Dead Sea Scrolls: Scrolls of Mystery
Date: Thursday, September 28th, 2006 (CDT )
Topic: Ancient History
 The controversies surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls are still lively, 2,000 years after they were written, and more than half a century after they were found hidden within the caves of the Judean desert. To get a sense of the mysteries surrounding those ancient fragments, there's nothing like seeing them up close - and that's exactly what I did last week at Seattle's Pacific Science Center during the run-up to its big-ticket exhibit, "Deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls."
From a couple of feet away, many of the pieces look rather mundane: tattered bits from a shopping list that's gone through the laundry, perhaps, or yellowed wallpaper that's been scraped off a wall, or even ragged pieces from a jigsaw puzzle.
The puzzle analogy is particularly apt, because archaeologists have had to piece together thousands of fragments to decipher what's on the scrolls.
To give
museumgoers a feel for the job, curators have set up a hands-on exhibit
consisting of a bin in which 50 1,000-piece puzzles have been dumped.
Only a few pieces were matched with another when I looked, and it's the
same with most of the actual scrolls.
But there is the occasional
long stretch - like a 41-inch-long (105-centimeter-long) scroll on
display in Seattle. No one would mistake this for a shopping list:
Rather, it has the look of an ancient Constitution writ small, held
safe within its display case.
When you stoop down to look
more closely through the glass, you might marvel at the fine script on
the parchment, laid out in neat rows. That "Constitution" actually
contains Psalm 119: "Forever, O Lord, thy word is firmly fixed in the
heavens." Nearby you'll find a commentary on Hosea, cast as a husband's
indictment of his wife: "I will uncover her disgrace in the sight of
her lovers. ..." And over there, a calendrical text that specifies holy
days with all the poetry of, um, a shopping list: "On the 25th of the
month is the Sabbath of Jedaiah ..."
The 10 sets of fragments on
display in Seattle are just a sampling of the 900 parchment and papyrus
documents, found near the ruins of an ancient settlement called Qumran.
The texts have been dated to between 250 B.C. and A.D. 68 - thus
representing the oldest surviving bits of the Old Testament. Were they
carefully tucked away by the ascetics of the Essene sect, living in
Qumran? Or were they more hurriedly left behind by believers who fled
Jerusalem when Romans put down a Jewish revolt?
Those are among the
questions still being debated by archaeologists. The mainstream view is
that the caves were essentially long-term storage libraries for the
Essenes, and that Qumran served as the sect's communal center. But in
the pages of the Biblical Archaeology Review and The New York Times,
Israeli archaeologists Yizhak Magen and Yuval Peleg argue that Qumran
was actually the site of a pottery factory rather than a cult
headquarters - and that it just happened to be the most convenient
place for refugees from the A.D. 68 revolt to stash their precious
scriptures.
Such debates touch upon the
deep questions surrounding the identity of the scrolls' authors, and
the particular perspective (or would that be perspectives?) represented
in the documents.
To help put those puzzles
together, scientists are using tried-and-true tools - including the
recovery and analysis of artifacts found at the Qumran site and within
the caves - as well as sophisticated "CSI"-style methods such as
multispectral imaging and DNA analysis.
For example, minute samples
from the parchments - which, after all, are animal skins - can yield
genetic fingerprints to show which fragments should be grouped
together. That will help reduce the Dead Sea Scrolls' grand
50,000-piece puzzle into smaller, more manageable puzzles.
The displays surrounding
the core of the exhibit provide museumgoers with that scientific
context - but with a personal context as well. Hoards of silver coins,
found in the Qumran vicinity, bring to mind the "30 pieces of silver"
mentioned in New Testament accounts of Jesus' betrayal.
For Indiana Jones fans,
there are replicas of the mysterious "Copper Scroll," which promises
gold and silver to the person who can figure out the scroll's baffling
directions. (No one has succeeded in finding the treasure - assuming
that it ever existed in the first place.)
Other artifacts include the
dyed textiles worn by Qumran residents, their hairnets and combs, even
their sandals. "When you look at sandals that someone wore, you start
to get a real connection to the people who wrote the scrolls," said
Diana Johns, the project manager for the Seattle exhibit.
"Discovering the Dead Sea
Scrolls" began its U.S. tour in Charlotte, N.C., and will be at the
Pacific Science Center through Jan. 7. Then it moves on to Kansas City,
Mo., and San Diego. For more information about the exhibit, check out
the science center's Web site, as well as these previews from the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Seattle Times.
Copyright: MSNBC
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