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March
21, 2005 
VOL.
43, NO. 6Oakland,
CA
shows oldest biblical fragments
MOBILE, Ala.—Portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
the ancient manuscripts whose discovery in 1947 is viewed by many as the
archaeological find of the 20th century, have gone on display at a small
science museum, attracting sizable daily crowds eager to see the oldest
biblical fragments ever unearthed.
Each day, hundreds of visitors to the Gulf Coast Exploreum in Mobile linger
at one clear plastic case in particular.
It is the world’s oldest copy of the Ten Commandments, its tiny
black text exquisitely inked onto the crinkled surface of a brown animal
skin.
Nearby is a 3-foot-wide document whose six columns of precise text contain
all or parts of Psalm 135 and three other psalms.
And just a few feet away are other scroll fragments: portions of the books
of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Isaiah and Jeremiah.
Some of the fragments are barely larger than the palm of a hand: dark
brown, inscribed with Hebrew text in words little bigger than a grain
of rice.
On larger manuscripts, such as the Psalm Scroll, a reader can easily pick
out the distinctive four-letter Tetragrammaton—YHWH—the Hebrew
symbol for Yahweh, or God.
Organizers of the exhibit say it is the largest collection of biblical
Dead Sea Scroll fragments ever assembled in the United States. They were
written about the time Jesus Christ lived, and only about 100 miles from
the Galilean landscape where he preached.
The display of the scrolls and related items ends April 24.
On display with them are pottery, coins and related artifacts that tell
the story of the Essenes, a small community of ascetic Jews who lived
apart on the scorched and arid northwest shore of the Dead Sea and who
are widely believed to have created the scrolls.
The exhibit also displays a collection of rare Bibles, a page from a 15th
century Gutenberg Bible and Roman glass.
The scrolls came to light in 1947, when a young Bedouin shepherd threw
a stone into a dark cave above the Dead Sea and heard the distinctive
clink of pottery breaking. He recovered the first of the scrolls.
Systematic exploration yielded more than 900 documents in 11 caves. Some
had been stored in jars; others lay intact or in fragments on dusty cave
floors, preserved by the arid climate.
The find dazzled scholars. The scrolls contained portions of all the books
of the Bible except Esther. But mostly they consisted of nonbiblical apocalyptic
literature and secular documents. Some explained the rules for living
in the community that produced them.
Although a few scholars dispute that the Essenes created the scrolls,
the consensus attributing the manuscripts to the wilderness sect is a
broad one.
From about 130 B.C. to A.D. 68, the Essenes lived lives of severe discipline
and ritual purity in a community called Qumran in the Judean wilderness.
They studied Scripture and prepared for a world-shaking clash between
the “sons of darkness” and the “sons of light.”
It is not a long leap to imagine the New Testament wilderness prophet
John the Baptist an Essene, said James Bowley, a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar
at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. But the evidence is mixed. “Certainly
possible and not unlikely, ... (but) not close to a certainty,”
he said.
“At the very least, what is most probable and totally reasonable
is that John, being at the same time and in the same region, knew of the
community and of at least some of their ideas.”
This Dead Sea Scrolls fragment contains Colossians 3:21-4:7 on the front side and 4:7-15 on the back. It is written on papyrus in Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language.
RNS PHOTO/CARUCHA L. MEUSE
Visitors to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit can see some of the hundreds of text fragments, including the world’s oldest copy of the Ten Commandments.
RNS PHOTO/BILL STARLING
