Until that discovery, the oldest complete manuscript we have of the Hebrew Bible dates from over a thousand years after Christ’s birth—the Codex Leningrad, about A.D. 1000. That is 1,600 years after the time when the book was first written (sometime in the 7th century B.C.).

When I visited the Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit in Philadelphia in June, I started fidgeting almost immediately. The exhibit (at the Franklin Institute, running through October 14) begins by walking visitors through a display of archeological treasures (some 600, according to the publicity) from Israel’s history, dating from 1200 B.C. to A.D. 68. I had come to look at the Scrolls, and here I was wading knee deep through the ancient archeology.  

There is a method in the exhibit’s madness, of course. For one, such history puts the Scrolls in the larger historical context. I’m guessing that the curators also recognized that having non-Dead Sea Scroll treasures would attract visitors who may not have much interest in the Scrolls alone.  

All well and good, but I’d come for the Scrolls—where the heck were they?  

From Cave to Museum  

Scholars asked a similar question when they were first discovered in 1947—where had they been all this time?  

Well, they sat in caves dark and numinous near the Dead Sea. One day a Bedouin shepherd threw a stone into a cave, and he and his cousin heard the sound of pottery breaking. But descending darkness prevented exploring the cave immediately. Some days later, the cousin, Muhammed edh-Dhib, returned and discovered seven scrolls in pottery jars, which later were identified as the Isaiah Scroll, Habakkuk Commentary, and the Community Rule. He took them back to the camp to show to his family, hanging the scrolls on a tent pole until they figured out what to do with them.    Eventually, he took the scrolls to a dealer in Bethlehem, who thought them worthless, but he finally found a buyer for three of the scrolls (for which he received the equivalent of about $30 U.S.). Within months key manuscripts were in the hands of experts, who recognized their ancient origin.  

For the next decade, archeologists and Bedouins descended on the area known as Qumran to investigate the many caves that lay in that stretch of dry, desert climate near the Dead Sea, the search finally coming to an end in 1956. When all is said and done, they found (depending on who’s doing the counting ) over 100,000 fragments, from pieces the size of a fingernail to scrolls many feet long, that make up some 900 separate documents.  

The scrolls are mostly extra-biblical documents, but about 20 to 25 percent are the earliest known surviving copies of some portion of every book of the Hebrew Bible. They are dated between 250 B.C. and A.D. 68, and are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean, mostly on parchment, some on papyrus, and one on copper. The scrolls were the property of a religious community, the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes, though some scholars have other ideas about the nature of this community.  

Today the vast majority of the Scrolls are housed in Israel at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, but eight can be seen at Southwestern Baptist Seminary and another five at Azusa Pacific University, among other places. From time to time, the Israeli authorities put the Scrolls on display, and at the Franklin Museum in Philadelphia, the display is said to be “the largest collection of ancient artifacts ever to tour outside of Israel.”  

Reverent Hush  

I rushed through the vast bulk of those ancient artifacts—iron arrowheads from 8th century Lachish, pottery fragments from 10th-century B.C. Jerusalem, and a clay altar from 10th-century B.C. Hazor, among others—and final found myself in a room, dark and numinous. The few Scrolls on display were set in a large circular glass case, framed in individual panels, gently lit from the sides. To one side of the Scroll was an enlarged copy of the Hebrew text, which on the Scroll original could only be barely discerned, so murky and small were the fragments in some cases.     

A reverent, musuem hush filled the room, as visitors circled the Scroll case, as if we were now in the holy of holies of archeology—which we were. In a secular world, being in the presence of written artifacts two millennia old is to have an experience of transcendence, perhaps not divine transcendence but certainly historical. Human beings are fascinated with looking at, and if possible, touching that have been touched by human beings two millennial ago. We love to feel history in our hands. It puts us in communion with the dead, which is only one step away from the Christian idea of the “communion of saints.” In this case, it was more like the communion of scribes.  

Protestants, especially evangelicals—people of my tribe—are supposed to be less enamored with such experiences. We’re people of the word, not people of the ancient manuscript. Who cares how the word comes to us as long as it faithfully reproduces the words of the text?  

But there is something about seeing the a Dead Sea Scrolls fragment of Scripture up close—even if protected by a glass panel and barely visible in low light. In a few instances, you see whole sections of a scroll, like the Psalms scroll, but what I remember most is those little scraps of parchment with a few indecipherable letters. It was Hebrew to me. But nonetheless impressive. The question is why?  

There is this business of historical transcendence. One imagines the scribe hunched over parchments, the original to his right, his copy to his left, dipping his pen in an inkwell, meticulously reproducing each and every letter of the original, day after day, month after month. A writer can appreciate that.   

Another fascination is this: These biblical scrolls and fragments are by far the oldest manuscripts we have of the Hebrew Bible. I was looking at something that is over 1,000 years closer to the original manuscripts of Scripture. The oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible have been dated to about the turn of the first millennium. Now we have manuscripts ten centuries closer to the so-called original inerrant autographs.  

On Original Autographs  

As with many doctrines, evangelical scholars are not necessarily in agreement about what we exactly mean by “original autographs,” and in what sense they are “inerrant.”    Some imagine a solitary author writing out a book under the unique inspiration of God. Others say that some books show signs of having been authored by a community of scribes, who together were inspired. Some say these first copies were inerrant in all matters, including scientific ones. Others say they were inerrant only in matters of faith and practice. Of course, others wonder how you decide which passages are matters of faith and practice and which are not!  

All well and good for scholars to have an honest if spirited debate about such matters.

But most evangelical scholars agree on this: the copies of Scripture that we work with today are awfully close to the originals. They know this from studying the history of manuscript transmission. And they know it, now more than ever, from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  

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