Within Reason - #97 Kipp Davis - What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Episode Date: March 2, 2025

Kipp Davis (‪@DrKippDavis‬) is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway, where he specialises in the assignment and reconstruction of fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls and their interpretation. (Google Books) The Dead Sea Scrolls are a set of ancient Jewish manuscripts from the Second Temple period. They were discovered over a period of 10 years, between 1946 and 1956, at the Qumran Caves near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the northern shore of the Dead Sea. Dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, the Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the biblical canons, including deuterocanonical manuscripts from late Second Temple Judaism and extrabiblical books. At the same time, they cast new light on the emergence of Christianity and of Rabbinic Judaism. (Wikipedia) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

uh there's kind of a cachet with the scrolls too it just sort of feels like like i noticed that with the danny jones podcast too right like in the uh the the episode i did with him i think has has 700 000 views or what have you where like it's it's twice as many as like the stuff that he did for several months prior to that and then afterwards too right so it's but i think no i i mean maybe but uh i suspect as soon as you stick that in the title people are like well this is the this is the dan brown effect right this is the one thing prior to when i read the novel. I heard about the novel, but people were like super excited about it, right? And I figured I need to read this. And when I did read it, I chuckled because there's, there's like

this one part in it where he meets with the scholar, philanthropist billionaire, what's his name, Teabing, I think is the character's name, who's providing them all this evidence, right, for the, for the Merivengian connection to Jesus. And then he's like, well, you know, where does, like, tracing the threads of this, he's like, how far back to you connect this or where does this connect? And the guy just says, well, all you have to do is read the Dead Sea Scrolls. And that was it. It's the only thing he said about it, right? Does it really say it? He does. He really does and it probably it's it's the sort of thing that most people would not uh remember right but because it's me because it's any anybody who's who's in the field it's all we're like fucking guy right

like it it's it's it's like and he doesn't explain anything either like it just doesn't even attempt it's just a throw away line and i'm sure it's because it sounds great Well, the thing about the death of the scrolls is that they are, even the name, like, because they happen to have been discovered near something called the Dead Sea, there's just something so sort of mysterious about it. There's a mystique to it. It's got that Dan Brown thing. It's got the sort of like hidden texts in the desert, the sort of gnostic gospel feeling of these texts that get dug up kind of thing. So what actually are the Dead Sea Scrolls? What all right.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of Jewish, or I should say of a series of collections of Jewish manuscripts dating between the 3rd century BCE to roughly the second century CE, so covering a period of maybe 400 years, probably a little less than that, though. And they are manuscripts, they're scrolls that were discovered in a series of sites along the western shore of the Dead Sea in Israel. Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls came from a site we call Qumran, which comprised 11 caves. And I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about that as we move forward. and these were the first of the scrolls were discovered in this area, but the term has come to cover a lot more material since then.

There have been discoveries of manuscripts further south of Qumran at places like Murabat and Nakhal-Khaver and Masara, I'm sure you've heard of. The Masara is the spur on the cliffs on the southern shore of the dead, sea where Herod the Great built his winter palace. Yes, I've been there. And yes, it's, did, did you take the tram or did you hike it? We took the tram. We were short on time, okay?

We weren't, right. Yeah, no, I, I, I need to. So, and, and that's the, I, I can, I can provide the excuse that I was, I was traveling with Peter Flint and he really, really wanted to take the tram and didn't want to hike. So there you go. But, uh, yes. But when you were at Masada, undoubtedly, they pointed out, or you saw the so-called synagogue on the site. I'm sure we will have been, well, actually, we didn't have a tour or anything.

We were just walking around. And so I'm not sure that we will have noticed, to be honest. So there's a, there's a structure that has been identified as a synagogue just on the basis. it's a meeting hall, right? And it's got some, it's got like stone benches built into the sides of the walls and like Roman pillars sort of in the center of it. And it resembles what we know of Jewish synagogues from later periods of time. So this has been commonly interpreted as a synagogue.

It might be, I just don't know, but one of the really interesting things about it, and this probably led to further solidify this identification. There was a, I think it was a wall compartment or a floor compartment near this particular structure where they opened it up and they found Hebrew manuscripts. manuscripts written in Hebrew, Jewish manuscripts, copies of text from the Old Testament, but also some other really interesting things. Like there is a Hebrew copy that was discovered there of the book of Ben Sira, which we only know from the Greek. This is one of the apocryphal books. And here they discovered a copy of Hebrew text from Ben Sera, one of the only.

copies we have. But anyways, the Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish manuscripts that were discovered in this region, basically, the Judean desert in and around the Dead Sea. And in terms of the numbers, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of scrolls that were written predominantly, dominantly on vellum or leather, but a handful also on papyrus, and quite a few containing texts from the Old Testament, from the Hebrew Bible, but this probably only represents about 30% of the total number of texts. There's a lot more literature in this grouping of manuscripts. So that's what they are. The biblical stuff is what most people are interested in, because these are discovered in the mid-40s, right, 45 or 47 around there, I think.

Yeah, so they were first discovered in 1947. The discoveries extend generally from 1947 to closer to 1960, when some of the later manuscripts in the in caves were found. It's a fairly famous story. A shepherd looking for his lost sheep, throws a rock into a cave. And here's the shattering of pottery. When he goes in to check things out,

he discovers these bundles wrapped in in cloth and soaked in like an oil. and he sees a bunch of jars sort of strewn around the cave. And when they open these up, they discover that they're complete intact scrolls. Now, the remarkable thing about the discovery right away, as you point out, most people are interested in the fact that large numbers of these are biblical manuscripts. And in fact, this first one that was taken out by,

the Ta'amira Bedouin shepherd who found it was the great Isaiah scroll. 1Q Isaiah A, a completely intact copy of the book of Isaiah that scholars have now reliably dated to the end of the 2nd century BCE, maybe the beginning of the first century BCE. But remarkable in the fact that it was complete. It was word for word identical. with the Masoretic text.

That's it. That's exactly it. As we've come to learn. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. And yes, there's a hundred different ways you can validate that statement apparently. An intact version. And this is the remarkable thing, right?

So prior to this time, we had copies of Hebrew Bible texts from the medieval period. the earliest Hebrew manuscripts from which modern Bibles were translated were the Leningrad Codex or the Aleppo Codex, which date to the 10th century. So these are properly medieval manuscripts. There's a small handful of other fragmentary Hebrew texts sort of in circulation at the time. A famous one is at the University of Cambridge. It's called the Nash Papyrus. It dates probably to the first century BC. It's a single sheet measuring maybe 20 centimeters by 10 centimeters,

and it contains text of the Ten Commandments from both versions in Exodus and in Deuteronomy sort of spliced and dispersed together. So that was one of our earliest main. manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And then there's a smattering of small fragments that you can still go look at. I think at my alma mater at the University of Manchester, they have a handful of early Hebrew manuscript fragments. And when I say early, I mean, you know, a third, second, first century C.E.A.D. copies of Hebrew. Bible texts.

So when the great Isaiah scroll was discovered suddenly, and I think you have to imagine just how dramatic this was in the moment, where once, and I think maybe I need to set this up a little bit, there was a running scholarly assumption that something that big just could not survive under those conditions in that area, that scholars. had given up hope of finding anything like the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of the reasons for this I think had to do with something called the Shapiro, the Shapiro Scrolls or the Shapira forgeries, which were purported to be copies of very ancient Bible manuscripts that were were being promoted as

6th century BCE turns out they're probably fakes they're lost they they got lost somewhere in the British Library so they're gone so we can't we can't check anymore but at the time they were discovered near the end of the 19th century the scholarly consensus the the opinion of

almost all experts who looked at them who actually saw them said yeah these are these are fakes and of course they're fakes because there's just no way anything could survive from that far back for this long under those conditions where they were found. So I think there was that one of the reasons this was such a surprising discovery was because of this prevailing sentiment, you know, at the time of the 40s and the 1950s when the great Isaiah scroll was discovered, and lo and behold, it's a completely intact

copy of the book of Isaiah that measures, you know, like nine meters long. It's a, it's a magnificent artifact. Yeah, you've seen the real thing, right? I have. I've worked. I've spent a week of my life working on the real thing inside the vault at the shrine of the book, shrine of the book in Jerusalem. When people go to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, very often this is the place where they will go. There is a subterranean, a beautiful subterranean exhibit on the property there

called the Shrine of the Book. And on display in the rotundra, right in the center of the exhibit is a replica, an exact replica of the manuscript 1 Q Isaiah A.

And they will put in and out of circulation, smaller fragments from some of the other manuscripts, but nothing is ever on permanent display, and the reason for this is because the worst things for ancient manuscripts are light and humidity, and certainly the changing light and changing humidity. So we have very tragically also, you know, come to discover over the last 70 years of working on these things, just how terribly fragile they are. Because the fragments that are still there at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, even though they are strictly climate controlled and light controlled and guarded.

environmentally protected to the best of their ability they are still falling apart before our very eyes and and yes so all that to say yes I've been inside the vault

with the genuine article with the real thing where I spent a week working as a PhD student with one of my my supervisors and mentors, Peter W. Flint, and Eugene Alrick, who published the official edition of both OneQ Isaiah A and OneQ Isaiah B. We'll get back to Kit in just a moment, but first, something that's really important to manuscript scholars is objectivity, and that's got a lot to do

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Use my link to get 40% off their unlimited access vantage plan. That said, back to KIP. Yeah, and it's quite astonishing in many ways. I mean, talking about how it's degraded just being in the museum, the fact that it survived for, you know, so, so long, thousands of years. in the desert is pretty incredible, and it's just so fortunate. It really is. The desert conditions just happen to be wonderful for preserving manuscripts, which is why if you want to find ancient manuscripts, biblical manuscripts, you don't go to biblical sites.

You go to Egypt. You go to Qumran, because these places just happen to be really good for the preservation of manuscripts. When the gospel of Judas was described. discovered, the apocry gospel of Judas, was dug up from the desert. And before it got published, there were a bunch of people trying to sell it, and it moved around. And it spent something like 10 years in a safety deposit box in New York City, which almost destroyed it. It's just unfathomable how delicate these things are and how mistreated they often are by people who just don't know what they're doing.

It's true. It's very true. And, you know, we have, it's been a learning process. for scholars over the course of the last 60 or 70 years of discovery. There's a similar story, actually, about some of the scrolls in the first discoveries. When 1Q Isaiah A is purported to be the one that was first taken by the Bedouin out of the cave, but they actually took seven manuscripts in total. These were one Q Isaiah A, one Q Isaiah B, a text known as the War Scroll, which in itself is a pretty remarkable apocalyptic telling somewhat similar to things that you read in the book of Revelation about the battle between the Sons of Light

and the Sons of Darkness in the last days. And then they found a commentary on the book of Habakkuk. where text from the biblical prophetic book of Habakkuk would be quoted, followed by a contemporary interpretation as to what it means for the people who were living at that time. And then there were rule texts, so-called community rule, which told of regulations for living in this Jewish community, which we believe were the ones responsible for writing. and collecting the scrolls. And then another text called the Haudaiot,

which is a large, rather exquisite collection of poems and songs, sounding very similar to things that you read in the book of Psalms, but 100% entirely different, a completely unique poetical composition in the same genre from a later period in time. And then finally, the Genesis Apocryphon, which is an Aramaic text. It's important for me to point out, not all the texts were written in Hebrew. We have hundreds of manuscripts in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written in Aramaic,

which is really interesting in a couple of regards. And I won't get into it, but it's sort of a fascinating turn. on what this collection is and who is putting it together. And it tells us something, too, about just, you know, Jewish literacy within Jewish Palestine, Greco-Roman Palestine, and the ways people were interacting with their text. So there were these seven manuscripts, which were part of the first discovery. The reason why the great Isaiah Scroll is called 1Q Isaiah A, is is it so one q refers to the first cave of kumran so like one q one kumran and then it'll be

icer for isaiah the name of the text and then a because it's like the first version so you'll also have like and you you you've got like uh i suppose there's is there a one q isaiah b i know there's a four q isaiah a and a four q is i b there'll be a one q isaiah b and they all have this kind so when you see these fancy sort of looking words it's it helpful to that I think that helps to sort of yeah that's good yeah absolutely and every so every every manuscript gets gets both a catalog designation like that um and also a catalog number so I believe some of the catalog numbers you just

never hear um like I believe one Q Isaiah A is actually one Q eight or seven Um, but again, I don't even know because it's, it's just, the number is, fancy sounding terms, but just bear in mind that you're looking at the name of the, the number of the cave and then the, the kind of the correct. And there were, so there were 11 caves, right? And there were manuscripts discovered in 10 of the 11 caves. There were no manuscripts covered discovered in, uh, cave 10 itself. Uh, so that's, that's, That's where the numbers come from. So all of these ones from the first discoveries are 1Q manuscripts. So 1Q Isaiah A, 1Q, Peshire, Habakkuk, which is the way we talk about a commentary. And then 1QM, which is the short form for the Milchama, is the Hebrew word. word for war, and then 1QH, which is short for Chodayot, the Hebrew word for praises for the so-called Thanksgiving hymns, that sort of thing. So there were these seven manuscripts that were

discovered at first. The Bedouin who found them held onto them for some time, and originally also struggled to find someone interested in buying them. In Bethlehem, they circulated them among antiquities dealers and, you know, people in, merchants working in the markets and not getting much traction. They were eventually sold to, four of them were eventually sold to an antiquities dealer and a cobbler in Bethlehem by the name of, Iskander Shahin, he's more commonly known as Kando, and he ended up being basically the broker for sales of manuscript fragments that the Bedouin continued to find in the desert and the archaeologists

who worked on the text. But from this first discovery, he purchased four. The remaining three were handed off to a friend of his by the name of George's Say. And George Isay also was in contact with a professor at the Hebrew University by the name of Ilyezer Sucenic, a professor of archaeology, who was one of the first scholars to see the Dead Sea Scrolls and was so excited about what he saw that he, with some doing managed to secure some money from the Hebrew University to purchase.

He wanted to purchase all of them, but only had the opportunity to purchase the other three that weren't already bought by Kando. Now, so they ended up, the first seven ended up being split up right away. Three of them ended up at the Hebrew University. The remaining four, Kando then he was brokering this sale. with a Syrian Orthodox priest by the name of shoot. What's his name? Sorry, Athanasius Samuel.

So the four ended up with the Syrian Orthodox priest, Athanasius Samuel. And this all happened as well in 1947. So, at the same time, the Second World had ended a few years before, there was a strong movement afoot for an independent state of Israel. There was a lot of tension in the city of Jerusalem and certainly in the region, and in November of 1947, the state of 17, the state of Israel was a few. officially declared and ratified by the United Nations. The British mandate had come to an end, and many people who were living in the region packed up and left,

in large part just because of increased political tension and things that were going on in the rest of the world. And Athanasius Samuel packed his stuff up, including his four scrolls, and went to the United States. There's some very good old video recordings of some of the manuscripts, some of the scrolls themselves. And a number of these actually come from places like the Library of Congress or from Johns Hopkins University, where

Athanasia Samuel was on a month's long tour of the U.S. with his four manuscripts attempting to find a buyer and unsuccessfully so at that. And the reason for this was because with the recent establishment of the state of Israel, there was growing concern that this new state of Israel would then just nationalize everything that ended up on the market and in so doing basically annex it and take it back into their own so this for two years Athanasia Samuel wandered around without able to find any buyers for these these four fabulous manuscripts that he had he famously took out an advertisement in the classifieds of the Wall Street Journal the heading on it is four Dead Sea Scrolls for sale.

And the body of the text says, these would make a wonderful gift for an academic institution or for a religious institution of some sort. So there is this ongoing, I think this is kind of the nature of working with antiquities and with material culture, of all sorts and a lot of this is just because this is such sensitive material with such wide ranging uh implications religious implications but also uh political implications as well um most of

it ends up going underground and and passing through uh shady antiquities dealers or or places like that before ever seeing the light of day But, yeah, the scrolls are no exception. It's a hell of the story. I mean, it's always the case with these manuscripts, discoveries, and transportation. It's shocking and weird and incredible. But eventually, these manuscripts are translated. You can read them online.

Like, we know what's inside them. And they've been studied to a pretty extensive degree. But people might sort of forget that 1947 isn't that long ago. compare it to new testament studies which you know even even at that time even in the 40s new testament studies was small enough that like there's nothing like the kind of materials even that we have today let's people have been studying these texts for thousands incalculably years than then and so although a lot of study has been done into the into the dead sea scrolls there's still so much being done and some cutting edge stuff that you've been telling me about

which we'll we'll get into that's incredibly interesting but the thing about the like, you know, looking at the Isaiah scroll, is that, you know, Christians, Jews, they discover the Wonky Isaiah A, and they all sort of go, few. Like, okay, thank goodness, because they could have unearthed a text that was completely different to the version that we have today, and it would have really upset the idea that the Bible is the inspired word of God. But luckily, with some variants, The text was almost identical, and so told us something important about the preservation of biblical texts and gave us an indication into the care that is taken in preserving this story of the Book of Isaiah, right? Yeah, but and I think, too, you raise a couple of important issues with that observation, Alex.

On the one hand, I think it's worth mentioning here. I talked just very briefly about these Shapira forgeries from the late 19th century, which kind of informed, affected scholarly opinions about what's even possible. Right. One of, I think, the motivating factors in terms of how scholars approached those particular manuscripts is in that these did not match up identically with the biblical text. In this case, the biblical text of Deuteronomy. One of the things that we know about these transcriptions of these forgeries is that they presented an elaborately different version of the book.

of Deuteronomy, and one that confirms or aligns with scholarly views about the composition of the Book of Deuteronomy from the sixth century, sorry, the seventh century, and as a text that developed over time. I think this has an effect on the way that scholars even will handle these materials. The excitement and the attention that the Dead Sea Scrolls gained at their discovery was very much fueled by these questions. What does this do for our, for whatever it is we know about the text of the Bible. How does this affect what we think we know about early Christianity, even? Yes, because, of course, this time that the Dead Sea Scrolls are written, broadly speaking,

I mean, it's a few hundred years, but it roughly coincides with the time of Christ. So although it doesn't say anything about Jesus, there's no New Testament manuscripts or anything like that, what we do have is an indication of the kind of things that Jews, believed at the time that Jesus was alive, or just before Jesus came, which is incredibly useful of its own accord, even if we don't have any Christian literature among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Very much so. In fact, this is one of the directions. I mean, there's a number of things that we could talk about in terms of how the Dead Sea Scrolls have affected biblical scholarship more generally. And just in a few ways, not just, they've not just been extremely valuable

for increasing our understanding of the text of the Bible at this period of time. They provided a window into Jewish culture at the time of Jesus or leading up to the time of Jesus and the emergence of the church. And this has been, in large part, a surprise. The Dead Sea Scrolls over the course of the last 60 or 70 years have really had a significant effect in overturning and revolutionizing our understanding of the shape of early Judaism, in some pretty exciting and some really interesting ways. You know, most of the, most of the first scholars, sorry, I should correct myself,

all of the first scholars who saw handled and worked with the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s and the 50s were Christians. They were not Jewish. And this also had a major effect on the ways in which certainly in the early days, the scrolls were organized or collected and interpreted. For example, the scrolls were housed and kept basically and studied at the Echolbiblique, which is the Dominican French school of archaeology in East Jerusalem, and most of the first members, most of the members of the editorial team in the beginning, were Dominican

priests. So when they would read a lot of the non-biblical literature, a lot of the literature that was produced by this community, in the early days, and when you read some of the early material that they wrote, it felt like they were writing about, you know, an ascetic, religious sect very much like the Dominicans. Go figure. It's something we all have a tendency to read our own narratives into these things. And I think this is what you see coming from Christian apologists as well when it comes to the question of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And something that I am constantly eager to encounter and correct in terms of the ways in which they want to evaluate the

are relative to this question of how reliable or how close is our Bible to the ancient Bible. It's the primary question, the priority question that they always ask with regards to the scrolls. But even in just asking that question does not provide a clear enough or a comprehensive enough answer or perspective on what, this discovery is and the very many ways in which these manuscripts are really valuable for increasing our understanding of this part of the world at this particular point in time. So who do we think wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? You talked about when they're from, but what kind of Jews are sitting down and putting these manuscripts together? So, yes. So we know from the first century Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, as well as another first century writer, Philo of Alexandria, of different competing sects of Judaism in and around this time.

We know of the Sadducees or the Sadokites who were part of the Jewish aristocracy and in charge of the temple. We know of the Pharisees, and you'll recognize these groups also from the New Testament, who were more of a widespread populist group of Jews, that probably emerged out of the question of how to do Judaism without being part of the temple ritual on a regular basis. But this was really a reformative movement in an effort to make Judaism as practical and as, I'll just say, as practical and pragmatic just within the Hellenistic Roman world. So we know of these groups. We also know of another group called

the Ascenes. And both Josephus and Philo tell us that the Ascines lived in various places in and around the region but were particularly concentrated on the western shore of the dead sea excuse me um they go on to tell us about some of their their beliefs and their practices uh they identify them as sort of a a secret sect uh not interested in in interacting or or spreading the gospel uh among among their fellow men they kept to themselves uh they were were extremely concerned with matters of ritual purity and had a very strict approach to the observance of the rules of the Torah, certainly much more strict than that of the Pharisees. So based on the types of literature that we've discovered within the Dead Sea Scrolls, which

seem to be self-identifying, where the writers are speaking of their own community, these tend to align with things that Josephus and Philo tell us about the Ascines. And that, you know, coupled with the geographical identification, has most scholars convinced that they were produced by a group of the Aesnes or by a group that was very similar. to the Aseans. Sure. Okay, so we've got the Aseans, as many scholars believe, writing these texts in sort of over this 300-ish year period around the time of the turn of the millennium. And so we end up having these biblical texts.

We've talked about the Isaiah scroll, which, as we said, is pretty darn similar to the Isaiah. that we have in in the in the in the Maseretic text and the old testament that we're not word for having the Bible today not word for word not word for work but pretty pretty close let's say but that's not the only Old Testament text that we have it's the only complete one I think but we have other sort of quite large chunks of other texts which aren't quite as you know I don't quite have the same accuracy cashing or even accuracy yes so this is and this is really something that I get worked up about just in my in my own profession, in my own work.

So one of the things that you commonly hear from Christian apologists in particular is this remarkable level of correspondence that you see between texts of the Bible from the Dead Sea Scrolls with copies of the masoretic. text and this is the this is the text type the standard text of the Hebrew Bible that that survived into the medieval period and for some reason lots of Christians are really worked up about the text aligning with the Masoretic text in particular which is kind of funny because one of the things that we know just we knew this already that there were competing versions of Old Testament text in circulation at the time of Jesus.

One of the reasons we know this, hmm? I was going to ask how we know that, yeah. Yeah, yeah. One of the reasons we know this is because in the first place, wherever New Testament authors are quoting the Bible, they're always quoting from the Greek translation, or almost always quoting from the Greek translation of the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible. But there are a number of places where it clearly doesn't match up there either. And then we also have this Greek translation of the Old Testament, which probably dates back to the third century, BCE, or at least

the Torah portion, the part of the Pentateuch. But in many places, this this document called the Septuagint, does not, and actually pretty dramatically departs from the Hebrew text that we know from this medieval masoretic text. So we already knew about some of this textual pluriformity. There's another version of certainly the Pentateuch that survives, the Torah, called the Samaritan. to Manitouk, which is still in use by the tiny, tiny surviving community of Samaritan Jews still out on Mount Garazim in the northern part of the country. So we already knew about the existence of some of this stuff. And it shouldn't come as any surprise to know that

among the hundreds of so-called biblical manuscripts that we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls, you see quite a bit of representation, not just of something that looks like the Maseretic text, and I think it's important to point out that when you go back this far with text this old prior to the establishment of the sorts of scarborough conventions that led to a stronger sense of preservation, which all happened later, you go back this far, you will discover that there are no two manuscripts that look exactly the same. No two copies of the same text from the Dead Sea Scrolls looks exactly the same. They are all a little different, but some of them are pretty remarkably different from one another. As an example in mentioning the Septuagint, one of the features of the Septuagint

is the Book of Jeremiah, which we know into pretty dramatically different versions. The one that survives in the Masoretic text in the Hebrew. And what is the Masoretic text? Just quickly. Oh, so, yeah. So this is the standard text of the Hebrew Bible that has survived. into the medieval period on which all of our English translations or most of our English translations of the Old Testament are based. And this is the one that we know from those 10th century codices, the Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex. So we did find examples of text that look very close to the Maseretic text in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So yes, we've got those, but we've got all these other things too.

So Jeremiah you were talking about. So Jeremiah is in the Hebrew text, it is 13% longer than the Greek translation of the book of Jeremiah from the Septuagint. And it's in a dramatically different order, like chunks and entire chapters and huge sections of text. have just been jumbled around and tossed about in a completely different structure. Prior to the discovery of the scrolls, scholars already knew, as scholars were convinced that there was a pretty significant development just within this single composition. Scholars were convinced that the Septuagint version, the Greek translation,

was translated from an older Hebrew version and that what we have in the Masoretic text is actually a dramatically revised, updated Hebrew version. And one of the things that we discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls was six copies of the book of Jeremiah, two of which look pretty close to the Maseretic text in terms of their text type, at least. That's the, you know, the language and the alignment.

Maybe not in terms of structure, which is another question. But then two of the manuscripts look actually very, very close in terms of both the text and the structure to the Greek translation. that we know in the septuagen. So the natural conclusion of scholars is that among the Dead Sea Scrolls, you have both of these competing versions in circulation at the same time being used by this same group of people. And, you know, there's even, while we're talking about Jeremiah,

I'll just mention one more thing. I've worked fairly extensively with a particular manuscript for Q Jeremiah A, so you recognize that as coming from K4 at Kumron, and this is the first copy of the book of Jeremiah from Cave 4. It also happens to be one of the oldest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, making it one of our oldest biblical manuscripts anywhere. It dates to probably the end of the second century, sorry, probably the end of the third century, B.C.E. And within this particular manuscript, there is a section between chapter

seven and chapter eight, where the scribe, he's writing along, and he comes to the end of Jeremiah chapter 728 and he ends his paragraph and leaves an open line uh to the end of the column and then goes to the next line to start a new paragraph but instead of starting with uh verse 29 he starts with chapter 8 verse 5 and then continues uh in his writing now somebody else came along after probably a hundred years of this manuscript being in circulation, and we can tell this on the basis of analyzing handwriting styles, which is one of the ways of which we, which is the way we commonly date the manuscripts. So by analyzing the handwriting styles, I can see that another scribe has come along after decades, maybe a hundred years, and inserted into the margin, into the blank paragraph. space, three lines, and then he's run out of space. So he actually has to go and write along the edge of the column, the column breaking between the two columns. He writes another four

lines, but still hasn't completed his text. So he turns the whole thing, like right upside down, and then just finishes his text upside down in the bottom margin. Now, the remarkable thing about this, is that even prior to the discovery of this particular manuscript, there was some suggestion by scholars that this section between Jeremiah 7.29, or sorry, Jeremiah chapter 7, verse 28 and chapter 8 verse 5 was probably a secondary edition by a later writer working in the text of Jeremiah. And now, we have a manuscript. in our possession, where you can see this happening, I hesitate to say real time, just because, you know, we're dealing with artifacts that are thousands of years old.

But we're certainly looking at a situation where this was not a native part of this particular manuscript of Jeremiah. And this is the kind of thing, this is for my perspective, as a biblical. scholar, as a textual critic, as a scribal specialist, as someone who's keenly interested in questions with regards to the composition, the shape, and the reception of the biblical text through time, this is all intensely interesting to me, and this is the kind of thing that we see all over the place in the Dead Sea Scrolls. We see active scribal involvement in the texts of the Bible in such a way that, quite frankly, is fairly surprising.

It was fairly surprising to scholars when they started to dig in to the texts of the Bible, just how active scribes were in the authorial process and the transmission process of these texts. Yes, and that also potentially shows up in the great Isaiah Scroll. It does. Evidence of scribal notation, as it were, that might tell us something interesting about Isaiah. Now, especially given that the Isaiah Scroll is celebrated as giving us an insight into the text's preservation, there is a fascinating line of thought about the book of Isaiah that it is not written by one author. It's not written by one guy called Isaiah, but instead is made up of multiple authors kind of put together under the name of Isaiah. For a long time, scholars had separated, like, the first writer and the second writer, there is some thought that it's split into three parts as well, and there's some dispute over exactly where that split occurs, but one way of splitting up the Book of Isaiah, thematically, is up to.

verse 33 and then from verse 34 onwards and there's sort of a thematic break and everything sort of changes and so there was some idea that there's actually two different texts being written here so before looking at the manuscript evidence like do we have good reason outside of that to already suspect this multiple authorship and where does that idea come from yeah absolutely so this is i mean this is an idea that's already hundreds of years old um this is this is based on on observations by scholars and specialists back in the in the 19th century with regards to Isaiah so just there are 66 chapters in the book of Isaiah and early on scholars noted that in the first place Isaiah himself Isaiah the prophet is mentioned so there's a

there's a couple of narrative sections in the book of Isaiah in chapter 6 there's the story of his call, right? His call to be a prophet of Yahweh. He's in the temple worshipping. He sees a vision of God and has his lips seared by burning hot coals. It's a lovely story. And then in chapters 36 through 39 is a large narrative chunk that is actually almost identical. There are some clear differences, but there's an awesome.

relationship, an obvious close correspondence between this story of Isaiah and the King Hezekiah and the invading Assyrians with stuff that we read from Second Kings. So I don't know the scholarly discussion enough to know which direction scholars tend to think this is going, whether the older text is in Isaiah or in Second Kings. But in any event, this is something that, you know, is known outside of the Book of Isaiah. So that's chapters 36 through 39. Now, in all the rest of the stuff, like in all the so the prophecies themselves, Isaiah's name pops up only six times, and all of those instances happen to be in this first half

before the narrative section in Chapter 36 starts. So everything from Chapter 1 through Chapter 35, this is where you find these six mentions of the Prophet's name. He has never mentioned after that at any point. So this was a clue right away, it's as scholars. But the really big one, some of the important information that they looked at carefully was just how dramatically different this second half of Isaiah was. Within the first half, within these first 35 chapters, 34, 35 chapters or so,

So the nature of Isaiah's language, his concerns, his message, many of the themes were really focused on the events of the 8th century, the impending invasion of Assyria, the so-called Cyro-Ephraimite war prior to that. These were primary concerns in this part of the book. and then there's a dramatic shift in chapter 40. The tone changes. We're introduced now to a different type of literature, which we more readily identify or recognize as the servant songs.

It's this high-level poetic kind of literature. And these tax seem much more naturally set at a time when there is no temple, one of the key features in this part of the book is that the author is pining and bemoaning the fact that there's no temple in Jerusalem, which seems strange if it's being written by Isaiah the prophet back in the 8th century. So this is a clue right away to scholars. And then in chapter 42, one of the prophecies makes mention by name of Cyrus the Great calls him, Yahweh calls Cyrus my Messiah, who's coming to basically take the Jewish people

back and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. Cyrus the Great lived in the 6th century BCE. So either this is a remarkable piece of evidence for the fulfillment of an actual datable prophecy to the 8th century, fulfilled some 200 years in the future, or we're dealing with a different kind of text written at a different point in time. And this is through the accumulation of pieces of evidence like this, checking and noting

just some of the vocabulary and the sentence structure differences between these two parts of this book. Scholars have quite unanimously concluded that this is precisely what we're dealing with. We're dealing with a core set of oracles belonging. to Isaiah Benamotes, who lived in the 8th century, or maybe some of his followers that were collected together, and forming this core in Isaiah chapter 1 through 33, 34, 35, there's some speculation about that, followed by this narrative section in chapter 36 to 39, but then at some point later in time, additional prophecies were added on to this.

manuscript in the form of these songs and oracles from a later period of time during the Babylonian exile after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 587 BCE somebody you know who probably was a follower of the teachings of Isaiah and a big fan of the writings of Isaiah probably took his Isaiah scroll and started adding things to it. We're not entirely sure when these things take place, but there's definitely some level of inspiration or influence from the first half to the second half,

but a clear enough distinction between the two that have convinced us that we're dealing with two separate compositions. And we actually have, I'll just say one more thing about this. We actually have an analog for how this works in another collection of texts from the Hebrew Bible. What we know of as the minor prophets, these are the small prophetic books that appear after Ezekiel that includes Hosea, Amos, Joel, Nakhum, Micah, Habakkuk, on and on. There's 12 of them. We see within Jewish collections of these texts, within Jewish Bibles, that the 12 prophets,

the so-called minor prophets, appear to have always been collected together as a single group. And in fact, when it comes to the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is what we see. There are copies of manuscripts of the Twelve Prophets from Masada, from Mutabat, from Qumran, and the one thing they all seem to have in common is that all of these individual shorter compositions of prophets were collected together on the same manuscript. There's some really interesting differences between the individual copies of these books, but this is an example of how something like this can happen, where... People were developing and people were writing anthologies, not just books belonging to a single author, but books based on individual themes or ideas or theological principles that they would collect together on the same scroll. And this seems to be what happened with the text of Isaiah, this anonymous collection of songs.

and poems written after the destruction of Jerusalem during the exile came to be collected along with the book of Isaiah proper from the ancient. And then get merged into one text at some point. Yes. So what is the manuscript evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls that we're dealing with two authors or two texts under the umbrella of the Book of Isaiah here? so it's it's really substantive i'll say that at the outset uh there is a ton of data and i'll go through all of it here which shows that even by the second or first century b c e there was an awareness of the existence

of these two compositions of a first isaiah and at least a second isaiah and we see this right within the great Isaiah scroll itself. You alluded to it within the manuscript right in the center at the end of column 27 is the end of chapter 33, Isaiah chapter 33. And at the end of the column, at the very bottom, the scribe has left three empty lines of text. There's nothing there. It's blank. And he started chapter 34 at the top of the following. column. Importantly, this break also happens at the end of a sheet. When it comes to large scrolls, Alex, the way that they're made is the animal is slaughtered, skinned, the skin is, the skin is, you know, scraped and and prepared. And then, you know, they are ruled in columns and

lines a scribe comes and writes on them and if it's a particularly large manuscript they will stitch several of these sheets these individual sheets together to complete the whole thing so importantly this break also appears at the end of a sheet now this is something that the casual observer is going to miss but it's also something that scholars have known about and recognized from the very beginning. William Brownlee, who was my own Ph.D. Supervisor's PhD supervisor, writing about this manuscript in the 1950s, was already talking about what he called the bisection in 1Q Isaiah A. This break between Chapter 33 and Chapter 34. He wrote a couple of articles about this we'll put this already back in the 1950s because it's like it's

the kind of thing as you say for the casual reader it kind of looks kind of natural because you already near the bottom of the page and it's a small gap it's like three lines maybe maybe two it's probably three it's sort of two or three isn't this just the kind of thing that like he got near the bottom of the page and thought uh it's a it's a new sentence or so i'm going to start on the next page no like this is the thing right It's not, and we have an accumulation of manuscript evidence from the time period, from different sites, which demonstrates this. The significant thing about this break is that the only time this ever occurs in any manuscript, any second temple manuscript. this is a manuscript from the same time period,

these Jewish manuscripts, any time that this kind of a multi-line break appears, it always only means the same thing, and that is that the scribe is moving on from the end of one composition to the beginning of the other. So we see breaks like this, they're rare, but where we do see them, They always occur at the ends of books and the starts of new books.

So, for example, we have a couple of manuscripts of the Torah, or at least a couple books from the Torah, from the Pentateuch, where you will see the last verse of the book of Genesis followed by three empty lines and then the first verse at the beginning of Exodus. Or you will see the last verse of the book of Loveticus, followed by three empty lines, and the beginning of the first book, first verse from the book of numbers. So we already have an established pattern here for what this means. I mentioned the minor prophet scrolls earlier. They don't even leave multi-line breaks.

The breaks between the individual prophets in a number of these minor prophet scrolls is just a single line. So, if this is what this break means everywhere else, then we should take that seriously and understand that that's probably what this means here. This probably means that this is the end of First Isaiah in the mind of this scribe, and that the top of, the beginning of chapter 34 is the beginning of a new composition. So that's the break, but there's a lot more to it. Well, this is interesting, right?

If it's just the break, I remember when you first told me about this, and I thought, that's cool. That's really interesting, like some indication, manuscript evidence of this, of this, you know, at this break. Now, importantly, prior to this, scholars had discussed the idea there being two or maybe three Isaiah, the proto-Isaiah, the Dutero Isaiah, and possibly the Trito-Eziah, And the breakup there is slightly different because they often have first Isaiah, proto-Isaiah, ending at verse 39, and with Deutro Isaiah beginning with verse 40.

So you might expect that if there was this gap, it would appear between 39 and 40. But since the 20th century, people have theorized otherwise. They've looked, for example, at the themes. So, verses one to, chapters 1 to 33, consists of, warnings about judgments that are going to happen, promises, the things that will happen to Jerusalem, speaking about it in the future tense, whereas chapter 34 onwards seem to assume that judgment has already taken place. The restoration of Jerusalem is already happening. So there's this thematic break that seems to coincide with this textual break as well. So yeah, exactly. And I think

people like in terms of gaining a clear understanding of this too like while most scholars will tell you just in in simple terms that first Isaiah is chapters one through 39 let's remember as well that those last three chapters chapters 36 through 39 this is the narrative section that looks like it was just pulled out of a different text altogether um so what do you do with that that looks like it's probably something that was added on at one point in time, but even before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and certainly since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there has been quite a bit of discussion among scholars about chapters 34 and 35 already being later inserted into the text at some point later in time.

was already some thought among scholars prior to this discovery that the the developmental history of this text was quite a bit more complicated than the the simple lines in which we have chosen to draw it up in so but this this is you know it's it's to my eye a clear indication that at least scholars are on the right track when it comes to tracking the development of these things and I mean if it was just that I mean that would be enough for me but there's a lot more to this

as well so I want to talk about some of the further evidence because another thing that people will point to is the fact that Isaiah is 66 chapters long this break occurs at after verse 33, which is exactly halfway through the text. Now, it may be that there are just two texts that happen to have the same number of chapters, that this gap indicates the end of one and the beginning of the next, but is it a bit suspicious that it occurs exactly halfway through,

as if to say that there might be something special about the two halves of Isaiah. It seems, you know, unlikely that you just happen to have two texts with the same number of chapters. It seems more like this is a unified text, and for some reason it's been sort of split down right at the middle. Do you find anything suspicious in that placement, bang on in the middle of the book? So I would tend to view that differently. To me, this looks like the natural way that a scribe would be reconstructing his text. One of the things that we know about scribes and readers and writers from antiquity is that they really enjoyed looking for these sorts of patterns of correspondence. So it seems like a natural move for a scribe who already has the existence of these two texts that are coming together.

that he's going to go well this first that he's going to look for those points of harmony I think or those points of parallel between the two so I would say I tend to look at this is just a feature a natural feature of scribal development that we also know from other sorts of compositions you see the same sort of thing happening in something like the book of Psalms, which has been compiled together from large numbers of different types of collections, but put together in such a way

as to provide some structural harmony to the whole thing. So that's, I tend to look at this as a feature of scribble development in terms of improving the structural harmony of this new thing that we now call, this larger composition of Isaiah. Does that make sense? Yes.

But so people will be listening to this and they might be not convinced by that. They might say, I still find that incredibly suspicious. So the only evidence that you have, you know, Dr. Davis is that that there are two authors going on here is that there's this three line gap, which could be hundreds of explanations for that. So as you've alluded to, I will ask you a question, I know the answer to. Are there other reasons to think that these two sections of Isaiah are written by different authors? There are, in fact, several. And I'll go through these last ones a little bit more quickly. So, in the second half of Isaiah, excuse me, from the great Isaiah scroll,

we know that this particular part of the text, this particular manuscript, was copied from a different copy than the first half. So the scroll who wrote the first half of Isaiah, Isaiah chapters 1 through 33 in the great Isaiah scroll had a copy of Isaiah before him that he was transcribing onto his new document. the scribe who the the the second half of this manuscript chapter's 34 through 66 was copied from a separate manuscript and the reason we know that is because there's some unusual features within just the second half uh where there is a repeating pattern of breaks in the text uh with uh secondary insertions, and there's been some work done by a Dead Sea Scroll scholar named Drew Longacher. He wrote an article back in 2014, where he argued quite convincingly that you can

actually map this out for the entire manuscript and demonstrate that the copy that the scribe was using for this second half of Isaiah was actually damaged at the bottom. So he was missing one or two, maybe three lines of text at the bottom of every column of his manuscript that he was trying to copy. And he would encounter a place where he get to the bottom, damaged part of the manuscript, and usually wasn't confident about what was there, didn't know what was there. So he decided just to leave an empty space and resolve to come back. and fill it in at a later point of time, or maybe somebody else will come back and fill in the missing text.

Uh, but sometimes there's a few places where he feels pretty sure about what he knows the text is and goes ahead and just kind of free hands it. He, he writes in what he, he remembers or what he thinks the missing text must be, but every single time, it's a little different. It's a clear paraphrase.

So if you put these things, you add them all up and you put it together, it's pretty obvious that the scroll was different for this second half of this book. And in addition to that, who's got this manuscript that's damaged at the bottom, and occasionally it looks like they filled it in in such a way that shows they knew what the text was, but they didn't actually have it in front of them because it's not like quite right. It's, it's like, oh, what's that Bible verse about like the cat, it's easier for a rich man to part, I know, and you sort of write it out from what you remember. And it's close enough, but you're doing it from. Yes. Just like that. So and, and it's important to point like, like to emphasize that this is a repeating pattern, right? So you can actually track it with math. Uh, you can measure the distance between where each one of these instances occurs and you end up with it has. It has. Uh, you can measure the distance between where each one of these instances occurs and you end up with it has. It has. Uh, happening basically in the same point as you're going through the entire manuscript. But this raises a question for us in the first place. I think, why on earth, if the book of Isaiah is a complete, intact 66 chapter composition at the time that this manuscript is being prepared and written? written, why on earth would a scribe need to use a different copy for the second half?

The obvious answer, I think, is because this is how the text was known at this time, that it existed in these two halves. But in addition to that, I think I just, I mentioned to you ahead of the show that that I I actually, I attended a virtual conference or a virtual lecture yesterday at the Oriole College at the University of Oxford. I'm sure you're familiar with it. I'm not of it. Yeah.

So every year they, they host the NAP, the Charles Knapp lecture. And this year, the, the presenters were Malaran Popovich and Muruf Dali from the University of Groningen. who a number of years ago ran a very exciting ERC project called The Hands that Wrote the Bible, where they developed machine learning tools to help investigate scripts in the Dead Sea Scrolls in an effort to identify individual scribal hands and to improve our efforts toward dating and identifying manuscripts using paleography. Now, they spent a lot of time working on this particular manuscript, 1QIs AIAA, because, of course,

they did it's intact. It's, you know, in terms of a data set, it's probably the biggest individual one. And while to the naked eye, when you look at the two halves of 1QIsAIAA, even to the naked eye of specialists in this field, the two hands look. the same. It looks like it was the same scribe who wrote both the first half and the second half of this manuscript. When an actual fact, we have discovered, or I should say Popovich and and Dolly have discovered through the tools that they've developed, that the second half was not only copied from a different exemplar, a different manuscript, it was also copied by a different

scribe altogether. It's an exciting project overall because it's an excellent demonstration of the interdisciplinary work between scientists and technologists and antiquities. specialists. But it's very exciting. And I'll mention one other thing about this manuscript, something that we observed. I worked on the official publication of 1Q Isaiah A and 1Q Isaiah B a number of years ago. And one of the things that we were doing when we were working on 1Q Isaiah A, was looking at these early parts of the manuscript in the first half where the individual sheets appeared to have folds in them. Now, the intriguing thing is that this only appears in the first half of the manuscript.

At the time, when the volume eventually came to be published, we weren't entirely sure what to do with this feature in the intervening time scholars have worked on this more in earnest and it's it have come to discover basically that at one point in time the first half first isaiah chapters one to thirty three of one q isaiah a was actually you know detached entirely from the second half and stored in a folded position as opposed to a rolled position. And this is different from the second half, which was rolled. And it looks as though this is something that was happening for a while before these two halves were even put together. so there you have the break at the end of chapter 33 you have the two manuscripts having been copied from separate exemplars you have the two manuscripts having been copied by second scribes by by two separate scribes you have the two manuscripts having been stored

differently for a period of time before they were combined and then you You also have what appears to be a different textual alignment in the first half as compared to the second half. So we talked a little bit about variation in 1Q Isaiah A, right? And there's the 2,600 textual variance that the editors have counted in 1Q Isaiah A. and most people compare these to the masoretic text. One of the other things that appears to be the case, and I don't think the legwork on this has actually been done, but scholars have started to really notice

that the first half of 1Q Isaiah A does not align as closely to the masoretic text as the second half of 1Q Isaiah A. So you have all of these data, points, and then I'll give you the one more that doesn't get talked about enough that I get really excited about. At this point, we start talking about what is happening with the Book of Isaiah in the rest of the collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are 21 copies in total of text from the Book of Isaiah in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The vast majority of these come from

cave four we have two from cave one and one from cave five now the two from cave one we know one q isaiah a one q isaiah b there are two more copies from cave four uh four q isaiah a and four q isaiah c i believe that's right uh both of these appear to have been completely appear to have been at one time complete copies of all of Isaiah from chapter one through to chapter 66, just like one Q Isaiah A, just like one Q Isaiah B. And we know this because even though they're fragmentary, they preserve material from every single part of the book of Isaiah from all of these many different sections. But what's really interesting is looking at the remaining 17 copies of the book of

Isaiah from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And what we discover is that among these, each individual manuscript contained only text from the first half of Isaiah, Isaiah chapters 1 through 33, or the second half of Isaiah, chapters 34 through 66. And this is across the board, 17 manuscripts, 9. preserving text from only the first part of Isaiah, another eight preserving text from only the second part of Isaiah. Like that's, I mean, my math's not great, but that's, I believe that's 80% of all the text of Isaiah that we have from the Dead Sea Scrolls attest to this one feature that these appear to have been separate compositions in the second of first century,

BCE, and were not combined together, at least not universally combined together. My question is, in the face of all of this, what is the scholarly reaction? Maybe you don't know because some of this is quite recent, but like, A scholars looking at this and going... Well, Brownlee was writing about this in the 50s, so... Sure, sure, but I mean the recent with the machine learning and all this kind of stuff, but like, you know, we're looking at this and seeing all these data points, are scholars looking at this and going like, okay, yeah, that, that's pretty conclusive, or is there

dispute? Are people, because I can tell your level of confidence and I'm trying to figure out if that is unique to you and scholars like you, or if that is just the conclusion that scholars are naturally led to this is this is as as near as i can tell in the literature that has been published over the course of the last 10 or 15 years in critical uh journals and volumes this is the accepted fact that uh it and most of this stuff is just uh is just uh stuff written about 1Q Isaiah A, far and away, scholars tend to posit and conclude that this is the way Isaiah was still being circulated in the first century, BCE, very often into separate compositions. Not always, but very often into separate compositions.

It's a developmental process, right? So it doesn't all happen all at once. It's something that's still taking place. But there is a, there is, appears to be a sense among the people who are writing and collecting these manuscripts, that there's something definitely distinct about these two, uh, essentially these two biblical books. Now, am I right in thinking that there is some history of, forgery in the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Uh, yeah, absolutely. It's more recent, but I'd be remiss, uh, to not point out that with the first discoveries, uh, this question was already being raised. So, um, one of the, one of the first of the editors of the Dead Sea Scrolls published his, uh, journal entries. in one of the volumes from 1953 when he was working on the digs at Mudabat. This is another site where manuscripts have been discovered, in which he tells of some of the Bedouin trying to sell him what he already recognized to be obvious forgeries.

He noted that they had bits of, there were bits of leather and they, they had Hebrew letters on them, but most of them were kind of nonsensical, couldn't make heads or tails of, of what was on them. So this was already happening back in the 1950s. And then another scholar by the name of Solomon Zeiglin was the editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review, which is an academic, journal, but he kind of ran it like his own little fiefdom and went on a 15 or 20 year campaign starting in the 1940s and carried through all the way until his passing, attempting to argue that all the Dead Sea Scrolls were forgeries. We have, this is, this is in fact not the case, and we're confident about this in large part because even though most of the manuscript were discovered by non-specialists, by non-professionals, not-in-controlled

archaeological digs. Importantly, there were proper archaeological excavations in all 11 of the Kumron Caves and at the other sites where manuscripts were discovered. And one of the things that people don't know. notice or don't know is that the the archaeologists who dug and in the caves found fragments, small fragments of manuscripts still there, and we've been able to match those to manuscripts that the Bedouin had actually brought in and sold. And in addition to that, these have been carbon dated. They have been DNA tested, which,

which identifies, you know, the types of animals that were used in their construction. There is just a variety of ways in which we have managed to confirm at least the fact that these are authentic ancient Jewish manuscripts. Some of the inks themselves from the manuscripts have been tested and reveal the same. sort of thing. So that's to start. Now, starting around 1996, a private collector by the name of Martin Skoyen started to raise questions. He started to make inquiries about the possibility of buying fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls for his own private collection. When he approached you, you remember I mentioned the original antiquities dealer who handled most of this material named Cando was still alive.

Sorry, this was back in 1993, 1993, still alive back in 1993. Skoyan actually approached him about the possibility of buying any scrolls fragments. and Cando responded to him and said, those days are gone. He said it's over. And then the next year, he passed away. But in the intervening time,

over the course of the next five or six years, Martin Scoyen was able to purchase fragments of what he was told, where Dead Sea Scrolls directly from Cando Zeres in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and from other antiquities dealers. They started circulating fragments purported to be from Dead Sea Scrolls in the United States, and many of these were sold to evangelical Christian institutions, like Azusa

Pacific University, purchased five fragments for their special collections. Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Texas. I'm pretty sure it's in Texas, yes. uh southwestern baptist seminary in texas purchased nine fragments uh almost all from from the candle family uh that they they added to their special collections and uh the museum of the bible of course in washington dc purchased 14 uh fragments of dead sea scrolls manuscripts there was there was a time um i think in around 2009 2000 where we counted as many as 140 individual small fragments of manuscripts thought to be from the Dead Sea Scrolls but were sold in private antiquities markets between 2002 and that time, so 2010, 2011, and which were not ever identified with the original site, with the original finds.

at Coomron or anywhere else in the Judean desert. I had the opportunity to work directly on fragments from both the Skoyne collection, the collection of manuscripts belonging to Martin Skoyne. He owns 32 small fragments and the fragments belonging to the Museum of the Bible. And in the work that I did over the course of a few years, looking very closely at both of these separate private collections, I and some of my colleagues started to develop strong suspicions that these were, in fact, modern forgeries and that they were not part of the original scrolls discoveries at all. I think the remarkable thing in all this is that

so many people within the field, so many people who should probably know better, I myself for for a long period of time we're duped by this uh we're able to be convinced that these might in fact actually be authentic genuine artifacts from i mean yeah these are these are on display from 2017 yeah museum of the bible in washington dc opens these these fragments are on display as legitimate dead sea scroll fragments absolutely yes so and i was i was i was I was part of that, I was part of that entire project. In fact, I, how do we, how do we know that the, oh, so this is, uh, this, that you can't get this anymore by the way, uh, because, because it's been retracted, uh, on the fact

that, you know, it's full of forgeries, but this is the, this is the official publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the Museum of the Bible collection that I co-edited with Emmanuel Toe and Robert Duke. um so like it's got those 16 fake 14 of the 16 are in there yes so you've got you've got the the publication of the the the washington dc fragments of the dead sea scrolls book and and at the time what a piece of history that's crazy right uh and yeah i've i've also got this this one too this is the this is the the collection of uh the scoian fragments i think you know you can see my name down there as well.

But limited signed copies are available for $5,000. This one, this one still is available because it's not all for, there are some actual authentic Dead Sea Scrolls fragments in here. A few of the fragments, I'll just, I'll just say this, some of the first ones to be sold in the 90s to Martin Skoyen were fragments that he bought from the descendants of scholars who had worked on the original. So John, Trevor and William Brownlee, some of these scholars who were part of the original team in the 1940s and the 1950s had like tiny, tiny little pieces of things like the community rule or the Genesis Apocryphon that had fallen off and they just managed to keep. like they you know and and so they they held on to for mementos um you know those are the sorts of

things were confident like that's not a fake that's that's real uh they were there when you know this little piece fliked off and and they were able to keep it for themselves so uh but those are those are the sorts of the first fragments that martin scoyne purchased were these uh these types of fragments but then much do these fragments cost like say the museum of the Bible purchases 16 fragments I mean I'm sure we don't know the exact numbers but what kind of amount of money are we talking about here to buy these uh any like individual fragments you're you're talking about uh six figures for an individual fragment and these are tiny right like um I mean I'll just uh

I'll just just pull up one of these for you to give you an idea. Let's go to, you can probably, so here, this fragment of Exodus chapter 17 measures 3.27 by 3.05 centimeters. Wow. Right.

Like, they are, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes. Yes. In fact, Now, some of them were a little bit bigger, right? Like, some of the ones that were purchased by the Southwestern Baptist Seminary were a little bit bigger than that.

So like probably like, that is a lot of money. Can you tell us more about how to make forged documents and how to get away with that? I'm really interested in this. I'm sure you are. Everyone is. I, uh, I. That is incredible. So, but, you know, the, some of the people who made, uh, the, the, some of the people who made, uh,

these texts were paying close attention to various features that would, that would help them pass as authentic, right? Like, for example, there's one fragment from Skoyne's collection. It's a, it's a papyrus fragment from the Book of Enoch. And after we started observing and seeing a number of scribal and textual anomalies that had convinced I and the team I was working with that these were probably forgeries. After this happened, we managed to get a number of them forensically tested by physicists in Berlin. And one of the discoveries that was made in one of these tests was of this this papyrus fragment of first enoch they noticed under like extremely high microscope like under under what do you call that I guess under under

just high magnification there you go one of the things discovered under extreme high magnification was the presence of salt crystals on the fragment which is something that you do see on authentic fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ones that haven't been cleaned and prepared for conservation of presentation, right? And I mean, this makes some sense. The area is a very highly, it's a highly saline environment, right? Lots of salt. But the appearance of naturally occurring salt crystals under magnification looks quite distinct.

Some of these look like, the best way I can describe them are as like base salt structures or like cool crystals that wooey people like to collect. You know, now what the physicist discovered, on this one fragment of Enoch was salt crystals, but these were all cubicle, and then when they tested them, they discovered that they were table salt. Now, you probably don't even have to know this to understand what I'm getting at, but table salt wasn't invented until the 14th or the 15th century. It's like a modern thing. There's a whole chemical process that takes place in order to turn naturally occurring salt into table salt.

And here, there were not just table salt crystals scattered across the surface of this papyrus fragment, but there was ink on top of some of these pieces of table salt on the fragment. So clearly, you know, and this is the only the sort of thing that you can detect when you're working that up close to some ride too, right? So but like that was that was one of the things that we would see. Another feature that we noticed was that in particular with parchment, this happens with papyrus too, but in particular with parchment, as it ages, and as it dries out uh the surface layer starts to to deteriorate or to flake away and we see

examples of this in the authentic dead sea scrolls you will notice uh if you're looking through a number of the the fragments in the collection that there will be be parts where the surface itself is just completely flaked off and you know it's taken all the text with it um so you'll you'll encounter bits like this on on fragments what we started to see uh among what i'm going to call the modern post-2002 dead sea scrolls forgeries what we started to see on a number of these were in the first place they're very very poorly prepared or preserved the surfaces are incredibly coarse rough uh compared to the authentic dead sea scrolls they don't particularly look like prepared parchments.

In actual fact, they look more just like ancient prepared, like ancient leather maybe that you would use for other things, like wine skins or shoes. So you can already tell just by looking at them that whoever's writing on these is already struggling with his surface or her surface, you know, just to be able to write smoothly on something that's so rough. But then something else that we started to notice is that there were delaminated portions

on some of these fragments, but there's writing on that too, which is, you know, not something that would happen if this is a fragment that had been sitting out in the desert and had deteriorated over thousands of years, all that writing would have disappeared with the surface when when it when it deteriorated just like what we see in the authentic density scrolls now I don't even remember what your question was sorry about about forgery and how we know and how we know that out that these are these are forged and so presumably like who's like the ones that you were looking at like who was it that owned those particular fragments so those were the ones that I

was looking at were at we're in Martin Skoyne's private collection in Norway and those belonging to the Museum of the Bible. I, you then, you then approach these guys and you sort of say, look, you might have a problem here. I'll tell you the story here. So I was, the team that I was working with, uh, in Norway, we approached Mr. Skoyan and we, we spoke to him about, uh, about some of the problems with his fragments. And he's the one who, uh, gave us the, the permission to, run all these additional tests and we ended up publishing an article in a scholarly journal outlining the features of uh that we had detected indicating forgery on nine of the fragments

that's going's collection i personally think that numbers higher but these were the ones we were able to test and these were the ones that that we were able to agree on as being almost certainly forgeries. So we're working on the stuff in Skloin's collection when I started working for the Museum of the Bible and working on their collection of Dead Sea Scrolls fragments. At the time, it was policy for everyone to sign a non-disclosure agreement whenever they gained employment, working for the Museum of the Bible. And as a result of that, I was kind of sequestered and alone in my thoughts and my discussions about these fragments that they had at the Museum of the Bible. I spoke to other people who were working on them with me,

but we were not allowed to talk to anybody outside of this circle. And this went on for two years until the time of the publication of the volume. And by this time, because I've already been looking at the stuff, at the Skoyan collection and seeing the same sorts of things, I started also developing a keener eye of what to look for and how to detect forgery. And so I started to develop some very strong feelings about the problems in the Museum of the Bible fragments as well.

Leading up to the publication of the volume, I was asked to write a chapter on the physical, describe, you know, on the physical characteristics of the fragments and the paleography. So it was in that chapter, I actually wrote a couple of paragraphs, detailing some of my thoughts and my observations with regards to a number of the fragments, which suggested that they were probably modern forgeries. I turned it in to the other editors, and I was happy that they just they just published everything as it was um and this happened this all of this kind of happened right around the same time this has happened around the same time that we also

published the article um about uh the scoring fragments and of course uh some of this got picked up by uh by the newswire this pretty salacious stuff forgeries in the in the dead sea scrolls at the at the museum of the bible right around the time that the museum was opening as well so it it kind of became uh something that uh consume my attention for the next several years um i continued working with the museum and and helping them uh sort out what to do with uh with their now complete collection of forged Dead Sea Scrolls. Man, so were they grateful to you? Were they annoyed?

Like, what was this sort of feeling? Yeah. Especially the guy, the guy who was like the private collector. Like, he must be pretty gutted. He was. And of course, because he doesn't have, you know, as much money as God does, the Green family is apparently, you know,

above such concerns but yeah he was he he was definitely his his response and i i i was appreciative of the fact that he was as forthcoming and transparent as he was in the first place when it came to pursuing this question even you know what do you do if if you have forgeries in your collection What do you do as a private collector when you discover that you have forgeries in your collection? Suddenly your collection is not worth nearly as much as it was the day before, right? He had spent like real money on this material, and we were in the process of dramatically devaluing it. So there were many lengthy, painful correspondences between us and the, like, can you somehow, like, can you find out who forged this, where it came from? Because there must be some kind of way, at least he must know who he bought it from at the very least, you know, is there a idea to figure out what happened there and who's to buy.

Well, this is, this remains, this remains the open question. And it's something that this was one of the, before, before I ran out of funding, this is what I was in the process of working on. But that's one of the things I did when I was, when I was working with the Museum of the Bible, was tracking down, going through their documentation and trying to track down. chains of custody, chains of ownership, just to sort of see if I could discover a source. There's another project that was underway. I think they've wrapped up now, but they were underway for five years in Norway,

investigating not this question directly, but certainly putting together materials for gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the history of ownership, of these fragments. So there's been work underway. As you can imagine, there's a lot of very sensitive legal

stipulations and situations involved here where as much as I think I might have an idea of where these things came from, I'm just not

in a position to be able to broadcast that in large part because I don't have the evidence for it. All I have are suspicions. And until we have some concrete, clear cut evidence, which shows us where they came from, there's not much anybody can do. So it's a sensitive. It's a sensitive situation. Yeah.

and they are they are just out of luck so and this is i mean the museum responded by the museum of the bible basically responded by by shuttering that part of the exhibition for a while they had uh they had a placard on display that i helped them write uh about the uh great uncertainty of the authenticity of the manuscripts in the exhibit but eventually the exhibit itself just ended up getting i suppose that is part of the risk of collecting manuscripts is that you know people people put a lot of money into just trying to validate these texts before they buy them it's a whole convoluted process because of course like i know more about this from like gnostic gospels but the idea yeah like with the gospel of judas i mentioned earlier how you know barth ermine along with a group of

others were were sent by national geographic to verify and the owner was like i i want to give you enough that you can verify it, but I don't want to give you too much because you haven't bought it yet. And so a lot of effort has to go into very carefully making sure that you've, you've done just enough to know that this is real. And part of the risk of that is that you might just get scammed. It's a, it's a very sort of dubious industry in that respect. Yeah. And it's not the only reason, but it's certainly a reason why most scholars, many scholars certainly, I'd like to think most scholars are very concerned and very vocal about the sorts of problems with the private antiquities market, with private collecting of antiquities, just because, I mean, in the first place,

it's problematic to own cultural heritage that belongs to another people, another group, to to set, to set monetary value on that is, is really problematic. But this is the sort of thing that also promotes looting and trafficking and all sorts of, you know, human abuses that we don't want to, to participate in. Much of the, the antiquities market, the, the private antiquities market has been deeply infected by artifacts stolen out of museums, like the National Museum of Baghdad, and the funds collected through the sales of these artifacts have gone to fund ISIS and the Taliban and all of these groups of people that none of us want to be supporting. So it becomes an incredibly problematic situation when you're dealing with private

antiquities markets. And it creates great problems for the scholars who are actually trying to do legitimate work on legitimate manuscripts. Because as soon as you start introducing a fragment of a manuscript that you don't know anything about. You don't know where it came from. You can date it using the conventional methods that you have on hand, but without the kind of chain of ownership that comes with a properly provenance artifact from an actual archaeological dig, it creates issues

with how we incorporate that sort of information into our broader data set of the period. It can be really frustrating for scholars and for scholarship just trying to even sort out what to do with some of this stuff.

But I'll get off my soapbox now. It's just these are real issues that affect real people and certainly the scholarship as well. The Density Scrolls are sort of endlessly fascinating topic in that it's not just about the content of the text, but the manuscripts that they're written on and the ink and the materials and the dating and the communities and the sale and the history, like everything, from

the iconic, famous story of their discovery by accident. somebody's searching for a sheep and chucking a stone into a cave and hearing a sound, the whole story is, I think, plays into this feeling that people have that we're dealing with this strange and mysterious, like there's always something to discover. There's something almost mythical about the story that's told about these scrolls. It's wonderful. I'll tell you another story that feeds into this, right? So, yeah, so you'll remember this, this professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University,

managed to purchase three of the manuscripts, and he traveled. Like, at the time, he had to go from Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, where he lived and where the university was through, he had to get a pass and go through military checkpoints. at this time of political turmoil just to get to Bethlehem to purchase these manuscripts and then get them home. It was, you know, a risky, dangerous ordeal for him just to do this. But he tells the story in his journals, which have been published, about his adventures in doing so.

He comes back to his house on Mount Scopus and runs up to his study and starts pouring over these manuscripts and this all takes place on November 29th, 1947. It's late in the evening. He's looking over a manuscript of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Hothio, this famous collection of songs and hymns that and he is keenly aware that he's the first Westerner, the first scholar, to look at this stuff in over 2,000 years. And meanwhile, in the background on the radio, his son is listening to the resolution pass on the floor of the United Nations to establish and ratify the state of Israel. And he says in his journal something to the effect of how this momentous occasion

was celebrated in my study on the one event political, the other event spiritual. It's a beautiful, it's a moving moment, but it kind of helps to establish just how important this connection was, certainly in the early going, between Israel as a state, as a Jewish state, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. But this story doesn't end there. in the intervening years, you know, many more scrolls are discovered. They eventually all get nationalized by the state of Israel. They all end up back in Israel, and they are, you know, collected and preserved by the Israel

antiquities authority, except for a number that still belong to the state of Jordan at this time, which is, you know, not, it's still outside. It's in what is properly called the West Bank. And this is how the situation was for a couple of decades. When in 1967, some 20 years later, the Sixth Day of War erupts in June, and Israel manages to, manages to conquer and annex all this additional territory

in the West Bank, including a number of the holdings that were part of the Jordanian collection. But beyond that, after the dust settles, one of the first things that happens is that Kando, the antiquities dealer, who handled almost all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, gets a visit from agents of the Israeli government, and they enter his house, and they question him,

and then they come back, and they confiscate from him the Temple Scroll, which is the largest of the Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts. It was held back by Kando for a rainy day. He had his sights on, you know, selling this someday and cashing in and having a fabulous retirement as a result of this. He held on to it for all this time. The way this story tends to be told is that the man who put these events into motion was an archaeologist and a statesman and a soldier by the name of Yagal Yadin. Now, this wasn't his given name. This was his adopted name.

This is something that Jewish Revolutionary Fighters did during their pursuit of independence in the 1940s. Yagal Yadin actually happens to be the son of Aliezer Sukhanik. He was one of the first people who knew of the existence. of the Dead Sea Scrolls from his father. And he happened to be the deputy prime minister in 1967 during the Six-Day War, on the conclusion of which he had in mind that Kando had this manuscript, at least this one manuscript, if not many others, in his home in Bethlehem, which was now part of Israeli territory.

So, you know, some of these things are connected in surprising ways, and one of the things that I think we should pay close attention to is how much the narrative of the Dead Sea Scrolls, not just their ancient narrative, but their modern narrative tends to be connected to political events, to cultural events, to, religious events. I mean, it's no accident that the forgeries of the Dead Sea Scrolls that ended up on the private antiquities market were by and large purchased by very enthusiastic, conservative, evangelical Christian institutions. So, and just on that note, on that point, just to kind of reinforce what this looks like. When Azusa Pacific University purchased their nine fragments, one of these was a, and these are all forgeries, one of these was a fragment containing text on four lines

from Leviticus, Chapter 18, and Leviticus Chapter 20. These are notorious texts for their condemnation of homosexuality. And when these fragments, when the collection was purchased, there was an interview in one of the papers with the director of the exhibit, a man by the name of Bruce McCoy. And the quotation that he gave to the newspapers was that Southwestern Seminary actually paid quite a bit of extra money for this particular fragment, because in his words, it attests to a timeless truth known from Scripture. Now, on the face of it, this is kind of silly. From an historical perspective, this is kind of silly because nobody was collecting proof texts in Roman Palestine about homosexuality.

Because, of course, they weren't. It was a different kind of world back then. They weren't engaged in the same sorts of culture wars that we are today. But an insightful forger might have had in mind exactly what his buyers were willing to pay for. And this is what he came up with. man yeah that's quite that's quite the tale isn't it and um yeah i don't think it will

escape people that i mean you mentioned interdisciplinary research earlier about the actual text themselves but there's also an intersection of theology and history and textual criticism which depending on which of those angles you're coming from there will be a different significance to the dead sea scrolls if your interest is theological it will be in some instances quite reconfirming, like in the instance of the Isaiah scroll, you're going to think, well, that's great. The story is basically the same. From a textual critical perspective, you're going to think, isn't it interesting how it's

changed or what variants there are or what we might be able to gauge about the different authorship of Isaiah? If you're looking from a historical perspective, it's like, well, what can we learn about the people who wrote these and the things that they valued? You've spoken about how elsewhere, the prevalence of certain texts among the dead see scrolls, gives us an idea of their popularity at the time of the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or at least in the storage. So we can learn historically about the people who were reading these texts as well. And we know the influence it had because the texts which show up the most

in the Dead Sea Scrolls are the ones that are most referenced in the New Testament. Isn't that interesting, right? And the New Testament is written sort of around the same time or just after the Dead Sea Scrolls and so we've got this. It might not be an, okay, so maybe the Dead Sea Scrolls is an anomaly. Maybe they just happen to really like this Isaiah book and they don't really care about some other ones. But the fact that it comes together in that the ones that appear a bunch in the Dead Sea Scrolls are referenced a bunch in the New Testament. And the ones which aren't in the Dead Sea Scrolls aren't really referenced in the New Testament. We're learning a lot about the historical. And we're not just talking about what, yeah, and we're not just talking about

what most Protestants certainly recognize as scripture. Because in addition to the texts from the Bible that, or from the Protestant Bible, that the writers of the New Testament really liked, like Isaiah, like Genesis, like the Psalms, like Deuteronomy. They also, in the New Testament, quoted in the book of Jude, First Enoch, which was a text that was enormously popular for the writers and the collections of the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have multiple copies of First Enoch. Some of our earliest manuscripts

in the Dead Sea Scrolls are of First Enoch. We have a plethora of additional literature, which is clearly based on First Enoch in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's just a plethora of additional literature. It's just, I mean, it's just expanded, as much as it's expanded our perspective and understanding of this world of ancient Judaism, it's also just brought to light how much the writers of the New Testament and the first Christians and those in the early church were a huge part of this Jewish world and maybe in ways that are uncomfortable for some people. Yeah. Well, if people want to dive even deeper on this, I mean, we've been speaking for the better path for two and a half hours now, but there are more and more hours if you wish to find them on your YouTube channel,

Kip, which of course is linked in the description. You've got a whole series on the, on the Dead Sea Scrolls and its history and its discovery, but all kinds of streams and videos and series and interviews and all kinds of stuff to be found on your channel. So if people are interested, they know where to go. Kip Davis, thank you so much for taking the time. It's been a long time coming that I do a video on the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we managed to get through the whole of it without mentioning any recent scandals involving this ancient text. So I think we've done a pretty good job. How about that? Awesome. What do you know? Thanks again. Thanks for coming on, Thank you for having me, Alex. It's been my pleasure.