Zora

Where do the Dead Sea Scrolls fit into the history of the Bible? Are they the oldest copies of some of the books of the Bible? Are they just copies of other books that became included in the Bible? I just don't really understand how the Dead Sea Scrolls prove anything other than they are some really old manuscripts found buried in the desert. What am I missing?? Thanks.

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Among the scrolls are numerous copies of biblical texts, showing variations that disappear from the tradition by the time the texts were left at Masada after the Jewish war.

Some of the variation supports the existence of a Hebrew precursor to the LXX Greek translation, while others are early forms of the Samaritan torah.

The majority of the biblical texts however reflect the later uniformity of the biblical tradition.

Besides biblical texts, ie of the Hebrew bible, there are a number of texts which we call pseudepigraphic. These are books we know from Hebrew tradition which were not included in the bible, such as Enoch and Jubilees, so we have very early bersions of these as well. Yet, there is a third category of texts which had never been seen before the discovery, texts that deal with management of the community, text that contain unique cultic indications, others provide a type of commentary on certain prophets, and many other kinds. They are together a snapshot of religious thought of the period, though we are having a great deal of difficulty adjusting to the image we get.

Yup. Of nearly every book of the Hebrew bible.

Before the DSS the earliest Hebrew texts were from say 900 CE and we had to rely on a comparison with the Greek translations to understand the form of the biblical text. These scrolls take us back before the translation of much of the Greek and provide a basis to understand the Hebrew text itself better.

However, for the non-specialist, it is the non-biblical texts which offer the most interesting immediate results, because we learn about cultic activities such as ritual bathing, which is related to the notion of baptism, we learn about a non-christian ritual meal, akin to the meal in 1 Cor 11. The scrolls are a mine of knowledge about the religion of the period.

Most people believe that they are the reflection of a small sect, though the vast number of scrolls puts such an approach into question. The large quantity has led to harebrained theories that Qumran was a scroll production center, but even this stuff fails to account for the fact that there were so few scribal hands ever repeated (ie there was a great number of scribes responsible for the scrolls, yet a local production theory would require very few scribes and so the same hands repeated many times).

There will be a lot of contention over the scribes in the years to come.


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