion and remain celibate all the time. Again, there's no mandate for that in the sectarian scrolls, but maybe, and the reason for that is it's connected with what our ancient outside authors say about the Essenes, which is Cephas and Philo and Pliny say, and again, we can get back to that if you want. that most of the members, at least, were married and had families. But it was not an easy lifestyle, and membership was really open to only a very small segment, full membership at least, a very small segment of the overall population. So the question is, why would anybody be attracted to apply for admission to a group like this? And the simple answer is, this was an apocalyptic sect that believed the end of days was at hand and only

they were going to be saved. And just to be clear, the end of days scenarios. So today, when we think of end of days scenarios, I think most people tend to think of it as pretty awful, you know, like all this violence and everything coming to an end. And it's true that the idea of an end of days scenario as it evolves in early Judaism and then sort of enters into Christianity does start off with a lot of violence, right? The current world order is overthrown. There's violence and wars and stuff like that, turmoil. But the ultimate result is the establishment of God's kingdom on earth, which is a utopia, which means that everybody is living in the presence of God. Everything in the presence of God, by the way, is whole and perfect. This is why only unblemished adult Jewish men could serve

as priests in the Jerusalem temple, because everything that's in the direct presence of the God of Israel has to be perfect and unblemished. That's why only unblemished animals could be offered for sacrifice to the God of Israel. So you're basically talking about an end-of-day scenario that culminates with the establishment of God's kingdom on earth that is a utopia. And that means there's no disease, there's no hunger, right? That sounds great. And if you believe that this is about to happen, you're going to want to be a part of that. And if you do not fulfill certain criteria, and many people actually who are looking forward to various end of day scenarios today believe this as well, if you do

not fulfill certain criteria, you won't be eligible to enter God's kingdom on earth. So who's going to be eligible? So this group believed that only they would be eligible and nobody else, including, by the way, all the other Jews, right? So, yeah, I mean, that's a pretty attractive message if you believe that. And we know this because it's documented, for example, in the War Scroll, is that this end-of-day scenario would be ushered in by a 40-year-long war between the forces of good and the forces of evil. They were the forces of good. They called themselves the sons of light. Everybody else was the forces of evil. They were the forces of good. They called themselves the sons of light. Everybody else was the sons of darkness. That it would also be ushered in by the arrival of

a messianic figure, a Messiah, but actually a little different from everybody else, from all other Jews. They anticipated the arrival of not one Messiah. Typically what becomes eventually canonical in Judaism, and also, by the way, Christianity is a single Messiah, and that Messiah is a royal Messiah descended from David, right, a Messiah of Israel. They added a second Messiah that is a priestly Messiah descended from Aaron, which isn't surprising considering the priestly orientation of the sect. Some scholars think they anticipated even the arrival of a third messiah, a prophetic messiah, and that you'd have this then scenario of this

really, you know, extended period of horrible war and violence, this 40-year-long war, these messianic figures, and that it would all end with the victory of the sons of light, their victory over the sons of darkness, and then ultimately culminate with the victory of the Sons of Light, their victory over the Sons of Darkness, and then ultimately culminate with the establishment of God's kingdom on earth. And one of the peculiarities of this sect is that they believed in predeterminism, that everything is preordained by God. So, this 40-year-long war is preordained by God. The Blue Peril is in the War Scroll. People can read it, right? This is what they thought was going to happen. It's a very interesting description of the war. There's some really weird things about it. But they didn't just believe that events were preordained by God,

but everything is preordained by God, meaning that there's no human free will at all. That God has predetermined everything that's going to happen, everything that you're going to do, and not just everything that you're going to do, but your personal makeup as an individual is preordained by God. You have no human free will. So how many parts of you are good? How many parts of you are evil? All of that is preordained by God before you're born. And that, by the way, was one of the reasons that they have this long initiation procedure, which is to try and ascertain how many parts of you are good and how many parts of you are evil, and whether then you're actually eligible for membership in the sect,

right? And the ultimate outcome then is they win, God's kingdom on earth is established. And as I said, many scholars, including myself, identify this group with the Essenes, which is a Jewish sect that is described in our contemporary ancient sources, meaning 1st century BC, 1st century AD, primarily Josephus, the ancient Jewish historian, but also Philo, the Jewish philosopher from Alexandria in Egypt, and Pliny the Elder, the same Roman Pliny who died when Mount Vesuvius erupted. They all talk about a Jewish sect called the Essenes. Pliny actually, even though he probably was never near an Essene in his life and got his information from some secondhand source and gives a very confused description, is the only one of our ancient authors who gives a

geographical location for them. And he says that they live, basically here I'm paraphrasing, but he says basically they live on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea to the north of En Gedi among the date palms, in other words, in the same area where Qumran is located. And so again, because of the correspondences between the information in these ancient sources and the information that we have in the scrolls, many scholars, including myself, identify the sect that lived at Qumran with the Essenes. Now, there is one more thing, and that is the connection of Jesus, right? So again, a lot of people, I think, have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls and think that they have something to do with Jesus, which they don't.

Exactly, Jodie. This is exactly what I kind of get onto now. It's that kind of thing, isn't it? We talk about the sects and if Jesus, he talks to these different groups of Jews, doesn't he, in his teachings? I'm guessing that's where we're going to next. So one of the reasons I think why a lot of people think that the Qumran sect, the Dead Sea Scrolls, have something to do with Jesus is because when the Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered and were studied for publication by Deveaux and members of the team who he initially assembled to work on the publication of the scrolls were all Christian, meaning Protestant and Catholic, scholars from Western Europe, mostly Western Europe and interest. And so, very early on in the popular imagination as, you know, the discovery of the scrolls became very publicized, in the popular imagination, this connection between Dead Sea Scrolls and Jesus was sort of established. And I think that has remained the case until today. Now, we know at this point that the Dead Sea Scrolls have nothing to do directly with Jesus, although they are important because they give us information about a Jewish sect that existed at the time of Jesus.

So what you have to imagine is that Jewish society in this period was very complex, just as it is today and just as people are in general. So there were many different Jewish groups and movements, and they're all Jewish. They all accept biblical law. Where they differ is in their interpretation of specific points of law, right? How do you properly interpret and practice specific points of law? And that's where they disagreed. And so the group that we have at Qumran is not Jesus' sect. There are clearly differences between Jesus' sect and this

group, but there are similarities too, because if you take any two groups randomly, they're going to have some similarities and some differences. And so the similarities and differences actually are informative in terms of helping to understand Jesus' background, if not Jesus and the Gospels themselves, right? So just to give a couple of examples. So there are a number of these very interesting correspondences. So for example, both groups practice or have communal meals. And both groups sort of express this imagery of a dichotomy between light and dark. And both groups, I think actually a lot of the similarities are because both groups are apocalyptic sects, basically, right? Sects that believe that either the end of days is about

to start or even has already gotten underway. And it's that apocalyptic outlook that really, you know, makes the groups look similar in some ways. But then there are some very, very striking differences. For example, you know, I don't think that Jesus ever preached that there is no free human will at all, even though we do find that later in Calvinism. But I don't see that in the gospel accounts, for example, right? Certainly, Jesus' followers did not anticipate the arrival of more than one Messiah. To the contrary, they saw Jesus as embodying the priestly, the Davidic, royal, and the prophetic in himself, right? I mean, there are all sorts of really, these are crucial differences, but I think that there are two differences that are really big.

And one difference is the ritual purity thing. Because again, members of this group observed the highest level of Jewish ritual purity and actually more strictly than other Jews. They had a very strict interpretation, very rigid interpretation of Jewish law. But then if you look at, and if we take the gospel account seriously in this regard, you see Jesus, I don't think he disregarded the need for Jewish purity, for ritual purity, but you do see him doing things that no Essene would ever have done. Coming into contact with women who have a hemorrhage, who are bleeding, for example, which is a real big kind of ritual purity. Lepers, ooh, that's very big. Even corpses, which is the worst kind of ritual impurity, right?

So there's a real big difference here. And again, I don't think, I really do not think at all that Jesus disregarded the need to observe purity laws, but it's a difference of how you interpret the need to observe those purity laws and the kind of lifestyle you're living. So first of all, there's a very big difference there. And the second difference, no less important, big difference is the inclusive versus exclusive thing, right? So this group at Qumran was exclusive, right? You had to fulfill very specific criteria to be even eligible to apply for admission, and only a very small proportion of the population was eligible. Whereas, again, if we take the gospel account seriously in this regard, Jesus welcomed everybody among his followers, right? There were no preconditions. There were no criteria,

right? Anybody was welcome to follow him. And so, make no mistake about it. There's no way, and if you go, again, if you go online, you'll see there are lots of claims that Jesus wasn't a scene. There's no way on earth that Jesus wasn't a scene. And also, by the way, from what we know, and again, the gospel accounts don't really give us a lot of information about Jesus until the very end of his life. But apparently most of his ministry, most of his time was spent in Galilee, which is very far removed from where Qumran is located physically. So, most of the interactions between Jesus and other groups that are reported in the gospel accounts have to do with the Pharisees, who apparently were far more active in Galilee than the Essenes. Not to say there couldn't have been Essenes in Galilee, but again, you don't hear about Essenes in the Dead Sea Scrolls and all, I mean, the Essenes overall were a really small and marginal sect. I mean, they had a small number of members. They were not influential in the overall population. They're this weird extreme group. It's just that we have their, you know, this literature. And so for us, the corpus of literature has kind of thrust them into a much more central position in the way that

we study Judaism in this period. So it's kind of an accident of discovery or accident of preservation. There is one figure in early Christian tradition, or in Jesus's movement, who might have a direct connection to the Essenes, and that is John the Baptist. And the reason is, of course, John the Baptist was active in the same time Qumran existed in the vicinity of the site of Qumran. And the reason is, of course, John the Baptist was active in the same time Qumran existed in the vicinity of the site of Qumran. And he apparently was from a priestly family. He lived an ascetic lifestyle, meaning he lived very simply. He denied himself physical pleasures, and that's one characteristic of the Essenes also. So he had a very simple diet. He wore simple clothing. He lived in the desert, right? And Qumran

is in the same kind of desert environment. And he apparently had this concern with immersion in water, purification by immersion in water. Now, let me just clarify that all Jews in this period believed that you had to immerse in water, in certain types of water, in order to ritually purify yourself. So this is not, right, not something that no other Jews are doing. But again, you get this kind of connection between ritual immersion in water and purification, and interestingly, not just purification of the body, but to, in a sense, also purification of the spirit or the soul, right, with purification. In biblical Judaism, you know, in normative Judaism, ritual purification has nothing to do with cleansing from sin. It's a kind of a mechanical kind of a thing. But in the

Qumran, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the sectarian literature, there is kind of this connection made between ritual immersion and sin in the sense that ritual immersion alone will not purify you from sin unless you do what's necessary to purify yourself from sin as well. So it's not exactly the same as in Christianity, but there's this very interesting kind of connection. So could it be that John the Baptist was a member of the Qumran sect at some point in his life, and that this influenced his beliefs and practices. And then we see this by way of John the Baptist kind of entering into Christianity then through, you know, the baptism of Jesus. And okay, so before I go on, I will just say that eventually what happens in Christianity is that baptism, which does derive

from ritual purification in Judaism, immersion in water, becomes something very different, very different. Because in Judaism, ritual immersion is required repeatedly. Every time you become ritually impure and you want to enter the presence of the God of Israel, you have to ritually purify yourself again. And it's a mechanical process. Whereas in Christianity, eventually baptism becomes a one-time event for cleansing from sin, right? So it becomes something different eventually, but initially they come out of the same thing. So it's really impossible to know if John the Baptist was ever a member of the Qumran sect. It's possible, but in my opinion, even if he was

at some point a member of the Qumran sect at some point in his life, by the time we read about him and his activities in the pages of the New Testament, he's no longer a member of this sect. And the reason is that the things that he's doing are different. And so, for example, just to give a couple of examples, his diet is different, right? So the diet of a full member of the Qumran sect was the pure food and drink of the sect. What's John the Baptist consuming? He's consuming locusts and wild honey, which is very interesting. By the way, locusts, or at least certain species of locusts, are biblically permitted, are kosher. Locusts and wild honey

are unprocessed foods. They're wild foods that you gather. And so they were ritually pure because they had not been processed. But that's his diet. So his diet is different. Even though he's eating, you know, biblically permitted foods, it's a different diet. And his clothing is different. What is he wearing? He's wearing a tunic made of camel hair. Now, camel hair, why camel hair? It's, you know, most Jews in this period actually wore wool clothing, what we do have remains of Jewish clothing in this period. And they were wearing wool, but the wool was generally sheep or goat wool, not camel. Why camel? Camel is very coarse. So it's going to be really scratchy and uncomfortable. And this is reflecting

John's asceticism, his ascetic lifestyle, right? He's denying himself physical pleasures. He's wearing the coarsest kind of clothing possible. What did full members of the Essene sect wear? They wore all linen all the time. And the reason is because priests serving in the temple wore linen. So again, they adopted the priestly lifestyle, including the same kind of clothing that the priests wore, meaning that they wore linen. And then if, again, you look at the theology behind what John is trying to achieve through baptism, through immersion in water, and you read what's in the Dead Sea Scrolls, even though, again, there's this kind of very interesting hint of a connection between cleansing from sin and cleansing from just ritual purity, it's different. There are subtle differences. So overall, I think

there's no way to conclude one way or another whether John the Baptist was actually ever a member of the Qumran sect. We can't rule it out. But I think that if he was, by the time we read about him, he had gone in his own direction. So he might be a kind of an indirect link through which some of the influences between the Qumran sect, the Essenes, and Jesus' movement, he might be one of these kind of indirect links. And I think that's about as much as we can say for that. It is so interesting, isn't it, about how these scrolls and all of that information, you force of nature, Jodie, that you've included there in that explanation, how, as you say, if this was a small sect, and we can't say for certain if John the Baptist was part of it,

but how the discovery of these scrolls and the information that they provide, that fascinating information that they can provide about this one part of Jewish history at that time in the 1st century BC and AD. Over time, these scrolls have, as we mentioned right at the start, become one of the most important discoveries in Holy Land archaeology. Absolutely, yeah. Part of it has to do with the geography of the Holy Land. So even though we tend to think of the entire Middle East as desert, a lot of the parts of what is today, let's say Israel and the Palestinian territories, and especially the kinds of sites that we're talking about are in parts of the country that

are more humid and get a fair amount of rain, if not like a lot of rain. And so we don't have a lot of places where these sorts of scrolls, the scrolls, by the way, are made of parchment, which is processed animal hide. So we don't have a lot of places where these sorts of organic materials, like parchment, are preserved. And this is in contrast with like Egypt, for example, right? So why do we have all these spectacular discoveries from Egypt? Because it's so arid that you get things preserved there that you don't get preserved anywhere else, right? Things made of wood and made of cloth and, you know, all different kinds of organic materials. So the Dead Sea Scrolls are somewhat exceptional for the area of Israel and the Palestinian

territories because we don't have a lot of these sorts of organic materials preserved otherwise. And in the case of Qumran, it's precisely because they were preserved in a desert environment, in a very arid environment, and in caves which were basically left undiscovered until the 20th century, right? I mean, there must have been lots and lots of this sort of stuff in the country in antiquity, but it just has not been preserved. They have not been preserved. And so once again, that makes, as you've highlighted there, that discovery so, so significant and extraordinary in those more than 10 cave sites,

as we've talked about. Something we talked about right at the start, if we're really going to wrap up now, Jodie, this has been fascinating. But I'd like to ask about the whole reason as to why those scrolls, let's say written by this sect living at Qumran, end up in these various caves. Now, is it potentially to do with the Romans? Or we've also mentioned the word library too. So what's the theories around why they end up in these caves? Right. Great question. And again, this is something where there's no scholarly consensus at all. So everybody has different opinions about it. Without going into other people's opinions, I'll give you mine. So first of all, I do think that at least some of

the scrolls were deposited in the caves for safekeeping on the eve of the Roman destruction of the site in 68. But I do think also that some of the scrolls were deposited for storage purposes in the caves, even during the lifetime of the settlement. So there's that. If there were scrolls at the site, and there probably were, by the way, they would have been destroyed when the Romans burned the site down in 68. So in 68, the Romans come through and they burn the site down. There may have been scrolls at the site. The caves weren't burned down, so the scrolls were preserved there.

But there might have been scrolls at the site itself. There is one cave, Cave 4, which yielded the lion's share of the scroll material. The remains of over 600 scrolls were found in Cave 4, and that's the cave that most people see from the site when they visit the site. But those scrolls in Cave 4, those scrolls were very fragmentary. They were in very bad condition, so they're not complete scrolls. Like in cave one, the first cave that was discovered, the scrolls were complete or nearly complete. But in cave four, there are lots of fragments of lots of different scrolls were placed. And it's certainly possible. I mean, you do have to kind of explain why so many scrolls were in K4, but we can only speculate. In other words, we don't know and there's just no scholarly consensus about this. Well, fair enough. Well, that's a nice mystery to end it on, Jodie. This has been absolutely brilliant. We've covered so much about the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran.

Last but certainly not least, you have written a book all about Qumran about the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran. Last but certainly not least, you have written a book all about Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls with various editions, which is called? Yeah, it's called The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. I'm really bad at titles, by the way. And by the way, I have a book that people always talk about, which is called Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit, Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus. Not my title. That was the publisher's title, which, yeah, okay, my titles are boring titles. So, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I originally published in 2002, and then a revised edition was published in 2021. Actually, what had happened is that the publisher had been after me for a

while to update the book, which it did need to be updated, frankly, but I never had time. And then when Corona hit, and we were all stuck at home, and I was sitting here and I was like, well, I guess I have time now to update the book. So it's a product of the pandemic. Yeah, shut down. I was able to sit here and revise it. So that's the second edition that came out. And that edition has some differences from the first one, including, for example, my new views on the animal bone deposits, right? And some other things. Brilliant. Well, Jodie, as you say, so much time found in the pandemic wasn't there and lots of books have been written, including your second edition of that book on Qumran and the archaeology. It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, there you go.

There was the end of our special two-parter all about the Dead Sea Scrolls with the legend that is Dr. Jodie Magnus. Her knowledge on the scrolls is extraordinary. The knowledge on the scrolls is extraordinary. And it was a pleasure just to listen to her explaining her theories behind the Essenes, Qumran, the scrolls themselves, the role of Qumran, the type of settlement that it was, what she has been able to propose from the surviving archaeology. Don't you worry, Jodie will be back in the future. There'll be more topics that we can talk about together. Now, last things from me, we, the ancients,

we've been nominated for an award. The first time ever for the ancients. It is really exciting. For the best single history podcast episode at the Signal Awards, there is a link in the description where you can go and vote for our episode. It is our episode from earlier in the summer with my old professor Alistair Blanchard

from the University of Queensland, where we talk all things Achilles. That was a great episode. We were up against Dan in the awards too. We've got to beat Dan. We have to. And I need your help. It's such a pleasure doing this podcast, and I just ask to click the link in the description below and to vote for the Ancients at the Signal Awards.

Hopefully, we can bring it home to Ancients HQ. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode. Thank you.