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Dead Sea Scrolls Scholar Speaks at JCC
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- One of the greatest archeological discoveries of the 20th century, the Dead Sea Scrolls, continues to fascinate Biblical scholars and laymen alike as evidenced by a packed house at the Jewish Community Center Monday.
The curator of the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, Adolfo D. Roitman, Ph.D., held the audience of 220 spellbound more than an hour and a half as he traced their discovery by Bedouins in the Judean Desert in the summers of 1946 and 1947 to their recent release in their entirety, 40 volumes, to the world on the Internet.
The last scrolls were discovered in 1956.
Some 35,000 books and articles, many of them scholarly, have been written about or on the scrolls, Roitman said, and they have been translated into several modern languages. The Spanish translation will be available by the end of this year and the scrolls are being translated into Chinese.
“Everybody knows they’re famous,” Roitman teased, “but few know why. Do they have magical powers?”
In short, the scrolls, discovered in 11 hard-to-reach caves on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, have resulted “in a major revolution in Jewish studies,” Roitman said. These ancient Jewish manuscripts, dating to 2,000 to 2,200 years ago, tell what Jewish life was like in Qumran, an isolated ascetic community.
They are also the preserved texts, in varying degrees of completeness, of many of the books of the Old Testament.
Some 37% of the material in the scrolls is sectarian in nature that informs us of who the residents of Qumran were, their values and beliefs. The people who lived there, relatively few in number – “only a few dozen” -- were convinced of the corruption and spiritual pollution of Jerusalem and its temple. Roitman called them “extreme separatists,” some of whom were former priests at the temple.
The scribes wrote on papyrus, vellum and copper, in Hebrew (90%), Aramaic (8%) and Greek (1 to 3%) and stored their scrolls in jars. The scrolls show how closely the texts Jews and Christians use today adhere to what the scribes in Qumran wrote and preserved. There are “2,600 variant readings,” Roitman said, “but they’re very close, often a difference of one letter.”
The most complete book is that of Isaiah, which has 66 chapters, and two copies of which were found. The first manuscript is complete, the second not quite. Also nearly complete are the books of Moses and the Psalms. Absent are the books of Esther and Nehemiah.
The Judean Desert is the driest in the world, Roitman said, which allowed the preservation of the papyri. Removing the scrolls from the jars after 2,000 years proved challenging. With the moisture having evaporated from the papyri, some scrolls broke apart when they were extracted from the jars and the copper scroll hadn’t been unwound in two millennia.
Depending on how they’re counted, between 15,000 and 20,000 fragments had to be reassembled by the scholars at the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem.
“They worked without computers to assemble the fragments,” Roitman said, wonder in his voice at their achievement. The scholars had to know Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and ancient Jewish and Greek culture. Some were also fluent in Coptic, the language of the Christian Church in Egypt. Material in one of the scrolls shows the origin of one of that church’s sacred texts found nowhere else in Christianity.
The Dead Sea Scrolls reflect “the richness of Judaism,” Roitman said. “We have a new perspective on ancient Judaism. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a spiritual treasure of all mankind.”
Christians are interested in the scrolls because the Essenes, the ascetic sect who lived at Qumran, were contemporaries of Jesus Christ and John the Baptist. So speculation continues about the extent, if any, that the Essenes influenced Christ. For example, the Essenes saw their bodies as sanctuaries, not the temple in Jerusalem, and sought inner purity. They believed in a messiah, possibly two, to come. And they believed they were living in “the end of times.”
Regardless, just as the Essenes, “John the Baptist and Jesus were born Jews, lived as Jews and died as Jews,” Roitman reminded a questioner in the audience.
Copyright 2013 by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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