, running on WARP
with WIN-OS/2. | Go to Glossary |
2) Norman Golb, "Who Wrote the Dead Scrolls? The Search for the Secret of Qumran" (New York; Touchstone, 1995). (His Glossary is very comprehensive in its coverage of numerous terms relevant to broad aspects of Judaism and the specialized language of scroll scholarship, in general, as well as to Dead Sea Scroll scholarship, in particular.)
3) W. Harold Mare, "The Archaeology of the Jerusalem Area" (Grand Rapids, 1987), which contains a good sampling of the specialized archaeological terminology applicable to sites in the Eastern Mediterranean dating to the Old Testament and intertestamental periods.
4) Josephus, "The Jewish War", G. A. Williamson (trans. 1959 & 1970), E. Mary Smallwood (revised with a new introduction, notes and appendixes) (London; Penguin, 1981).
In addition I have liberally interpreted information from a variety of sources to create new entries for this glossary. These are simply my own first attempts to catalog an evolving understanding of the underlying topic. All of it is subject to change without notice, of course. None of these authors are in any way responsible for my own additions, omissions, and errors or for my inability to understand their meaning or the contents of their works. Constructing this Glossary was one of the simpler exercises which I felt was necessary in order to make any headway along the steep learning curve for this topic. I still refer to it often and continue to find it useful on a regular basis.
Note: There is another interesting glossary on the University of Notre Dame web site constructed by Notre Dame undergraduates. While I have not consulted this glossary very often, and many of its entries are not strictly within the limits set for this site, it may well be of interest to those interested in biblical history from a christian perspective.
The Intertestamental Period
| Go to Glossary |
The Dead Sea Scrolls deserve a careful and dispassionate preservation, reconstruction and analysis. Nothing less will satisfy the demands of the diverse interests that seek to examine and understand their contents.
This Glossary includes a wide assortment of terms, references to locations, documents, and books to enable everyone interested in probing the messages and meanings of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
One clear message from the Dead Sea Scrolls is that we have not had a sufficient understanding of the diversity of the currents in religious philosophy that were influencing the daily lives of the citizenry at that time. Contemporary but distant historians writing primarily for a Roman audience had not sufficiently prepared the world's scholars for the diversity of the ideas and beliefs described in the Dead Sea Scrolls. About one-third of the scrolls seem to have left no other trace of themselves in the historical record and except for this amazing find would still not be known to this day.
The mythic simplicity of most biblical stories has disconnected the Old and New Testaments from the historical events that were known to have taken place in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the region during that time. This makes the Bible an unreliable historical document if one is looking for the roots of Rabbinic Judaism or early Christianity in previously known histories of the period.
It remains to be seen if any of the Dead Sea Scrolls will shed new light of those historical roots. It is already certain that they shed new light on the evolution of Jewish thought and religious practices that preceded the Christian era. In that sense they already provide some insight into the turmoil the eventually produced the early Christian Church. For the same reasons, they should also provide fresh insights into the evolution of Rabbinic Judaism which emerged alongside the Christian Church over several centuries.
In order to use the Dead Sea Scrolls as fruitfully as possible it is first necessary to recognize what they are and what they are not. The shear number of separate scrolls, the diversity of their handwriting, the variety of their philosophies, the complete lack of original autographs (deeds of ownership, correspondence, first hand commentaries by the original author, etc.), and the philosophical incompatibilities among some of the manuscripts all make it seem highly unlikely that these are the exclusive works of one small group of sectarian scribes working in the desert in total isolation from the majority of Jews living in Judaea at that time. Not impossible, just unlikely.
On the other hand, there are many reasons to reasonably suppose that these are not part of the collected works of the Temple. Individual priests and citizens of Jerusalem could possibly have contributed various parts of this library. Manuscripts could have to have been removed from the city and stored in the desert prior to the sack of the city by the Roman Army in 70 CE. This presupposes that Qumran was not taken by the Roman Army until after the fall of Jerusalem, of course. Hiding scrolls in caves in the desert has a long and distinguished history. Origen puts one find ("with other Hebrew and Greek books in a jar near Jericho."), which he personally examined, between 211 and 217 CE. Clearly, scrolls have been found in caves since at least the third century CE and others have even been discovered since the Dead Sea Scrolls were themselves first announced. There is no reason to assume that this one group of caves holds all the scrolls that were saved from the Roman army during the first Jewish revolt against Rome.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are to be seen as a subset of the collective library of Jewish religious, cultural and philosophical writings extant at the time of the First Jewish Revolt in and around Jerusalem. Only after that is finally understood will we be able to make any worthwhile progress toward sorting out what, if anything, they can tell us about the division of first century Judaism into its Christian and Rabbinic successors. That is a story that many people are waiting to hear.
This Glossary of Terms has been assembled to assist me, and anyone who is interested, in
tracing two of the Worlds most influential modern religions to their Biblical roots. Because
many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially the so-called non-biblical manuscripts, have
avoided the intermediate redactors, they are as direct a communication from the
intertestamental period as we are likely to get. As such, their importance is difficult to
overstate. On the other hand, it is important to consider both the words and the source
before attempting to read too much into their messages. This is the point of contention
that has developed over what to make of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Who wrote them, why and
when are questions that need to be definitively answered before their impact can be fully
gauged or appreciated.
Glossary of Terms
| Top of Page |
Apocrypha
|
| Top of Page |
| Quick Index |
| Top of Page |
| Quick Index |
All of this cannot be true. In fact, none of it necessarily has to be true. It is clear, however, that it is much easier to define Christianity in terms of its current Canon, complex as that may be, than in terms of its historical roots which are vague at their best, propagandist at their worst, and clouded by the effects of time, mishap and generations of intervening redactors.
At the time of the discovery of the scrolls the available scientific community able to handle the tasks of excavating the caves and the Qumran environs, conserve, translate and publish the scrolls, and interpret their larger significance was limited and, in fact, included no world recognized authorities in any requisite field; not scroll scholarship, not archaeology, not stratigraphy, not Jewish history, not ancient middle eastern languages, not even classical Roman history. Nevertheless, the local group headed by Pere de Vaux determined to keep it a local and to the extent possible a limited and united effort. That group had almost fifty years to generate their consensus while denying any else access to their cache of material.
A well organized and modern attack on the same problem, if it were to be undertaken today, would include many authorities from many disciplines from the very beginning. Instead what the world got was an amateurish and ultimately incompetent effort whose 50 year reign of non-communication is only now coming to an end with the wider dissemination of photographs of the the scrolls that for so long have remained hidden.
In spite of that, it is difficult to undo or properly redo the excavations that were undertaken so long ago or even to force the wider community of scholars to rethink the widely promulgated assumptions disguised as scientific discoveries by a lazy band of third rate scholars with an agenda that they do not acknowledge to this day.
| Top of Page |
| Quick Index |
The ages of the linen in which some scrolls were wrapped and the ages of the pottery jars in which some were stored have also to be determined. These can affect our understanding of the age and meaning of the scrolls.
There are other interesting items to consider. For example, it is likely though hardly certain,
All of these are mere likelihoods, not certainties. A common date is impossible, a narrow range of dates is unlikely. A diversity of dates is almost a certainty. Until much more is known, however, the question of dates for the scrolls will remain an area of active scholarly interest and speculation.
Questions such as the following may never be answered in a fully satisfactory manner.
Most of the scrolls are of leather (parchment) and many were wrapped in linen and stored in earthenware jars with 'bowl-like' lids. One scroll on copper was eventually discovered. Some were written on papyrus.
The total number of scrolls collected in this initial round of discovery is uncertain. Various sources claim that from three to seven or eight complete parchment scrolls were eventually taken to a local sheik. He directed the Bedouin to a shopkeeper named Khalil Iskander Shahin (Kando) a member of the Syrian Jacobite Church. Kando contacted another Church member named George Isaiah. Kando and Isaiah then visited the original cave themselves and removed additional scrolls or fragments.
George Isaiah reported the discoveries to his ecclesiastical leader, the Archimandrite of the Syrian-Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, Mar Athanasius Yeshua Samuel, the spiritual leader of the Syrian Jacobite Church in Jerusalem. Just when this occurred is not clear, although April 1947 has been suggested.
Part of the Bedouin's share of the Scrolls was sold to the Muslim sheik of Bethlehem. Kando purchased the remaining scrolls and in turn sold them to Mar Athanasius Yeshua Samuel for £24. This consisted of four scrolls originally thought to be five, but one of them was merely broken in half. These four scrolls consist of one twenty-four foot long copy of the book of Isaiah, the "Genesis Apocryphon', a commentary on the "Book of Habakkuk', and the so-called 'Community Rule'.
Other subsequent discoveries by bedouin and others are also included under this rubric, whether on parchment, papyrus or copper. Most of the known scrolls are now housed either in the Shrine of the Book or in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem.
Rumors of an underground scroll market for private collectors cannot be discounted and it is entirely possible that the entire library from the West Bank caves, if it could be collected together, would exceed the size of the known library by a wide margin. How the privately held scrolls might be located and purchased remains an interesting dilemma for modern scholars and presumably for the 'investors'who originally purchased them.
As described by
Josephus, Philo and Pliny the Elder they are noted for their communal way of life, their
ascetic conduct, and their ideas about fate and immortality. Only Pliny the Elder among
these three mentions that a group of Essenes lived near the Dead Sea. The smallest of
the three main Jewish sects during the first century CE, numbering about four thousand
according to both Josephus and Philo. They were very strict in avoidance of every form
of commerce, owned no slaves, observed a strict Sabbath, avoided all oaths and
maintained ritual purity.
The oldest known Massoretic biblical texts are:
The Massoretes did three things
to stablize the biblical text: they inserted vowels according to the oral readings
of the time; inserted accent marks (te'amim) and cantillation marks (in
the case of poetic sections) so the lector knows how to parse and where to pause
while reading out loud; and they included Masorot in the lateral, top
and bottom
margins to indicate to scribes of later generations how to accurately copy the text
at hand. For example, they highlite each unique word in the bible so that every
scribe will know not to repeat it. Similarly, they highlight each word that only
appears twice in the bible, and they indicated the passage where the other examplar
appears (without using chapter and verse references since that came later - they
relied on the fact that all scribes knew the entire text by heart and referred to
the exact passage with a few select words). When nearly identical passages are
different, there is a note to retain the difference. There are other warnings to
avoid scribal errors of many varieties.
Unlike the Dead
Sea Scrolls, these have all been published, though not on the Web, by the team assembled
by Robinson for that purpose.
It lies
thirty-three miles north of Masada, twenty miles from Jerusalem, about 8 miles from
Jericho and a mile and a quarter from the current Western shoreline of the Dead Sea. A
cemetery of some 1,200 graves, oriented North/South, lie on the Eastern side of the
fortress plateau. Gustav Dalman observed as early as 1914 that the site was
"exceptionally well suited for a fortress." Michael Avi-Yonah observed in 1940 that it
was a fortress, situating it among a large number of known military sites in the Judaean
Wilderness whose purpose during biblical and intertestamental times was the defense of
Jerusalem against incursions from beyond the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. He is
responsible for the site's designation on early maps.
The
museum was opened in 1938 during the British mandate and was built with funds donated by
John D. Rockefeller. Long an independently endowed institute, it was nationalized by
the Jordanian Government in 1966 and captured by the Israelis in 1967.
- E -
- F -
- G -
- H -
- I -
- J -
- K -
- L -
- M -
- N -
- O -
- P -
- Q -
- R -
- S -
- T -
- U -
- V -
After you've had a chance to look around a bit, please visit my
Guest Book and Suggestion Box.
It takes less than a minute to fill-in the basic form.
Please send any other comments or questions to hoselton@flash.net.
, running on WARP
with WIN-OS/2.
 Return to M. A. Hoselton's Dead Sea Scrolls
Resources |
| Top of Page |