Book Description

"Since the spring of 1947, when ancient manuscripts which came to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the Judean wilderness, scholars have been debating their origins and dates, attempting to place them in their proper historical context and searching other cave finds which might give them further enlightenment on pre-Christian Judaism. In this volume on Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran Community, Charles F. Pfeiffer relates the dramatic story of how the Scrolls were found and what they contain. Less than three centuries after Christ, the church father Origen mentioned Greek and Hebrew manuscripts which were found stored in jars in the region of Jericho. But this could not be confirmed until seventeen centuries later, when an Arab lad herding sheep or goats in the area entered a cave—perhaps in pursuit of a stray goat, perhaps taking refuge from a sudden thunderstorm, perhaps while smuggling goods across the Jordan to Bethlehem—and came upon the documents, which he tried to sell in the marketplace. How two buyers each brought part of the lot without realizing who had the other part, how one buyer tried to sell his acquisition in the United States before ceding it to the State of Israel, how archeologists were inspired to explore other caves and how their digs in eleven caves produced at least four hundred additional manuscripts—all of these facts provide a fascinating insight into what Professor Frank Cross has called "the ultimate in jigsaw puzzles. Certain myths and legends are dispelled: although Qumran has been reported to be the site of Gomorrah, the location has been proved to be wrong, and it is more likely that it was a Roman military outpost. In any case, the civilization which existed there was a highly developed one: inkwells with dried ink point to learned scribes who apparently copied the manuscripts and had them in their possession when they saw their homes about to be destroyed by Roman legions. Through the excavations of the ruins the whole history of Jews was reconstituted: the idol worship of the pre-exile period; the influence of the Hellenism during the time of Alexander the Great; the scourge of venality in the days when priesthoods were openly bought and sold; the guerrilla war with Syria and the subsequent cleansing of the Temple by Judas, still celebrated in the feast of Hanukkah; the origins of the Hassidim, who supported religious liberty but not nationalism; the evolution of sects such as the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Essenes. The author traces the background of customs such as common meals and explains the origin of water purification and common property laws. the reader can learn the true meaning of the scroll: "The War Between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness," and be informed that the Jewish religion, unlike other theologies, considered the one and omnipotent God to be the author of both good and evil, master of the world. In short, this is an invaluable handbook for the historian, theologian, the archeologist and indeed for any curious reader."-Publisher.