The Dead Sea Scrolls Revisited

Recently I taught a course on the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), with the subtitle The Intersection between Archaeology and Religion, at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Illinois. It was a marvelous experience due to my wonderful co-teacher, Janet E. Guthrie, and the mature, alert, curious students at Olli.

Course description: The discovery and interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls radically changed our understanding of biblical archaeology, the development of the Bible, and the history of the Jewish and Christian faiths. Who were the people of Qumran? How did their beliefs and practices differ from those of other Jewish sects of the first and second centuries BCE? What does archaeology tell us about the scroll librarians and how they lived? What is the relationship between the scrolls and the Bible? This four-week class, taught by a retired archaeologist and a retired pastor, will explore the historical and archaeological context of the scrolls, the lifestyle of the people who wrote them, and the implications of these ancient documents for religious history. 

Here are some of our resources for anyone who wants to explore this fascinating topic:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Note:  The best starting places for learning about the scrolls are the overview by James C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today and the edited volume Davies et al., The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Collins, John J.  The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2013.  A volume in the Lives of Great Religious Books series.  Includes an Appendix identifying “Personalities in the Discovery and Subsequent Controversies.”

Davies, Philip R., Brooke, George J., & Philip R. Callaway, The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thames and Hudson, 2002.

Flint, Peter W. & James C. VanderKam, eds.  The Dead Sea Scrolls After Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment.  2 volumes.  Leiden: Brill, 1998 & 1999.

[Josephus]. The Works of Flavius Josephus (translated by William Whiston), available online through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.  http://www.ccel.org/ccel/josephus/works/

For a detailed description of the Essenes, see The War of the Jews, Book 2, Chapter 8.  Jewish sects are also discussed in Antiquities of the Jews, Book 18, Chapter 1.

Lim, Timothy H. & John J. Collins, eds.  The Oxford Handbook of The Dead Sea Scrolls.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Magness, Jodi.  The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002.

Magness, Jodi. The Archaeology of the Holy Land: From the Destruction of Solomon’s Temple to the Muslim Conquest (2012). 

Martinez, Florentino Garcia.  The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English.  Second Edition.  Leiden: E. J. Brill & Grand Rapids, MI: Wm Eerdmans Publishing, 1996. 

Ulrich, Eugene.  The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Developmental Composition of the Bible.  Leiden: Brill, 2015.

VanderKam, James C.  The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2012.

VanderKam, James C.  The Dead Sea Scrolls Today.  Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2010.

VanderKam, James C.  An Introduction to Early Judaism.  Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2001.

VanderKam, James & Peter Flint.  The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity.  San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2002.

  The caves near Qumran where many scrolls were found

WEBSITES (the best of the best)

**Israeli Department of Antiquities: http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/ Includes photos of scrolls, detailed information, lots of resources. n.b.: this website includes scrolls from other caves south of Qumran (a larger corpus than we dealt with in this course)

**Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls: http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il/ Includes a Virtual Tour of the settlement of Qumran led by archaeologist Jodi Magness
http://virtualqumran.huji.ac.il/tour/VirtualTourIntroduction.htm

Library of Congress exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls, with a very useful glossary: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/scrolls/

SPECIFIC SCROLLS:

The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls
Images and summaries of scrolls
The Great Isaiah Scroll

Scroll fragments from Cave 4

MORE WEBSITES ON RECENT DISCOVERIES AND ONGOING CONTROVERSIES:

Qumran Scrolls and Masada

Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls

The controversial Copper Scroll

New Eyeballs on Ancient Texts 

New Discoveries in Qumran

Essene Calendar Deciphered

Qumran as Fortress

Skeletons at Qumran

Poor Health at Qumran
Animated map of rulers of ancient Middle East
Fake DSS at the Museum of the Bible
High-Tech and DSS
Articles on the DSS in the Biblical Archaeology Society library (you may have to join BAS to access these, but it is well worth it. Lots of material on biblical archaeology in general)

My mystery novel set in the Dead Sea region, but with different texts (the Gnoststic Gospels) at the heart of the story:

Two archaeologists race to find an ancient manuscript in Israel before Christian fanatics destroy it. More about the novel.  Author website: www.sarahwisseman.com

HOW TO TRAVEL IN YOUR PAJAMAS

When I began to write The Dead Sea Codex, I realized that I didn’t really want to go back to Israel and risk being blown up by a suicide bomber. So I cheated; I stayed home in Illinois. I used today’s virtual magic carpet, the Internet. Lucky me—I avoided the purgatory of crowded airports and multiple gas-powered vehicles to traverse oceans and time zones only to arrive sleep-deprived, sweat-stained, and thoroughly grumpy. Instead, I lounged around in my pajamas and sipped hot chocolate while dragging out all my old textbooks, diaries, and pictures from my Junior Year Abroad.

As a visiting archaeology student at Tel Aviv University in the 1970s, I feasted on the exotic. I tasted shwarma (roasted lamb) and six kinds of yogurt, joined an international excavation at biblical Beersheba in the Negev desert, swam across the Sea of Galilee with a hundred other people, and was adopted by a wonderful Israeli family with Russian and Romanian roots.

But these memories are out-of-date. What does the Israeli architecture look like now? Is my memory of palm trees and cacti in urban settings accurate? How do you make hummus and tahini dip? What is the name of the female version of the long garment Arab men wear? I found all these things on the Web, as well as listings of current restaurants with their street names, signature dishes, and local beers. To supplement my virtual findings, I purchased a brand-new travel guide to Israel, dug out my Hebrew grammar book, and reread Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” and several related books on the Gnostic Gospels, and watched movies set in the Middle East.

Creating an exotic setting without going there in the flesh isn’t easy, but it is possible. I created a notebook for Codex, complete with hand-drawn maps of the area around Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, a historical timeline, phrases of Arabic and Hebrew that my characters would hear and speak, and cutout photographs of models that resembled the physical description of my heroine, archaeologist and museum curator Lisa Donahue.

Using the Internet and other media does not mean that I’ve given up travel. A recent trip to Egypt proved that no computer screen or video footage can quite capture the smelly and precarious experience of riding a camel or the enormity of the pillars of Karnak. Those experiences have become my fourth novel, “The House of the Sphinx.”