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The Mysteries Of The Dead Sea Scrolls | Dead Sea Scrolls | Parable

Mar 20, 2024
On the desolate shores of the Dead Sea, two hundred years before the birth of Christ, a group of men known as the Sons of Light lived in a biblical community, preserving their beliefs and visions in a large library of

scrolls

that they separated from the room of unjust men and will go to the desert to prepare their way by aligning themselves with the sky for a period of 200 years they prepared for the end of days a last great battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness when the victorious Roman army was defeated. removed the voices and visions of qumran were lost for 2000 years the dust blew over the tombs of the sons of light who remained forgotten scholars from the hebrew university of jerusalem undertake the painstaking work of reconstructing fragments of ancient biblical

scrolls

found in a cave of mountain near the

dead

sea this scroll was a simple Bedouin boy who stumbled upon what has been called the most important archaeological find of the 20th century since the discovery of the first scroll, hope and fear were great, the hope that the scrolls will reveal eyewitness accounts of the Every day of Jesus' life in Palestine fear that they will undermine the fundamental beliefs of Christianity and Judaism.
the mysteries of the dead sea scrolls dead sea scrolls parable
The history of the discovery and scholarship of the scrolls has often been shrouded in secrecy. Hidden documents. False accusations and conspiracy theories involving governments and world leaders. What else is it? Hidden in the desert now on the threshold of a new millennium, scientists and scholars using the most sophisticated technology of the space age are adding their voices to the ancient search for meaning buried with the Dead Sea scrolls that come from around the world to Uncovering the truth about the Sons of Light The academic controversies of the early '90s obscured the true mystery of the scrolls of who wrote them and why they were hidden deep in caves along the Dead Sea What is clear is that the scrolls were carefully hidden in sealed jars where they were hidden in panic to be recovered after some danger had passed or they were placed there for a period of time for the benefit of future generations.
the mysteries of the dead sea scrolls dead sea scrolls parable

More Interesting Facts About,

the mysteries of the dead sea scrolls dead sea scrolls parable...

Clues to this mystery are hidden in fragments of the past that scholars and scientists have worked on for half a century. Stephen Faunus of the Center for the Study of Early Christianity in Jerusalem is working to achieve the synthesis of scientific scholarship and archeology at Qumran. What we are doing is returning to the crime scene to solve a mystery. We return to the place. where the events occurred here in Qumran and we study the place and the context, we study the actual documents that these people had in their hands and we interrelate them with the site and the events that took place there and we consult the witnesses, the eyewitnesses who knew to these people and spoke in detail about them at the time they lived magen broshi archaeologist and former curator of the shrine of the book in jerusalem has led many teams over the years that have carried out excavations at qumran the scrolls have been discovered of the

dead

sea in 11 caves those caves are geologically of two types five of the caves are in the cliffs in the very hard limestone of the dolomites and are, of course, natural caves the other six caves are artificial caves that have been excavated in The soft mall artificial caves are the best solution to survive in this harsh climate and it is very easy to excavate.
the mysteries of the dead sea scrolls dead sea scrolls parable
You see, this is the mall, it falls apart in your hands, so it doesn't require very hard work. On the floor we find hundreds of patches attesting that the place occupied by the Dead Sea Scrolls is a vast collection of more than 800 manuscripts 50 years of unparalleled scholarship have opened this ancient library to the modern world, but there is still much debate about the origin Of this great body of works, was it the product of the Sons of Light themselves living and writing in this secluded desert community or was it written somewhere else and brought to Qumran later by men who fled the catacombs of Jerusalem in the early A few scholars in Jerusalem began the task of reconstructing this library from tens of thousands of disintegrated fragments, some of the fragments were smaller than the tip of a finger and other fragments blackened and hardened with the passage of time.
the mysteries of the dead sea scrolls dead sea scrolls parable
While the task was overwhelming and frustrating for scholars, a tedious and innovative work that was driven by rising expectations among academics, religious leaders and the general public, scholars and the general public expected to find glimpses or much more than glimpses. of Jesus and early Christianity in the scrolls. This high expectation was met with frustration as the scholarship process was painstaking and initially limited. to eight scholars, all Christians and no Jews, the foundation was laid for widespread suspicions of a religious cover-up. The established churches had much to lose if the scrolls contained information from the days of Jesus that undermined ancient beliefs by piecing together thousands of fragments early.
The investigation would soon present evidence. from a community in the desert the 800 manuscripts left by the community comprise three distinct groups of literature the first group contains the entire Hebrew Bible except the book of Esther these are the oldest copies of the Old Testament texts by a thousand years the second part from the library are texts that were part of the literary heritage of the time, the last group are the sectarian scrolls that describe the life and teachings of the children of light while they lived in the desert, but scholars still had doubts about the authenticity of the scrolls found a new method of determining the age of artifacts.
Carbon-14 analysis had just been introduced in the 1950s, but was discarded as too clumsy a technique to apply to precious scrolls. The scholars focused on another method of dating the scrolls. Paleography is, I guess. literally, a study of ancient writing, specifically, it is a study of ancient writing with the goal of dating the material because writings change over time like all artifacts, whether they be cars, clothing, musical styles or whatever, each letter of an alphabet changes constantly. and not at the same pace so that you can examine where each of the letters is in a given alphabet and that gives you the basis for an absolute thing or at least a relative date in your typological sequence the early pedagogical dating carried out by The Frankish Cross in The Dead Sea Scrolls has subsequently been confirmed by more sophisticated and less invasive carbon-14 dating.
The scrolls were in fact written in the cradle of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. The oldest texts date from 250 to 150 BC. C., but most of the material is more No texts have been found before 70 AD. indicating that this is the time when the scrolls were hidden in the caves. In Jerusalem she is Catholic. world-class priest and paleographer has spent 30 years reconstructing the broken texts of the dead sea scrolls I try to imbibe a little of his mentality his ideas his point of view I can imagine them organizing themselves at first in their room in Qumran and copying the biblical texts and then composing other texts to fill the gaps in the manuscript Emil draws on a lifetime of study of ancient writing, considering many factors to decide which of the thousands of fragments belongs to the incomplete text, the individual writing style of each scribe, the time period of the lyric style, a vast knowledge of different types of ancient texts, and a keen intuition honed by years of dedicated study.
I found, for example, this little fragment and this one and I said: can they go with what I had reconstructed? They did find their place. The artistic gift allows him to almost feel the personality of his former brother in scholarship. They became familiar people to me, friends, people I would love to talk to. I would like them to at least inspire me to understand the gaps in the manuscripts. It was with the appointment of Emanuel Tove as editor-in-chief of the scrolls publication project in 1991 that many new scientists were given the opportunity to work with the scrolls, as many of them have deteriorated rapidly since their discovery.
Scientists struggled to give academics alternatives. to researching the scrolls while preserving the material for future generations, most of the work is actually done on photographs from the 1950s and early 1960s. Magnificent infrared photographs of the scrolls were made and remain our best tools. I must add to this that even better. some are being manufactured today in laboratories located outside the elegant halls of NASA's jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena. Greg Behrman has worked on digital optics used to capture different images of the Earth's surface from five miles up. Greg hypothesized that the multispectral imaging that had been applied to space and planetary optics could take the scrolls beyond the infrared spectrum to reveal more text invited by the Israeli antiquities authority to Jerusalem.
He will apply this new technology to fragments that have been selected by scholars from around the world. Selected fragments obscured by aging and rapid deterioration are put to the test. There are three such images. Bareman's technology relies on the use of infrared light to capture lost images in the same way that satellite cameras can reveal stories about life in the land that can see beyond the limitations of the naked eye the situation is tense in the room whatever is on the piece of parchment no one has seen it in almost 2000 years oh look at that that's what you want look at that In an instant, Greg Behrman washes away 2,000 years of filth, bat dung and animal urine, revealing for the first time lines of text that will reveal even more about the children of the light.
Imaging spectroscopy works by taking many different images of the same physical scene at different wavelengths, the information from which allows you to calculate the spectrum. each pixel in the scene and then you use spectroscopy, which is a traditional physics tool to help you figure out what each pixel is made of. The way we applied this to the Dead Sea scrolls was exactly what we did: we took an image every 10 nanometers. starting at 404 10 420 we worked the other way until we got to the infrared and we looked at the images as we went and what we discovered was that as you go into the infrared this is 640 and 680 this is the red part 720 This is infrared.
You see that as you zoom out, the text starts to emerge from the background and down here is an enhanced 970 nanometer version along with the images provided by Berman and his team. Today's scholars also have the advantage of replacing the traditional method of scroll study that involves hours of tedious work on fragments or microfiche with a CD-ROM version of the entire scroll library on their desktop. What's on the screen now is column 24 of the cave temple scroll 11. You'll see. the transcript on one side and a photograph of that column on the opposite side previously the scholar had to take this photograph and use a microscope or magnifying glass to get a close-up of this particular fragment now a scholar can simply open the database Select the transcript you want Select the area of ​​this fragment Crop it out and then you will get a much closer view of that portion of the fragment The dazzling magic of this new digital technology masks flaws that some scholars find troubling although one proponent of this new avenue of research bruce zuckerman of the west semitic research project at the university of southern california is quick to point out the gaps in the digital reconstruction of scroll fragments let me show you what i mean here we have up here a dead sea scroll or a section of it from the apocryphal genesis, one of the most interesting Dead Sea scrolls of what I would call a good use of computer imagery, a type of imagery that no one would argue with, you see here, there is a tear in the text, you see where the ink was . and uh, the piece just tears apart due to the tear.
Now what we did here is we just cut out this little piece electronically. I should add, you know it's not done, don't try this with the real thing and we just push it. up and when you pushed it up, it became quite nice, you'll notice that we left a line that is very clear showing that we have done something with the fragment. It would be very easy to go in and tidy up this edge. melting and simply becoming part of the fragment on top, you wouldn't be able to tell and most scholars would have no idea that you had done any kind of manipulation, so this is a good example of a type of manipulation of that one.
I could use the actual text if the actual text wasn't so fragile, but there are other types of manipulation that one would say are a little more questionable.Here is a text where we have made some computer image inhabitants. one end, this is the raw image or the image that is not processed and here at the other end is a really beautiful image, if I do say so myself, of the text and we could say that the computer enhancement produced that, but You see, he hides behind that. A multitude feels this image in some respects as false.
Now what do I mean by that? Here I can show you how we cite forgery. Well, I'm clarifying the picture around this, which turns out to be a yud, so you can see it very clearly. look where the letter begins and where it ends as if it were originally written by the scribe I'm taking all that little bleeding that it has had due to the deterioration of the text can you also darken it a little there Can you, no, no problem, look now, ink beautiful, the original looks like it was written yesterday, take it away now, take it away when we go back, if I showed people this material and this material and said that computer imaging produced that if I don't explain what?
I did, you would assume that that is a totally objective maneuver and it is not, it is a highly selective and highly idiosyncratic maneuver. In fact, using this type of technology I can put your name on a dead sea scroll, although this brave new world is not without risks as more scholars gain access to the scrolls with these new tools, new ideas and theories begin to emerge. take shape upon the children of light and the lives they led in Jerusalem today. Tensions at the end. of the 20th century with the voices of many religions, the different voices within Judaism worship at the same wall, different Christians come as pilgrims to this sacred place, each proclaiming the way in which Muslims worship Christ as they have done for centuries in the Dome of the Rock known among Scholars of various forms, such as the Covenanters, the Essenes, the Jihad, and the Sons of Light, as the desert community defined themselves, also lived in a time and place of many voices, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Essenes and other groups, all claimed to be the true Israel.
Judaism was evolving from this rich tapestry of voices that pitted Jews against each other in a spiritual battle for souls, the sons of light emerged from this world and followed their leaders out of the chaos of Jerusalem in the 2nd century. to. C. towards the purity of the desert and the peace it offered in their flight to the desert to establish a new order they could not have known that they were living in a world that was in the midst of giving birth to rabbinic Judaism and Christianity as we know it today this was a period of tremendous religious firmament third second first centuries BC. and Judaism since the time of the second temple, but there were all kinds of other tendencies, as well as strong apocalyptic messianic tendencies and these feed to some extent Christianity, to some extent rebel groups within Judaism that rebel against Rome twice and We have a sort of classifying traditions right now in which some parts of Second Temple Judaism end up somehow flowing into Rabbinic Judaism and some other elements end up flowing into Christianity and some other elements just disappear from the scene, but it's a very complex set of developments that lead to the religious picture that we know once we emerge in the first centuries of this era when leaving Jerusalem the children of light also left behind the sacred temple this temple in the eyes of the children of light It had been desecrated and therefore could not serve the truly righteous of Israel and what happened was that the members of the Qumran community basically felt that that temple was not being managed properly because of the Hellenistic influence on the high priests and others. specific rituals that they did not agree with, so they withdrew from it and For them, the dream of a perfect temple to which they would return and which would be managed the way they thought it should be managed was perhaps the greatest of all dreams driven by visions of a new temple.
These men forged a sacred community in the desert. on the shores of the dead sea to reach its final destination the lowest place on earth at 1,300 feet below sea level the dead sea has a salt content seven to eight times that of the world's oceans and evaporates At a rate of 55 inches per year they often create a thick, heavy stench in the air along the coast, gravel terraces indicating recent inland sea levels. Less than two inches of rain falls on this desolate land in any given year, temperatures hovering around 100 degrees Fahrenheit for days on end during the long summer.
Life has always had a weak foothold here in the Judean Desert. Most scholars agree that the light subs belong to a group in ancient times known as the Essenes, a group who were dedicated to the strict observance of religious doctrine from dawn to night. The main complex was used for study, worship and communal meals served during the day, it is likely that the children of light slept in the caves in the nearby cliffs and in tents around the sacred building, entering only through the east door after two years of initiation and testing. this building separated the children of light from the rest of the world they were separatists in that they separated themselves from the general community they were pietists and most scholars believe that the sect of the dead sea scrolls is a scene that a manuscript found in the caves of the The community rule details the daily rituals of the children of light and underlines their complete devotion to God before I move my hands and feet I will bless his name I will praise him before I go out or enter or sit down or stand up each brother was committed to a strict code of conduct that reinforced the sanctity of a place where angels trod and prayer was constant, even simple murmuring was received with swift justice in this, the rules of the community were clear, whoever murmured against the authority of the community will be expelled, it was a harsh regime far removed from later Christianity and other religions that preached compassion for the weak and sick, but within this rigid community was the belief that their piety and purity led to a higher dimension. the blind, the dead and the lame cannot enter the sacred precincts and the reason for this is that the blind cannot see if they are touching something that makes them impure upon death because they cannot hear the proper interpretation of the torah in order to know if they are becoming impure or not and the lame because they scare away the angels to be among the angels the children of light had to be pure in heart and body and water became the key to purification for the children of the light through an elaborate system of aqueducts the water from the Judean hills was channeled into cisterns and baths built by the community at Qumran, ironic given that only two inches of rain falls here annually and that much of this water was dedicated for ritual purposes at the so-called fifth hour of each day when the community returned from work. to eat in common before eating they would purify themselves they would have to enter and put on a loincloth take off their work clothes and put them to one side go down these steps and go down to the level where the water had settled or they evaporated to submerge themselves go up to the other side to be able to follow in the footsteps of the kumara knights is like going back in time the most important part of the main complex was the scriptorium the place where the scrolls were copied or written and The rooms where the scrolls were studied, without a doubt, had a great collection of scrolls to read, some of historical importance, such as copies of older biblical texts, but also those that contained the harsh rules for their daily lives, but these ancient ruins take on new meaning.
When viewed through space-age eyes, NASA's synthetic aperture radar, SAR for short, is designed to read the Earth's surface even when it is obscured by dense cloud cover. Today's Israel and Palestine can be seen in detail and physical features are enhanced with satellite technology, but the surprising feature of this technology is that it allows us to see beyond observations with the naked eye. In reality, it can function as a time machine and allow us to take a look back in history. Scientists David Long and David Arnold teamed up to create a smaller version. of NASA's sar that promises to shed light on how the children of light lived on the shore of the dead sea.
This is a custom designed antenna we build. The overall system operates at approximately two gigahertz. This is a patched phased array antenna. It is very flat. panel is something innovative, but it's not something that many places couldn't do. It's unusual that we did it here so that we could involve students and it's a very broad band that these scientists and students worked to implement this backyard sar equipment at a fraction of the cost of NASA's space model to capture images of microwave the ruins of Qumran and other sites in Israel from a small plane. What we expected to obtain, we hope that the colors of the ground would be seen optically, but on the radar. frequencies where their wavelengths are closer to this length, they will see roughness in the ground of that scale, so they will see rocks of that size, so our hope was to be able to see foundations that were buried because the ground will come up or old fences . rock piles and we would do a census from the air, we could look at layouts, maybe to see how the city was laid out, so that would give an archaeologist a study to start their excavation plans for when they actually go to dig.
The site, the first attempt at the new technology, had everyone excited. Mounting the radar device under the small plane was the easy part. The entire system will be operated from inside the plane using computers on the ground. Several metal cones are deployed to form. a grid on which photographs can be lined up the flight path is carefully plotted as they need to fly as low and level with the ground surface as possible to get the best reading one of the questions is how big the civilization was exactly where is Qumran or was the whole platform around the dead sea there, so we hope to be able to see paths, ancient paths that go between different settlements so that we can get an idea of ​​how big it is. civilization or that segment of that population was Doug Thompson collects data as they fly over the site at this stage has no visual control of the images that the system captures only later in the laboratory will be able to analyze the material that was the first flyover at Qumran tarnished by turbulence that scattered images of the site on trails in the sand, but other flybys of the holy land showed that the technology could work to identify ancient trails and structures that are not visible to the naked eye, but it is already clear that the Qumran site it was a place well connected with nearby communities like jericho ain fesca and anguar if i was one of the group 2000 years ago they gave me the map of the country i would say this is the place because it has all the advantages that isolation has, i mean true isolation, You must remember that the road you see now did not exist at that time and the water reached the cliffs, so there was not even a path that ran along the coast, so this is true isolation, on the one hand, on the other hand.
On the other hand, it's a day's walk to Jerusalem, a day's work to Jerusalem, it's a couple of hours to Jericho, so they're far from civilization but not too far from But if Qumran were so well connected to other parts of Palestine and neighboring areas, could we make sure that the scrolls were actually written on the site. Could they have been produced elsewhere and brought to Qumran for safekeeping during the Jewish revolt in 68 AD? Scientists from new fields have joined biblical scholars in their search for answers. Microbiologist Scott Woodward. from Brigham Young University has worked on extracting ancient DNA from mummies in Egypt.
Upon learning of his work, the Israeli Antiquities Authority approached him regarding sampling DNA from the scrolls when he was originally approached by the Antiquities Authority in Israel. For us the idea was what can we do with all of these fragments of the scrolls, the pieces that did not belong to some large scroll, was there a way to put them back together and reconstruct some of the Dead Sea scrolls from a pile of disconnected fragments because the parchment on which the texts are? writing is leather and comes from animals scientists can search for the genetic material found in cells by finding small pieces of DNA strands in the cells' so-called mitochondria scientists can create a genetic fingerprint of each individual animal by testing piece after piece see If they come from the same original scroll, then they probably belong together in some of the other text sequences that are placed in the key likes and we'll go from there, it'sWell, Woodward's partner in DNA research at the Hebrew University, Gila Kahila, has begun examining them. a large number of scroll fragments, he realizes that his scientific approach to scroll research will not necessarily be met with acclaim from traditional scholars, we can tell whether these two fragments belong to the same individual, if so, maybe the match they made is okay. if they don't, that means it will change the text and it will change everything.
Academics don't want us to come to this conclusion in his lab in the US. Woodward takes this study a step further, not only DNA fragments can be joined together. and genetic signatures can reveal even more information. We have been able to demonstrate that the technology works. What that will do for scholars is help answer the question: where were the scrolls written? In order to do this, we have to take the genetic signature. that we now have from some of these scrolls matches the genetic signature that we would find in bones from some of the archaeological sites, bones from Qumran, bones from Jerusalem and other sites throughout the Holy Land and then, probably, finally, the other one, which Next, what we should be able to do is take some of the unidentified fragments that are still in boxes waiting to be reconstructed to see if we can in fact reconstruct some new pages from which scholars could then obtain new information to DNA could help reveal whether the scrolls were really from Qumran or somewhere else in the Middle East.
Goats had always been the prime suspects as the source of the scrolls' material. Common domestic animals. They were a natural choice because they could thrive in the harsh climate of the Dead Sea and were acceptable to use as skin for sacred or biblical texts. The skin of ibex, a wild animal, was also found on scrolls that were not biblical in nature, but on sectarian documents that were written for the regulation of the community. Ibex was an interesting choice, but not surprising was that with more samples, however, the DNA work took an unexpected turn, surprising scholars and raising more questions about the scrolls, but what we found in this case was that these scrolls appear to have been written on bovine or cow scrolls there.
There might be a problem with the cows here. Where are cows raised on the shores of the Dead Sea? It's not very easy. I think most people would agree that they probably weren't there. So where did they come from? The origin of the scrolls is. questioned by another source another way to ask where the scrolls were written is by studying the clay vessels that contained them for 2,000 years. Scroll vessels and pottery fragments were found in and around Qumran and in 11 caves adjacent to the site. This wide range of locations leaves the door open to speculation. About whether or not the scrolls were made in Qumran Professor Yan Guneveg of the Hebrew University is applying nuclear activation technology to discover whether the vessels were made in the kiln of the communities in Qumran or perhaps brought there from somewhere else. like jerusalem in Police records around the world store fingerprints of criminals by which each individual can be identified, so what we are doing here is the same, more or less the same: we are taking a chemical profile of a kiln that is called a chemical imprint and you can later compare it to pottery found at the site after collecting clay samples from the kiln at Qumran.
Gunaway goes to the Rockefeller museum in Jerusalem, where the jars are kept. An interesting feature that parchment jars exhibit is a blister effect on the ceramic surface. Gunavig offers several theories to explain the effect, one of the most intriguing is the idea that the jars were made quickly to hide the scrolls, perhaps when the Kumara knights heard about the advancing Roman army, people were in a hurry, you know. , for producing the jars and therefore they took everything they could get to produce these jars as quickly as possible and therefore when they go into the kiln, they shrink differently, then the clay and the calcium carbonate are burned and then blisters are obtained.
About where this jar is from cave number eight in Kumra, what we're going to do is take a sample from this jar to find a match between whatever we analyzed at Qumran and this jar that we've already made in the meantime. other jars, so if they match we can prove whether it was made in kumbram or imported to cumbra if DNA analysis takes the parchment research to the molecular level neutron analysis takes it beyond the basic building blocks of all matter then of packaging the samples. In numbered and identified vials they are sent to the Technical University of Budapest.
Dr. Martibala, Gudevag's partner, prepares them for the nuclear reactor. The samples are bombarded by neutrons that turn the powdered samples radioactive. The radiation emitted by the sample is converted into pulses. electrical elements that are converted into numbers that show the amounts of chemical elements within the clay. This is the fingerprint that will indicate the path to the place where the vessel was made and a possible clue to the origin of the scrolls themselves. The results from Budapest are sent back to Jerusalem. where they are grouped and compared with evidence on other pieces of Qumran pottery in the data bank and now I have entered into the data bank a sample that is one of the 15 storage vessels that we have analyzed and nine of them are analyzing as a piece of clay what we found in Qumran, that means that there is not a piece of clay but not imported now you find it there and I have analyzed three pieces of clay which are three balls of clay that were found as bowls, you know, two centimeters in diameter and one of them is analyzing nine of the 15 storage jars made in qumran, which means that in this case they are really made in qumran, they are made from clay that was found in kumra.
There is another interesting thing which is that the parchment jars are not analyzed exactly the same as all the other ceramics that you know, so it seems that at least based on 30 shirts, there is a type of preparation in the clay that is used specifically for the jars of parchment and another composition that is used for the rest. from pottery another ceramic object found in Qumran 40 years ago has kept its secrets well cosmic secrets about the alignment of celestial time with earthly time recently Stephen Faun identified the object as a sundial the historical significance of this sundial when it was modified in its final form is that it is the only clock in ancient times that accurately determined the fifth hour of the day at any time of the year when the sun rose in the morning over the dead sea, the sundial was calibrated to mark the hours of the day regardless of the season.
It was common at that time not only in Qumran to divide the day between sunrise and sunset into 12 equal hours, the length of each hour of the day would change depending on the season, they would be shorter in winter and longer in summer. It was divided into three vigils: sunrise, noon, or fifth hour, and sunset, and the importance was to find the fifth hour, the exact time at which they ate at the site, and when they aligned themselves with the sky, the true alignment with the sky culminated in the designated end time. battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness they were expecting a war like that because I think for at least two centuries they took it seriously one of the reasons they went to the desert is to prepare for that kind of war He prepared himself impurity and whatever and even composed a book on how the war is going to be handled because the war of the sons of the fugue against the spread of the drug traffickers is exactly a military manual on the tips of the javelin they will write javelin shining of the power of god bloody spikes to strike down those slain by the wrath of god flaming blade to devour the wicked struck down by the judgment of god a thousand men lined up seven lines deep each will hold shields of burnished bronze with mirrors the sons of the light they waited more than 200 years in the desert for this holy war it is unknown what signs they were waiting for but when the Roman army mobilized to stop the Jewish rebellion they believed that the day had arrived the historian Josephus tells us about the fate of the Essenes in The hands of the Romans, the war with the Romans, tried their souls from beginning to end by every variety of trials, wrapped and twisted, burned and torn and passed through every instrument of torture to induce them to blaspheme their legislator, smiling in his agonies and softly. mocking their executioners, they joyfully resigned their souls, confident that they would receive them again.
The Jewish revolt was an ironic end to the apocalyptic vision of the children of light, since it was the Romans who had a dizzying variety of weapons and legions of men. They took their revolt against the Romans too seriously, they believed this was the apocalyptic war they expected, so they entered the war with such abandon that they perished in the war, they were simply killed on the battlefields and after the battles they were persecuted. by the Romans and massacred and how did they know the fact that we have 800 scrolls, I mean there was no one to recover them, although there is no archaeological evidence of a brave final battle near Qumran, it is certain that the sons of light disappeared a note at the foot of From history to the Roman conquest of Judea, the scattered remains of the Qumran group would have merged together with a whole variety of Second Temple groups disappearing from the face of the earth, so to speak, as a result of the consensus that takes place around.
Pharisaic rabbinic Judaism after the destruction no matter what a dream was shattered at first they did not think of staying more than a few months maybe a few years at most and they were planning to return and purify the temple and they died there with some regrets As they expected to the messiahs and hoped to return to Jerusalem, the dreams and visions that led these men to the desert are still not fully understood, it is the science of the 21st century that will bring us closer to these forgotten voices in the desert in In this area there are quite a few artificial caves that collapsed in that collapse we think there may be up to 20.
The fact that they are collapsed is an advantage because they have not been looted, no one has touched them if they have collapsed at the right time, so there is a very good possibility of that if we dig those caves you will find utensils and, God willing, even manuscripts, even those are their scrolls, although they were lost after the Roman military campaign, the voices of Qumran can be heard once again. due to the painstaking work of dozens of scientists and scholars around the world, but for every question answered, many others are raised and perhaps many answers still remain hidden in the desert.
In many ways, the real work on the Dead Sea scrolls is just beginning in the Judean desert in Palestine on the shore of the Dead Sea the windswept desert ruins of Qumran still hide ancient secrets human remains and artifacts unearthed by archaeologists 50 years ago are only now beginning to tell the story of the people who, in desperation, hid the Dead Sea Scrolls in the caves above Qumran never to return Hidden in a forgotten crypt beneath the busy streets of modern Jerusalem lies the tomb of a remarkable man whose ghost still haunts archaeologists and scientists eager to learn the

mysteries

of the scrolls and those who hid them.
What secrets did Father Roland Devoe take to the grave and why does his name still spark controversy? You can't go to someone else's dig and that's what happened here in '93 during the scroll operation and start digging before you have a final report of what the previous dig was and now you can understand that they can't publish their result before the vote publishes yours. The Dead Sea Scrolls are accessible to everyone now. Why is Qumran archaeological material not accessible? The same argument that was made about the Dead Sea. scrolls why the dead sea scrolls should be accessible to everyone that same argument should be made about the archeology of qumran we are 52 years after the dead sea scrolls were found but from the point of view of archeology we are just beginning the story that consumed The Life of Father Devoe begins in the winter of 1947 with an Arab shepherd named Mohamed Eddie searching for a lost goat on the limestone cliffs above the Dead Sea.
The boy throws a stone into a small cave as it opens. The sound of breaking pottery comes back to him like a story from the Arabian Nights, he enters the cave and, to his amazement, finds ten clay jars intact since the time of Christ, all of them were empty or full of earth, except one that contained one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century, the Dead Sea Scrolls. A total of seven scrolls were taken from cave number one. They were the first manuscripts discovered in this ancient library thatIt would eventually total more than 800 texts located in ancient Palestine on the shores of the Dead Sea and just a day's walk from Jerusalem.
The ruins of Qumran were ignored. Over the centuries, with the discovery of the scrolls, they suddenly took on a new meaning. Was there a connection between the scrolls and the ruins? In 1951, Father Roland Devoe assembled a small team of archaeologists to investigate the ruins of Qumran which they excavated for five years and formed into what it became. to become the accepted history of the desert community of a monastic brotherhood known as the Essenes or Pious, an elite society that assembled an enormous library of sacred scrolls obsessed with ritual purity and the celestial calendar when it began its excavations, devoe He was already a famous archaeologist and teacher.
The first time I met Devoe was in October of '63 and after dinner I was introduced to everyone who was sitting in the garden and Devoe was telling jokes and my French was pretty good, but a lot of it was Argo. . He had a great sense of humor and you could see the dynamism and brilliance that he was appointed director of the prestigious Jerusalem Bible School in 1953 and president of the Rockefeller Museum in 1954. The Dead Sea Scrolls housed at the Rockefeller were entrusted to his staff and care. exclusive of the scrolls and the archaeological excavation under his personal control he was in an extraordinary position to correlate the work of the field team excavating at Qumran and the group of young scholars he had assembled who were classifying and translating the texts at the Rockefeller museum .
John Strugnell was 26 years old when he came from Oxford to join the team. They smoked cigarettes in the presence of the sacred scrolls. Everyone smoked cigarettes in those days. They served us coffee in the morning. You could have spilled a cup of coffee over the straw and not. We, we, do not treat these scrolls with great reverence, we treat them seriously and without great scientific skill. These young scholars were assembling a vast puzzle of thousands of individual fragments, many of them from texts that no living person had ever read inside. The convolutions of the parchment were very tight, it hadn't been unrolled for 2000 years, so I really had to work hard to carve the bottom to remove the ebony part and not lose any information, words and letters, and uh, for that It was hard to do, but I had to go to lunch that day and to the American school in Jerusalem and no, actually what I did was I put a kettle on my stove, which was an oil stove, and I left it. the steam from the kettle I put a lot of water in it, he ran, took my lunch and I came back and I didn't dare tell my father to vote, that's what he had done because, in fact, he would have done it when I told him later, he He was very upset that I had done that, but the result was good, I put it all under glass, it was all, you know, it had just worked perfectly and then he claimed that he had suggested it to me between 1952 and 1956.
Another 10 caves. Scrolls and fragments containing, eventually, over 800 texts were discovered during the same period. Davao and his team were collecting and recording massive amounts of data at the excavation site, details that Davao hoped to publish in a definitive final report. and his heart was weak and he didn't care, he continued, you know, he continued and had a very minor surgery and during the surgery he died. Jean-Baptiste Umber of the Ecole Biblic is the man to whom the legacy of Davao was passed. presides over the ongoing study into the enormous amounts of archaeological material that Devoe left behind but some people ask questions maybe not maybe not a saying and if Qumran is not the same the glory disappears you know the fantastic weight of Qumran is resolved in water if he is not a saint, so the question is serious because until the full report is published people may hesitate to link caves and skulls with sight Devoe's sudden death left the world without a final report of his discoveries lo What we know about Qumran comes from his lectures and notebooks A wealth of archaeological details that tell the story of a thousand years The archaeological site of Qumran is situated on a wide plateau that lies between the severe limestone cliffs to the west and the dead sea to the east when devoe's team began work here in 1952 they found piles of rubble barely distinguishable from the surrounding landscape the excavation took more than five years to complete as devoe's team worked their way through the rubble evidence of four periods of occupation beginning at the deepest and therefore oldest level, some structures date back to 900 BC, the time of the Israelite kings, eight centuries later, around 150 BC, a new group arrived at the plateau and began constructing buildings, bushes for lighting pottery, and aqueducts and cisterns for moving and storing water.
This was the modest beginning of the Essene community and the scroll library. In the middle of the 1st century BC, the community adopted what Devoe called its definitive form. The finished complex had three parts: first, the study area where the scrolls were collected and also a fortress-like watchtower, second, a group of service buildings, including a third kitchen. at the south end, the largest room in the complex used as a dining room and assembly hall and woven throughout a remarkable system of aqueducts and baths used to purify members of the community and in the final period, evidence of ashes and arrowheads of devastation. the story of the destruction of the Essenes at the hands of the Roman army in 68 AD. and it was this settlement in this main period of occupation that Davao identified as a sectarian settlement, believing that the people who lived at the site were the same ones who deposited the scrolls in the caves and this opinion has been well maintained, basically it has not been questioned until about 10 years ago and I probably still think I could safely say that it is the majority opinion, the accepted opinion among most scholars, the texts have been grouped together by scholars.
In three categories, biblical books, sectarian documents, and non-biblical religious writings, the first third of the library was made up of the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible, including the great scroll of Isaiah, a thousand years older than any previously known copy. , and it will appear there. a rod from the trunk of Jesse and a branch will grow from its roots and the spirit of the lord will rest on him the spirit of counsel and power but with justice he will judge the poor and with the breath of his lips kill the wicked the messianic texts texts that predict the coming of the messiah and all things related to that the restoration of the people of god the restoration of the country all the hopes that are connected with the coming of the messiah and this was a central principle of Qumran as well as it was a central principle of Christianity the second category of the library was the sectarian literature or the group of manuscripts that were written by the Essenes themselves to govern daily life among these manuscripts is the rule of the community that establishes a strict lifestyle for the members of this elite group.
Every man who enters the council of holiness and who deliberately or negligently transgresses one word of the law of Moses at any point will be expelled and will not return again for an inadvertent sin. He will do penance for two years, but if he has sinned deliberately he will never return to the law. community so that his path and counsel may be perfected according to the judgment of the congregation Joseph, the ancient historian observed that those guilty of serious offenses often came to a very miserable end still bound by oaths and the practices seen could not partake of the meal or other men's drink and so they began to eat grass and wasted away starving in the desert.
Some scholars have speculated that John the Baptist, Jesus' cousin, may have been excommunicated, as he was seen surviving in the desert by eating honey and locusts. wild and wearing animal skins, in addition to governing the community, other sectarian texts found in the caves were used to protect and transmit sacred teachings that were not for the eyes. Stephen Fahn of the University of the Holy Land is currently conducting new work on an unusual type of sectarian text, so-called cryptic writing, devised by the mosquito, who was a visionary or prophetic leader in the community, this new alphabet that developed it was one that was his own personal alphabet and perhaps that of some other people he trusted and this was to help keep knowledge pure and separate that others cannot access, but this scroll contains secret spoken wisdom. by the mosquito to those who first entered the community for their moment of trial, the children of the dawn were emerging from the darkness of an evil world into the light of God beginning a new life of strict discipline and purity, so It can be very interesting to take a look at the way in which this community of the dead sea scrolls formed the people gave them a new story for their lives gave them a new way of seeing themselves gave them new disciplines by which they could becoming, from their point of view, better people or achieving a kind of spiritual perfection.
The third group of documents is more difficult to categorize, but they offer the first glimpse that scholars have had of the great ferment that was taking place in Judaism. during this time. They include retold Bible stories, new psalms, works of biblical commentary and interpretation. as well as mystical writings that describe angelic journeys, however, there is another type of religious experience that occurs within the framework of worship and that is very close to what we could call mystical and that is quite well represented in the songs of the Saturday sacrifice. where each week for a series of 13 weeks they recited one of the songs describing how the angels worship god in heaven when the wheels of his throne chariot move forward the angels of holiness come and go there is a fiery vision of the spirits more saints around him the appearance of rivulets of fire like shining brass the spirits of the living gods move perpetually with the glory of their wonderful chariot uh, I don't think it was consciously gathered as if from the beginning there was a librarian who asked the people and ordered books to be brought there but what I can best imagine about how the library got there was that several of the people who came to Qumran to spend some time there, study the Scriptures and embrace that whole ascetic life brought their treasures with them, huh , and especially its religious treasures. of those would be, you know, a book of, you know, books of the Bible, what we call scrolls of Scripture, um, maybe a scroll of Isaiah and a scroll of Deuteronomy and a scroll of Psalms and maybe Genesis or something like that, your favorites. but also other religious works that were important to them as the publication of the Dead Sea scrolls approaches, attention is again focused on the story of the desert community that Devoe presented almost 50 years ago, perhaps a dawn is dawning new day for archaeological study. from qumran the temple priests who would reform the core of the qumran community left jerusalem around 150 b.c.
They believed that the temple, the center of Jewish life and worship, had been corrupted by the influence of Greek culture, which they carried with them into the desert. The writings and rituals they believed would open the way to a renewed Israel, including an extraordinary plan to the creation of a new temple and each member of the house of separation who left the holy city and relied on God at the time when Israel sinned and desecrated the temple. They will rejoice and their hearts will be strong and they will prevail over the children of the earth. They settled on an isolated plateau near the Dead Sea, a place where they could prepare the way of the Lord to restore the true Israel after a period of turmoil.
A leader arose whom the Skrulls referred to as the teacher of justice. For 20 years they were like blind people groping for the way and God raised up for them a teacher of justice to guide them in the path of their heart. Under his guidance the disciples dedicated their lives. to the production, collection and study of the great library of scrolls and the congregation will watch in community for a third of each night of the year to read the book and study together many of the things that Josephus says about the customs of the Essenes are details that We don't get it because they are a normal practice today in modern Western society, but they were unusual at the time, so what is unusual here they took their seats, they sat when they had dinner like we sit today, this was different from usual Greco-Roman custom in which the 1st century historian Joseph reclined, refers to the dining room of the Essenes as a sacred temple where only men free from physical disabilities and ritually pure could eat the sacred food, so they were seated and each one You receive a plate with your meal, well, what's unusual about that?
Well, you see in ancient times in the Roman world in Judea at this time, when they gathered to eat, they would be served a large pot or a kind of large crater or pot that contained thefood and this was apparently due to his concerns with ritual purity. If you go back to the scrolls and look, it talks about the pure food and pure drink of the community and they believed that the ritual. Impurities could be transmitted through food and drink, and liquids, by the way, were more susceptible than liquids. solid foods and for this reason they had all kinds of restrictions on who could participate in the communal meals and who could eat pure food and who could eat the pure, who could drink the pure drink and, apparently, because of this concern about transmitting impurity ritual through food, each member received an individual plate of food, another striking similarity between the ancient Essenes and modern hygiene concerns their hygienic habits.
Father Devoe believed that an iron tool found in Cave 11 was an ax or matic for digging individual latrines into the desert floor. These features make them seem very modern in the sense that they were concerned about the privacy of the bathroom, so they would find a secluded place and wrap their cloaks around them unlike everyone else. Another thing that seemed very strange and then they immersed themselves and said they were contaminated again because they associated this with ritual impurity. Of course these hygienic practices were not based on scientific knowledge but on the religious needs of the members of the community. to be pure before God in order to fulfill what they considered their central role in the divine plan ideologically they were biblical Jews, they actually lived in the post-biblical era and I think that some of the difficulties we have in understanding the world of Covenanters' ideas lies in The fact that we are standing with one foot in one age, with the other foot and in the other age, the long hours of study and discussion on discipline and purification were only a prelude to the restoration of the true Israel and the building of the great temple in Jerusalem, members of the Qumran community eagerly awaited a great final battle at the end of days between the sons of light and the sons of darkness with the hosts of heaven fighting.
For their part, God's chosen ones were going to have the final victory over their enemies, but the future did not hold what they expected. As the Roman army marched south from Jericho in its war against the Jews, the Essenes looked toward the cave that surrounded Qumran to protect the precious library of scrolls placed in clay vessels and the entrances to the caves walled up from the outside the library of sacred scrolls was safe but the men who hid them never returned the Romans tortured, massacred and dispersed the people of the new covenant their dream was shattered some of them fled to masada and took with them parts of their writings, their scriptures and the pieces found there seemed to indicate that this was the case, although the Qumran community was destroyed, the remains of their ancient cemetery, the Essene tombs have been an attractive mystery since the beginning of Devos excavations of the 1,200 tombs carefully arranged on a north-south axis along the eastern edge of the Qumran plateau 54 were opened before Jewish criticism ultra-orthodox people stopped work in the early 1960s the story of what happened to the bones and the questions they raised opens a new chapter in qumran archeology father devoe's attitude towards the bones was puzzling different accounts suggest that he was sometimes Excited about what the bones could reveal and at other times indifferent, he promised the bones to two different anthropologists Henri de Valois of France and Gottfried Curt of Germany.
The bones excavated by the Devos team now reside in three collections in France, Germany and Jerusalem. , all ignored for more than 30 years and in various states of decomposition, anthropologist Sue Sheridan is working on the frontier of archaeological science with tools that will finally allow ancient bones to begin telling their story when the bones were exhumed in the early the 1950s paleopathology was in its infancy recent advances now give us a biocultural image of the qumran community this is the individual from the tomb18 and we have represented here a very complete skeleton almost all the bones here are from an individual of between 30 and 33 years old.
He is very representative of the rest of the skeletons in the French collection in his degree of preservation and is also a robust man between 30 and 40 years old, what makes this particular individual even more special is the fact that he was buried in the area west of the cemetery, right near the actual ruins, the person closest to the ruins in a circle of stones that demarcates their grave is something special and also has a coffin. There were only three people who were actually buried in a coffin and we have large pieces of wood preserved as a result of most of the graves in the cemetery being of similar construction after the body.
A hole was prepared in the soft soil one to two meters deep, the body was lowered into the grave and then placed in a chamber which was cut sideways into the earth and stones were then placed over the opening of the chamber to protect the body while awaiting a final great resurrection at the end of days, over time, the movements of water and earth caused the stones to collapse inward, often breaking the bones. Devoe's team poured paraffin onto many of the bones to prevent them from crumbling or separating, making it the first step before any analysis.
What could be done was a preliminary removal of the wax. Now that that's done, the next step will be to chemically remove all the wax and extract it from the bones so we can have clean edges. It is particularly important in the skull to be able to get a good fit, reconstruct everything correctly and take measurements from inside the skull and once we are able to reconstruct the skull, hips and knee area we will be able to look at various features of the skeleton. in great detail on the surfaces of the joints to get reconstructions of daily activity patterns, we will be able to review, for example, and look at the spine and see if there were any special stresses on the back, we can go in and mold the teeth. with epoxy resins that allow us to microscopically observe tooth wear patterns that tell us something about what individuals ate, so there is a wealth of information about daily dietary intake etc. that we can reconstruct once we We have the The skeleton was further cleaned at the University of Notre Dame Sheridan partners with chemist Mark Sher to prepare bone samples for carbon-14 dating.
If the age of the bones can be determined, perhaps we can get closer to the mystery of the origin of the community where these samples are found. very rare and valuable every time you do a radiocarbon date the sample is destroyed so we want to make sure that before we try to get a radiocarbon date we will have enough carbon in the bone to be able to get a good small date. Bone fragments are analyzed. Every precaution is taken to protect the integrity of the bone samples, but two millennia of decay have taken their toll. The results are disappointing and, since I am used to working with the inorganic fraction, I was not looking.
I passed it through the same eye, but it was clear that they were poorly preserved bones. I was hoping that when we got through the paraffin we'd have some good news, but yeah, there's a little cut there if you're under two. Per cent carbon you're going to or two percent protein, you're probably not going to get a good date, but if you have anything more than that, even just three percent, you're going to be able to get a good radiocarbon date and I. Know? Did you hope we were at least right? I knew it would be low.
I expected us to be just above that lower limit. Know? The Germans have also had to rely on forensic methods rather than chemistry to uncover secrets from poorly preserved bones. Olaf Rora Ertel inherited the German collection of Qumran bones from Gottfried Curt in the early 1970s now housed in the Catholic Diocese of Eichstadt. He has used the same methods as Sue Sheridan to create an image of the individuals in the Essenes community, if He hasn't done it here, we have the left thigh here, this is typical for a man of his size. You can also see here that the muscular system is present.
He was doing physical activity but did not do any hard physical work. probably did less physical activity than someone like you or me, who occasionally walks around the German bones, suggest a society divided into groups, perhaps an academic or administrative elite and a working class, we have here members of a rural ruling class that is part of a multilevel society. society which suggests that there was also a lower class social stratification in the society is therefore more substantiated it should also be mentioned that we have skeletal remains of men, women and children, this indicates that family structures existed in the community of the 1200 tombs 53 11 of them were excavated and were identified as female, their conclusion contradicts the prevailing opinion based on the Dead Sea Scrolls texts that Qumran was a celibate male community. um, we have here a somewhat delicate skull of a woman.
This is woman number 32, who is also the darkest. the primary color is again somewhat faded, the interesting thing here is the strong abrasion of the teeth. From here you can see the swollen sinus cavities on both sides, which were quite extensive and caused a lot of pain and discomfort over the years. Sheridan also has women from the French collection. we know we have a woman we know we have a woman who is buried deep enough to fit the pattern we see of the essene she is buried in the correct barrier orientation she does not have things like beads and such as was stated of the extension south, so it matches the burial pattern for the rest of the cemetery, Devoe's monastic theory is supported by the evidence, it is clear that the studies of the skeletons on which Devoe relied were, at best , preliminary educated guesses, the challenges to the accepted theory based on this new evidence are provocative.
I once joked that they ate, drank, and were married, and that totally fits what I'm talking about today. This was a very normal community that lived well in order and could achieve a lot if it was there. truly of the Essene sect of Judaism I do not know and I am not interested someone else must determine that but what is described as seen in current literature was not that it sounds unique but this vision of the presence of women and children at Qumran does not are shared by all scholars, both the type and number of genre objects, such as the spindle world, must be considered.
Qumran was occupied for about 150 years and we have a spindle swirl and four beads. Masada was occupied for no more than seven. years and the caves, the other caves were occupied for perhaps a few months and yet we have many more of these genre objects. In other words, if we summarize the archaeological evidence from Qumran, there is indeed evidence of the presence of women, but very, very, very few scholars disagree on other issues and discussions continue about the purpose of the buildings themselves. . One opinion holds that the presence of the large tower in the northern section is evidence that the site was a military fortress.
This is a question of where. You can take the same archaeological evidence and interpret it in different ways, but you're not taking into account much of it, so yes, you could say that because there's a tower and there are arrowheads, that means it's a fortress, but you're ignoring everything else. At the site fortress or religious community, yet another interpretation of the evidence suggests that it may have been designed as a luxury villa replete with baths, dining rooms, and date palm groves in the second part of the 2nd century, some wealthy people from Jerusalem or other places Jericho and Then I built villas at that end of the world near a nice spring, near the palm trees because there were large gardens and orchards, etc., it was not a desert at that time and people could also use the villa as an agricultural place . center, basically the location is not suitable, it does not fit the usual location model for a villa.
The second problem is that it does not have the interior decoration that is found in contemporary villas, for example, most of the neighbors. the villas have wall paintings and mosaics and the other thing is, in terms of design, the way you have workshops, the rooms were used as workshops interspersed around the settlement, whereas in a villa like today you wouldn't want to have their areas work in their living areas, have them separated from each other the answers to these questions about the ruins of qumran may be in the pages of these notebooks father roland devoe may still have the last word devos hypothesis that it was a group who lived on the edge of the desert preparing the way of the lord and writing manuscripts um no, some have tried to argue it but the vast majority still believe that this is the best hypothesis forDealing with the evidence as we have it, the Qumran pottery offers another opportunity to probe the history of Devoe.
The fragments and vessels may hold the key to answering the fundamental questions of Qumran when the site was established and where the Davao scrolls came from. Of course now here is the Qumran excavator started from the premise that everything he found at the site itself was made locally, he had published this in about six years and virtually no one has questioned this. No archaeologist, the thing is that at the time Devoe excavated, not many sites had been excavated around, there was no masada. There was no Jericho, there was no Kipros, which is one of King Herod's other winter palaces, today we have them, but at the time he had nothing, so when he found this type of pottery, no, he just assumed it was made in the place and this.
It has remained this way for the past 50 years Jan Gunaveg's research begins in the kiln anciently used to fire pottery at Qumran Gunaway takes a sample of the clay from the kiln to determine its chemical fingerprint, which are the unique characteristics that belong only to this one. type of clay and which will later allow him to compare the Qumran pottery with fingerprints on clay samples from many different places in the Rockefeller museum in Jerusalem, where the precious scroll vessels are kept. Gunawag carefully takes a sample from one of the clay vessels in which the scrolls were found.
Both the oven and jar samples will be subject to neutron analysis at the Technical University of Budapest. The clay samples are prepared by Dr. Marta Bala. They are bombarded with neutrons, which makes them radioactive. It is this process that produces the fingerprint that Gunaveg uses to compare the Qumran vessels with clay samples from across the Middle East. I have 100 samples, the result of 100 samples indicates that there are four chemical compositions in Kumra. The first group matches the inner lining of the Qumran furnace and was made from it. clay like the oven, these are utilitarian containers of various types, secondly, there are cooking pots that match the debris found near the oven and were obviously fired there, thirdly, there are containers of various types made of clay that came from the north or south of Qumran.
This group includes some scrolls. jars Finally there is a fourth group of scroll jars that are not from Qumran or Jerusalem. This is a surprise because some have guessed that the jars containing the Dead Sea Scrolls may have come from the Jerusalem temple, but what do these results tell us? devos theory about the essene community neutron analysis shows that some ceramics from the caves and some from the settlement have the same chemical signature proof that the scrolls and the community are linked as the devotees thought gunabek's research also confirms that some vessels They were imported to Qumran from Jericho and Jordan, but a mystery still remains 36 samples comprising the majority of the caves' scroll jars remain unidentified where the jars containing the precious scrolls were made Every year thousands of tourists come to Qumran in seek their own answers about the men and women who settled here more than 2,000 years ago and year after year, despite intense international interest, the work of archeology begins and ends subject to the vagaries of funding and political support. , but the discoveries were not over when I got to the university I was at.
He said: look, the fountains disappeared. Everything has already been found in those 18 years. The veterans found everything and there is no possibility of finding more documents because from 1965 to 1986 nothing was found in the Judean Desert. Hanan Eschel is one of the most productive archaeologists working at Qumran. In the winter of 1996, Eschel and fellow archaeologist McGinn Brochi began looking beyond the main site that Devoe had excavated in the early 1950s. Josie Patrick, who teaches at a university in Haifa, said there is no trail connecting cave three and eleven, one and two and the side because He walked here and did not find a trace of construction, since he knew that in that area the tanks were doing some maneuvers and he knew that this area is wounded.
I decided I wanted to do the opposite. I arrived at the site and walked here trying. to find the path that leads from the site to caves one and two and while walking here I discovered that there are those caves that were never recorded by the vault. I came here and said, well, look, there's a cave here and in the sea cave. the one you see right below us, we were lucky to get to the cave floor and found 200 pieces of pottery lying on the surface, but we found evidence that the Bedouins were there before us, we found an Arabic newspaper from 1953 and we found Other evidence tells us that the cave was already excavated for sleeping quarters, although many of the cave dwellings collapsed after two thousand years.
Echelon Brochi found support for the theory that community members took shelter in them at night. from the Damascus document found in Cave 4 suggests the need for a geographically close community no man will walk in any field to do business on the Sabbath he will not walk more than a thousand cubits from his own city here we find another ball and more Here we find complete vessels in the surface and a tent pole and coins and shoe nails that were fallen here all from the second temple period and we believe that tents were built in this area, perhaps in the winter people were afraid that their moral caves would collapse and They needed a place where they felt safe on a rainy day, they built tents here. and that is what we found here, but it is very interesting to find all those things on the surface of areas so close to the site that mran has not yet revealed all its secrets, there are still surprises in store and many new questions to ask. about the celibate monastic community, are there more scrolls to be discovered that will reveal the source of the wisdom of the Essenes, what secrets the ancient tombs still hold, what is the future of Qumran archeology until the people they call public produce its end? volume I think what we should do is work off site understand better decide and wait until we have a final report we have to not cancel the results of the divorce but we have to continue I think at this point I really have a pretty clear idea of ​​what was happening at Qumran, but obviously the final publication will be able to add a lot to that.
Devoe was an extremely intelligent man, so he knew the value of evidence and never absolutized. He came to a very definitive conclusion. conclusions but he had absolutely no problem changing his mind and imagining that devoe would be upset by the criticism of his methods and conclusions not today, he would just love to be a part of it in the Judean desert in Palestine, on the shore of the dead sea. The windswept desert ruins of Qumran still hide ancient secrets Human remains and artifacts unearthed by archaeologists 50 years ago are only now beginning to tell the story of the desperate people who hid the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves upon Qumran never to return.
People of faith and dreams will separate themselves from the habitation of unjust men and go into the desert to prepare their way for him by aligning themselves with heaven for a period of 200 years. They prepared for the end of days a last great battle between the forces of The light and the forces of darkness hidden for two thousand years The scrolls speak to us again giving life to the voices of the desert The story begins in the winter of 1947 with an Arab shepherd named Muhammad Adeeb searching for a lost goat in the limestone cliffs over the dead sea the boy throws a stone into a small cave when he opens it the sound of breaking pottery comes back to him, he enters the cave and, to his amazement, ties together ten clay jars intact since the time of Christ, all of them were empty or full of earth except one that contained one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century the dead sea scrolls located in ancient palestine on the shores of the dead sea a day's walk from jerusalem the town of qumran soon attracted the attention of the world Scholars from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem undertake the painstaking work of reconstructing fragments of ancient biblical scrolls found in a mountain cave near the Dead Sea.
This scroll, the history of the discovery and scholarship of the scrolls has often been shrouded in secrecy, hidden documents, false accusations, and conspiracy theories involving governments and world leaders. The stakes have been high, both politically and scientifically, since the discovery of the first scroll, hope and fear were great. The hope that the scrolls would reveal eyewitness accounts of the very days of Jesus' life in Palestine, the fear that they would undermine the fundamental beliefs of Christianity. and Judaism for 50 years has set the stage for extraordinary research and endless controversy emil poesh of the ecole in jerusalem is a world-class catholic priest and paleographer has spent 30 years reconstructing the broken texts of the dead sea scrolls the scrolls are written in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, and in ancient Hebrew, two languages ​​that in some forms have survived to this day, I try to absorb a little of their mentality, their ideas, their point of view.
I can imagine them organizing themselves at the beginning in their room in Qumran and the copying the texts they use as biblical texts and then composing other texts useful to their community their daily life to fill in the gaps in the Emil manuscript depends on a lifetime of studying ancient writing, considering many factors to decide which of the thousands of fragments belongs to the incomplete text the individual writing style of each scribe the time period of the writing style a vast knowledge of different types of ancient texts and a keen intuition sharpened by years of dedicated study I found, for example, this little fragment and this one and I said: can you go with what I had reconstructed?
Yes, they found their place. Emil's artistic gift allows him to almost feel the personality of his older brother in scholarship. They became for me family people, friends, people with whom I would love. to discuss I would like to share with them I would like to be at least inspired to understand the gaps in the manuscripts who were the writers who copied ancient texts onto new scrolls and composed new texts calling for a society of their dreams once scrolls were found. Interest turned to a forgotten place in the desert, a place that could reveal the truth about the writers of the Dead Sea scrolls in 1951.
Father Roland Davao assembled a small team of archaeologists who explored the ruins of Qumran that they excavated during five years and reported what would become the accepted history of the community in the desert an elite society known as the Essenes amassing a huge library of sacred scrolls Davao gathered a group of young scholars to work on the scrolls at the Rockefeller Museum in jerusalem john strugnell was 26 years old when he came from oxford to join the team, they smoked cigarettes in the presence of the sacred scrolls, everyone smoked cigarettes in those days. um, they served us coffee in the morning, you might have spilled a cup of coffee over the straw and no, we, we.
We did not treat these scrolls with great reverence, we treated them seriously, and without great scientific skill these young scholars were putting together an enormous puzzle of thousands of individual fragments, many of them from texts that no living person had ever read. The internal convolutions of the scroll were tightly packed. , it hadn't been unrolled for 2000 years, so I really had to work hard to remove the ebony part and not lose any information, words and letters, and uh, so it was difficult Yes, but I had to go to lunch that day and to the American school in Jerusalem and no, actually what I did was I put a kettle on my stove, which was an oil stove, and I let the kettle smoke.
I put a lot of water in it, I ran, I had my lunch and I came back and I didn't tell my father to vote, that's what I had done because in fact he would have done it when I told him later, he got very upset because I had done, but then the result was good, I put it all under glass, it was all, you know, it had just worked perfectly and then he claimed that he had suggested it to me, eventually more than 800 texts would be identified in tens of thousands. of disintegrated fragments some were smaller than the tip of a finger and others blackened and hardened with the passage of time the task was overwhelming and frustrating for the scholars a tedious and innovative work that was fueled by the growing expectations among academics, religious leaders and the general public Both scholars and the general public expected to find glimpses or much more than glimpses of Jesus and early Christianity in the scrolls.
This great expectation was met with frustration as the process of scholarshipIt was thorough and initially limited to eight scholars, all Christians and none. Jews laid the groundwork for widespread suspicions of a religious cover-up established churches had much to lose if the scrolls contained information from the days of Jesus that undermined ancient beliefs between 1952 and 1956 ten other caves were discovered containing scrolls and fragments of which No one doubted this area still held other secrets from the time of Christ. The archaeological site of Qumran is situated on a wide plateau that lies between the severe limestone cliffs to the west and the Dead Sea to the east when the Devoe team began work. here in 1952 they found piles of rubble that were barely distinguishable from the surrounding landscape.
The excavation took more than five years to complete as Devoe's team worked their way through the rubble. Evidence of four periods of occupation was discovered starting at the deepest and therefore oldest level. Some structures. They dated back to 900 BC, the time of the Israelite kings, eight centuries later, around 150 BC, a new group arrived on the plateau. This was the modest beginning of the Essene community and the scroll library. They began to build buildings, pottery burning mats, aqueducts and cisterns to move and store water, this was a period of tremendous religious ferment (third second first century BC) and Judaism from the time of the second temple, but there were all kinds of other tendencies, as well as strong apocalyptic messianic tendencies and these feed Christianity to a certain extent. rebel groups within Judaism rebelling against Rome twice and we have a sort of classification of traditions right now where some parts of Second Temple Judaism end up somehow flowing into Rabbinic Judaism and some other elements end up flowing into the Christianity and some others.
Elements simply disappear from the scene, but it is a very complex set of developments that lead to the religious image we know once we emerge into the first centuries of this era. Jerusalem today strains the voices of many religions just as it did two thousand years ago, based on the same historical facts, many sects and religions represented in the Dead Sea scrolls have forged their own religious beliefs. Jews and different Christians come as pilgrims to this sacred land. Muslims worship as they have done for centuries at the Dome of the Rock. Known among scholars as the Covenanters, the Essenes, the Jahadah, and the Sons of Light, as the desert community defined themselves, they also lived in a time and place of many voices, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Essenes, and other groups. , all claimed to be the true Israel. the rich tapestry of voices that pitted the Jews against each other in a spiritual battle for souls, the children of light emerged from this world and followed their leaders into the wilderness to establish a new order unaware of the fact that they lived in a world that was in the agony of giving birth to rabbinic Judaism and Christianity as we know it today as they left Jerusalem the sons of light also left behind the sacred temple the temple in their eyes was defiled and therefore could not serve the truly righteous of Israel and then what happened was that members of the Qumran community basically felt that that temple was not functioning properly due to the Hellenistic influence on the high priests and various other specific rituals that they did not agree with. agreement, so they withdrew from it and dreamed of a perfect temple to which they would return. and that it would be administered the way they thought it should be administered was perhaps the greatest of all dreams and every member of the house of separation who left the holy city and leaned on god at the time when Israel sinned and He desecrated the temple.
They will rejoice and their hearts will be strong and they will prevail over the children of the earth. They settled on an isolated plateau near the Dead Sea, a place where they could prepare the way of the Lord to restore the true Israel in the middle of the first century. Before Christ, the community adopted what devoe called its definitive form. The finished complex had three parts: first, the study area where the scrolls were collected and also a fortress-like watchtower, second, a group of service buildings that included a kitchen, third at the southern end, the most big. room of the complex used as a dining room and assembly hall, remains of an extensive water storage and use system exclusive to this site were also found.
Reconstructing the site has all the signs of a fortress, a place that is as difficult to enter as it is to leave. It is likely that the Sons of Light slept in the nearby cliff caves and in tents around the sacred building, only entering through the east gate after two years of initiation and testing, the most important part of the main complex was the scriptorium. the place where the scrolls were copied or written and the rooms where the scrolls were studied, no doubt the sect had a large collection of scrolls to read, some of historical importance, such as copies of older biblical texts, but also those that contained the harsh rules for their daily life through an elaborate system of aqueducts the water from the Judean hills was channeled into cisterns and baths built by the community in Qumran at the so-called fifth hour of each day the community returned from their work to eat in common before eating.
The men purified themselves, they took off their work clothes and put on a loincloth, they walked to the deep pool and immersed themselves after this purification ritual, then they returned to the community on the holy or pure side of the stairs. Could this ritual of the water? For the development of the Christian baptismal rite in later times, purity was of utmost importance to the Essenes living at Qumran. It affected all areas of life. The 1st century historian Joseph refers to the Essenes' dining hall as a sacred temple where only men who were both free of physical disabilities and ritually pure could eat the sacred food unlike others in the area at that time every member of the community had their personal plate and cup they did not eat from communal pots and pans they were concerned about contamination and cleanliness Both the physically and spiritually blind, the deaf and the lame cannot enter the sacred precincts and the reason for this is that the blind cannot see if they are touching something that makes them unclean to death because they cannot hear the proper interpretation. of the Torah in order to know if they are becoming impure or not and the lame because they scare away the angels was a harsh regime each brother was committed to a strict code of conduct that reinforced the sanctity of a place where angels tread and prayer It was constant, even simple murmuring was received with swift justice.
Anyone who murmured against the authority of the community will be expelled among the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are texts definitively written by the Essenes themselves. a strict lifestyle for the members of this elite group every man who enters the holiness council and who deliberately or negligently transgresses a word of the law of Moses at any point will be expelled and will never return for an inadvertent sin will do penance for two years but if you have deliberately sinned never return to the community Josephus, the ancient historian, observed that those guilty of serious crimes often came to a very miserable end still bound by oaths and, as seen in practices, could not participate in the food or drink of other men and that is why they began to eat grass and wasted away.
Starving in the desert, some scholars have speculated that John the Baptist, Jesus' cousin, may have been excommunicated. As he is seen surviving in the desert by eating honey and wild locusts and wearing animal skins, could John have brought with him the rite of baptism? his own mission along the Jordan River, not far from Qumran, thus establishing a direct historical link with Jesus. It is likely that many aspects of Essene beliefs resonate in the teachings of John the Baptist, as well as in early Christianity and Judaism, but the harsh regime was far removed. of later Christianity and other religions that preached compassion for the weak and sick but believed that their piety and purity led to a higher dimension, but archeology points to a different story in the fourth layer of Qumran.
Archaeologists have found ashes and arrowheads that tell the story of the After the destruction of the community, at first they did not think of staying more than a few months, perhaps a few years at most, and they died there with regret, as they were waiting for the messiah and hoped to return to Jerusalem, although the Qumran community was destroyed. The remains of the cemetery The Essene tombs have been an attractive mystery since the beginning of the dubious excavations of the 1,200 tombs arranged on a north-south axis along the eastern edge of the Qumran plateau. 54 were opened before ultra-Orthodox Jewish criticism stopped work in the In the early 1960s, the story of what happened to the bones and the questions they raised opens a new chapter in Qumran archaeology.
Father Devoe's attitude toward the bones was disconcerting. Different accounts suggest that he was sometimes excited about what the bones could reveal and other times indifferent. Most of the graves in the cemetery are of similar construction. After the body was prepared, a hole was dug in the soft soil one to two meters deep, the body was lowered into the grave and then placed in a chamber that was cut laterally into the ground. Devoe's unpublished notes accurately describe the tombs. Stones were then placed over the opening of the chamber to protect the body while it awaited a final great resurrection at the end of days, but the mystery over the skeletal remains has deepened over time.
The bones excavated by Devoe's team now reside. In three collections in France, Germany and Jerusalem, all ignored for more than 30 years and in various states of decomposition today, the bones are fueling an academic controversy, perhaps society was divided into groups, an academic or administrative elite and a working class whose bones are marked by hard scars. work this could still fit with the theory of a monastic society but other findings do not coincide with the anthropologist gustav rora ertel men are found we have skeletal remains of men women and children this indicates that family structures existed in the community of the 1200 tombs 53 were excavated 11 of them were identified as women His conclusion contradicts the prevailing view based on the Dead Sea Scrolls texts that Qumran was a celibate male community His devos monastic theory was confirmed by evidence before he could publish his final report and open his conclusions to a normal academic procedure and debate father devos died suddenly at the age of 66.
His archaeological evidence remains unpublished to the dismay of the scientific community, it is clear that the studies of the skeletons on which Devoe relied were, at best, preliminary educated guesses, the challenges to the accepted theory based on new evidence It is provocative. I once joked that they ate, drank and were happy and that totally corresponds to what I'm talking about today. This was a very normal community that lived well-ordered and was capable of achieving a lot if they really were. about the Essene sect of Judaism I don't know and I'm not interested someone else must determine that but what is described as seen in current literature was not in the literature anthropologist Sue Sheridan is working on the frontier of archeology science with tools of the 21st century that will finally allow the ancient bones to begin to tell their story Sheridan is fascinated by the presence of women in the cemetery we know we have a woman we know we have a woman who is buried deep enough to be fitting the pattern that We see in the scene where she's buried in the correct barrier orientation, she doesn't have things like beads and things like those claimed from the southern extension, so it matches the burial pattern for the rest of the cemetery, but This view of the presence of women and children at Qumran is not shared by all scholars both the type and number of gender objects found at Qumran Current issues Qumran was occupied for approximately 150 years and we have a spindle whirl and four beads masada was occupied for no more than seven years and the caves and the other caves were occupied for perhaps a few months and yet we have many more of these genre objects.
In other words, if we summarize the archaeological evidence from Qumran, there is indeed evidence of the presence of women, but it is very, very minimal. Scholars disagree on other issues and discussions continue over the purpose of the buildings themselves. One opinion holds that the presence of the great tower in the northern section isevidence that the site was a military fortress. It's a question of where you can take the same archaeological evidence and interpret it in different ways, but you're not taking into account much of it, so yes, you could say that because there's a tower and there's arrowheads, that means it's a fortress.
But regardless of everything else on the site, space-age technology is shedding new light on NASA's ancient Qumran synthetic aperture radar, SAR for short, is designed to read the Earth's surface even when obscured by dense cloud cover. The current Palestine can be seen in detail and the physical characteristics are improved. by satellite technology, but the surprising feature of this technology is that it allows us to see beyond observations with the naked eye; In reality, it can function as a time machine and allow us to look back in history; The same technology mounted on a small plane allows scientists to investigate further, seeing hidden caves, underground paths covered by time and objects just a few centimeters in size on the ground.
Several metal cones are deployed to form a grid on which photographs can be aligned. The flight path is carefully plotted as they go. It is necessary to fly as low and level with the ground surface as possible to get the best reading. Some believe that there are still places on Earth that Qumran and that we have not yet found all the details about this new community technology combined with the old one. Hopefully the texts can give us a better picture of the religious group that lived here. Doug Thompson collects data while flying over the site. At this stage he does not have visual control of the images that the system captures, only later in the laboratory will he be able to analyze them. material, but it is already clear that the Qumran site was not an isolated island in the desert, it was a place well connected to nearby communities such as Jericho Ein Feshka and Eingwar, another space age method developed by Dr.
Greg Baerman at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For use on the scrolls themselves at the invitation of the Israeli antiquities authority, selected fragments obscured by aging and rapid deterioration are put to the test. I assume this is reverse writing. Warning: There are three of those images and they are on your side. Bearman technology. It relies on the use of infrared light to capture lost images in the same way that the satellite camera can reveal stories about life on Earth. You can see beyond the limitations of the naked eye. The situation is tense in the room. Whatever is on the piece of parchment that no one has.
I've seen it for almost 2000 years. Oh, look, that's what you want. See, in an instant, Greg Bearman washes away two thousand years of bat dung and animal urine, revealing for the first time lines of text that will divulge even more about the Children of the Light, what we discovered was that as you progress through the infrared, this is 640 and 680, this is the red part, uh, 720, this is infrared, you see that as you get further away, the text starts to emerge from the background and downwards. here at the bottom is an improved version of 970 nanometers once in computing scientists can work with the new images and texts the dazzling magic of this new digital technology masks flaws that some scholars find worrying although a defender of this new path of Research Bruce Zuckerman of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California is quick to point out the gaps in the digital reconstruction of scroll fragments, let me show you what I mean here, we have here a Dead Sea scroll or a section of the same from the apocryphal genesis one of the most interesting dead sea scrolls of what I would call a good use of computer images a type of images that no one would argue you see here there is a tear in the text you see where the ink was and the piece just a little irritated because of the tearing, now what we did here is we just cut this little piece electronically.
I should add, you know it's not done, don't try this with the real thing and we just pushed it up and when we pushed it up and it became quite nice, you'll notice that we left a line that is very clear that shows that we have done something to the fragment. It would be very easy to go in and have this edge melt and just become part of it. You wouldn't be able to tell from the snippet above and most scholars would have no idea that you had done any sort of manipulation, so this is a good example of a type of manipulation that could be done to the actual text if the actual text It wasn't as fragile but there are other types of manipulation that one would say are a little more questionable here is a text where we have done some computer image inhabitants look here it is at this end this is the raw The image or the image that is not processed and here at the other end is really absolutely beautiful, if I do say so myself, image of the text and we could say that the computer enhancement produced that, but you see, behind that lies a multitude of meanings in this image.
In some ways it is false, what do I mean by that? Here I can show you how we quote that is false, okay, I'm clarifying the image around this, which turns out to be a yud, so you can see very clearly where the letter begins and where it ends as if it were originally written by the scribe. I'm taking all that little bleeding that has occurred due to text deterioration. You can also make it a little darker. You can, uh, no, no problem, look. now beautiful original ink looks like it was written yesterday take it away now take it away when we go back if I showed people this material and this material and said that the computer images came out that if I don't explain what I did, they would assume That's a totally objective maneuver and It is not, it is a highly selective and highly idiosyncratic maneuver.
In fact, using this type of technology I can put your name on a Dead Sea scroll, but the only name that everyone has searched for in the scrolls is Yeshua Ben Yosef. known to Christians as Jesus and to Muslims as Isa ibn Maryam but his name is nowhere to be found the texts have been grouped by scholars into three categories biblical books sectarian documents and non-biblical religious writings the first third of the library was composed of the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible, including the great scroll of Isaiah, a thousand years older than any previously known copy.
The second category of the library was sectarian literature or the group of manuscripts that were written by the Essenes themselves to govern daily life. The third group of documents is more difficult to categorize, but they offer the first glimpse that scholars have had of the great ferment that was taking place in Judaism during this period. They include retold Bible stories, new psalms, works of biblical commentary and interpretation, as well as mystical writings describing angelic journeys. After a period of confusion a great leader arose whom the scrolls referred to as the teacher of righteousness. Under his leadership the disciples dedicated their lives to the production, collection and study of the great library of scrolls could this teacher have been john the baptist?
Jesus himself has been part of this community. Speculation abounds because there is still much we do not understand about this group of people and the mystery deepens as scholars have found cryptic texts among the scrolls of sacred teachings that were not for the eyes of outsiders. The name of Jesus will be hidden in these secret documents Stephen Fong of the University of the Holy Land has worked to decipher the unusual alphabet. He has not found the name of Jesus in the text but apparently the cryptic writing was devised by a man called Mosquil who was a visionary or prophetic leader in the community in a way that the text reads like an instruction manual and Fawn believes that Mosquil He kept this text close to his heart and carried it with him at all times.
This new alphabet that he developed was one that was his own personal alphabet and perhaps that of some other people that he trusted and this was in order to help maintain pure and separate knowledge that others cannot access, it is easy to believe that The community's texts, like the coded language of mosquitoes, were actually written at Qumran, where the community was established and where the scrolls were found two thousand years later, but could some of the scrolls have been written elsewhere? and then taken to Qumran for safekeeping during the Jewish revolt in 68 AD? Scientists from new fields have joined biblical scholars in their search for answers.
Scott Woodward of Brigham Young University has worked on extracting ancient DNA from mummies in Egypt. The Israeli Antiquities Authority approached him about sampling DNA from the scrolls when we were originally approached by the Israeli Antiquities Authority. The idea was what can we do with all these fragments of the scrolls - the pieces that didn't belong to some large scroll - was there a way we could put them back together and reconstruct some of the dead sea scrolls from a pile of disconnected fragments because the scroll on which the texts are written is made of leather and comes from animals scientists can search for the genetic material found in cells by finding small parts of DNA chains in the so-called mitochondria of cells scientists can create a genetic fingerprint of each individual animal testing piece after piece and they can see if they come from the same original scroll therefore they probably belong together in the same sequence of text a little bit of that goes into the key and we'll go from there okay no only fragments of DNA can be joined together and genetic signatures can reveal even more information than we have been able to show that the technology works.
What that will do for scholars is help answer the question of where the scrolls were written. To do this we have to take the genetic signature that we now have from some of these scrolls. compare it to the genetic signature that we would find in bones from some of the archaeological sites, bones from Qumran, bones from Jerusalem and other sites throughout the Holy Land and then probably, finally, the other, the next thing we should be able to do is take some of the unidentified fragments that are still in boxes waiting to be reconstructed to see if we can in fact reconstruct some new pages from which scholars could glean new information so that DNA can help reveal whether the scrolls were actually from Qumran or from other parts of the Middle East.
Goats had always been the prime suspects as the source of the scrolls' material. Common domestic animals. They were a natural choice because they could thrive in the harsh climate of the Dead Sea and it was acceptable to use their skin. For the sacred or biblical text, the skin of the ibex, a wild animal, was also found on scrolls that were not biblical in nature, but on sectarian documents that were written for the regulation of the community. The mountain goat was an interesting but not surprising choice, however, it was with more samples. That the DNA work took an unexpected turn, surprising scholars and raising more questions about the scrolls, but what we found in this case was that these scrolls appear to have been written on bovine or cow scrolls.
There may be a problem with the cows here, where? Do you raise cows on the shores of the Dead Sea? It's not very easy. I think most people would agree that they probably weren't there. So where did they come from? The origin of the scrolls is questioned by another source: the fragments. and qumran ceramic jars may hold the key to answering fundamental questions about qumran: when and why the site was established and where the scrolls came from professor yan gunevik of the hebrew university is applying nuclear activation technology to discover Whether the vessels were made in the communities' kiln at Qumran or perhaps they were brought here from another place such as Jerusalem.
Fingerprints of criminals are stored in police records around the world by which each individual can be identified, so what we are doing here is the same. or less equal, we are taking a chemical profile of a kiln which is called a chemical fingerprint and we can compare it later with the pottery found at the site after collecting clay samples from the kiln and qumran gunaway goes to the rockefeller museum in Jerusalem where jars are stored, an interesting feature that parchment jars display is a blistering effect on the ceramic surface. Gunavec offers several theories to explain the effect, one of the most intriguing being the idea that the jars were quickly made to conceal the scrolls, perhaps when the Knights of Kumra learned of the Roman army's advance.
People were in a hurry, you know, to produce the jars and therefore they took everything they could to produce these jars as quickly as possible and therefore when they go into the kiln you get differentshrinks, you know, after that the clay and the calcium carbonate are burned and then blisters appear everywhere, but not all the jars look the same and they are in different places and contain different scrolls. One conclusion does not answer all. the questions whether DNA analysis takes parchment research to the molecular level neutron analysis takes it beyond the basic building blocks of all matter after the samples are packaged in numbered and identified vials they are sent to the technical university of budapest doctor marta bala, partner of budapest, prepares for the nuclear reactor the samples are bombarded with neutrons that make the dust samples radioactive the radiation emitted by the sample is converted into electrical pulses that are converted into numbers that show the quantities of chemical elements within the clay this is the fingerprint that points the way to the place where the jar was made and a possible clue to the origin of the scrolls in Jerusalem.
Gunavag can compare the result with an extensive database from across the Middle East. I have 100 samples, the results of 100 samples and these. indicate that there are four chemical compositions in kumra the first group matches the inner lining of the oven in qumran and was made of the same clay as the oven these are utilitarian containers of various types secondly there are cooking pots that match the waste found near the oven and were obviously cooked. Thirdly there are vessels of various types made of clay that came from the north or south of Qumran. This group includes some vessels with scrolls.
Finally, there is a fourth group of scroll vessels that are not from Qumran or Jerusalem. This is a surprise. Because some have guessed that the jars containing the Dead Sea Scrolls may have come from the Jerusalem temple, neutron analysis shows that some ceramics from the caves and some from the settlement have the same chemical signature, proof that the scrolls and the community are linked like devoe. Gunavec's research also confirms that some vessels were imported to Qumran from Jericho and Jordan, but a mystery remains. 36 specimens that comprise the majority of the scroll vessels from the caves have yet to be identified.
Where were the vessels containing the precious scrolls of the members of the Qumran community made? with a strong apocalyptic belief they were not surprised that they were heading into a final battle; The long hours of study and discussion had prepared them for a great battle at the end of days between the children of light and the children of darkness with the hosts of heaven. fighting on their side in 68 AD. The Roman army marched south from Jericho They mobilized the army to stop the Jewish rebellion The knights of Qumran were probably not the main target but they did not escape the wrath of the Romans The Essenes look at the caves surrounding Qumran To protect their precious library of scrolls , the scrolls were safe, but the men who hid them never returned, they went out to fight the battle they had prepared for and the scrolls had described in detail the tips of the javelin.
They will write bright javelin of god's power bloody barbs to fell those slain by god's wrath flaming blade to devour the wicked felled by god's judgment a thousand men lined up seven lines deep each will hold shields of polished bronze with mirrors the The children of light waited more than 200 years in the desert for this holy war. It is unknown what signs they were waiting for, but when the Roman army mobilized to stop the Jewish rebellion, they believed that the day had arrived. The historian Josephus tells us about the fate of the Essenes. In the hands of the Romans, the war with the Romans, their souls were tested from beginning to end by every variety of trials, wrapped and twisted, burned and torn, and passed through every instrument of torture to induce them to blaspheme their legislator. , smiling in his agonies and softly. mocking their executioners, they joyfully resigned their souls, confident that they would receive them again.
The Jewish revolt was an ironic end to the apocalyptic vision of the children of light, since it was the Romans who had a dizzying variety of weapons and legions of men. magen brosher well, they took their revolt against the Romans too seriously, they believe this is the apocalyptic war they expected, so they entered the war with abandon to the point that they perished in the war, they were simply killed in the fields of battle and after battles. They were persecuted by the Romans and massacred and how did they know the fact that we have 800 scrolls? I mean, there was no one to get them back.
Hidden in a forgotten crypt beneath the busy streets of modern Jerusalem is the tomb of the extraordinary man whose ghost still haunts archaeologists and scientists eager to learn the

mysteries

of the scrolls and those who hid them. What secrets Father Roland Devoe took to the grave and why his name still sparks controversy. The Dead Sea Scrolls are now accessible to everyone. Because? Is the archaeological material from Qumran not accessible? The same argument that was made about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Why should the Dead Sea Scrolls be accessible to everyone? The same argument must be made about Qumran archaeology.
We are 52 years after the Dead Sea. Scrolls were found, but from the point of view of archeology, we have only just begun, the plots revolve more and more quickly around the ruins of Qumran, a place that has not yet revealed all its secrets, there are still surprises in store and many new questions to do. devoe writes about the celibate monastic community there are more scrolls to be discovered that will reveal the source of the Essenes' wisdom what secrets the ancient tomb still holds what the future of Qumran archeology is the dreams and visions that brought these men into the world the nature is not yet fully understood, it is the science of the 21st century that will bring us closer to these forgotten voices in the desert, in this area there are a good number of artificial caves that collapsed and we believe that they could even have existed 20. the fact of That they are crumbled is an advantage because they have not been looted, no one bothered them if they crumbled at the right time, so there is a very good chance that if we dig those caves we will find utensils and God willing, even the manuscripts, even that It is their cross, although they were lost after the Roman military campaign, the voices of Qumran can be heard once again thanks to the painstaking work of dozens of scientists and scholars around the world, but for every question answered, many more are being answered .
Questions and perhaps many answers are still hidden in the desert. In many ways, the real work on the Dead Sea Scrolls is just beginning.

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