May 28th: The Dead Sea Scrolls

At some time or another, most everyone has heard a reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls. I occasionally hear the scrolls mentioned when someone is trying to make a point about just how old a certain document is. However, I would guess that many people are not exactly clear as to what the Dead Sea Scrolls are, and more importantly, why they are significant.

The final stop on our four-day swing to southern Israel was the desert caves near the Dead Sea where the scrolls were found. The place of the discoveries is also known as Qumran. The first picture that you see is me crouching just inside “Cave 11,” where many of the scrolls were discovered. I would have gone further inside the cave, but I saw that there were many bats flying around deeper inside the cave, so I thought this would suffice. Getting to Cave 11 required a steep climb of a couple hundred feet. As the designation suggests, the Qumran caves are numbered.


The second picture that you see is “Cave 4,” again, a site where many scrolls have been found. The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in the late 1940s. They are a treasure trove of ancient religious documents. Most importantly, the scrolls include ancient copies of the Old Testament Scriptures. In fact, with the exception of Esther, all or part of every Old Testament book has been found at Qumran. Isaiah has been found in its entirety. Moreover, these scriptural texts have been found in a few different ancient languages. These texts are the oldest known copies of the Old Testament, and they date to the first few centuries B.C.


The third picture that you see is a distant view of Cave 11, the same one where I posed in the first picture above. In addition to Scripture, other Qumran scrolls include extensive commentaries on the Scriptures, Apocryphal books (historical books not included in the Old Testament), and religious instructions. In total, roughly 900 scrolls have been discovered at the Qumran caves.


Who is responsible for this copious amount of ancient material? Well, there was a strict Jewish sect at the time known as the Essenes. The Essenes lived out in the desert, away from the hustle and bustle of Jerusalem and the rest of Israeli society. They believed that living separate from the world would allow them to stay better focused on keeping God’s law and staying away from the temptations of the world. The fourth picture is the remains of an Essene settlement right near Caves 4 and 11.


The last picture that you see is a replica of a scroll of a portion of Psalms discovered at Qumran. Seeing this replica, and being there at Qumran, reminded me of why the Dead Sea Scrolls are significant. You see, most evangelical Christians believe that the original writing of the Old Testament was completed in about 400 B.C. The translations we use in America today are taken from Hebrew texts dating to about 1000 A.D. In other words, we believe that the Old Testament was faithfully and accurately passed down for nearly 1400 years (without the aid of a printing press or copy machine)! But in the 1800s and early 1900s, many critics of the Bible claimed that the Old Testament was not reliable. How, they asked, could men possibly have accurately transcribed the Bible over such a long period of time? It’s equivalent to a millennium-and-a-half game of “whisper-down-the-lane,” and we all know how that game turns out.

However, the scriptural Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the mid-twentieth century, are nearly identical to the texts dated to 1000 A.D.! This provides strong evidence that the Old Testament really was faithfully and accurately passed down for all those many years. And most importantly, it means that the Bible that we use today is reliable. It’s not the byproduct of centuries of mistakes and embellishments by a myriad of unknown scribes, but rather, it can be trusted as the reliable Word of God.