c. 2005 Religion News Service

MOBILE, Ala. _ Portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the ancient manuscripts whose discovery in 1947 is viewed by many as the archaeological find of the 20th century, have gone on display at a small science museum, attracting sizable daily crowds eager to see the oldest biblical fragments ever unearthed.

Each day, hundreds of visitors to the Gulf Coast Exploreum in Mobile linger at one clear plastic case in particular.

It is the world’s oldest copy of the Ten Commandments, its tiny black text exquisitely inked onto the crinkled surface of a brown animal skin.

Nearby is a 3-foot-wide document whose six columns of precise text contain all or parts of Psalm 135 and three other psalms.

And just a few feet away are other scroll fragments: portions of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Isaiah and Jeremiah.

Some of the fragments are barely larger than the palm of a hand: dark brown, inscribed with Hebrew text in words little bigger than a grain of rice.

On larger manuscripts, such as the Psalm Scroll, a reader can easily pick out the distinctive four-letter Tetragrammaton _ YHWH _ the Hebrew symbol for Yahweh, or God.

Organizers of the exhibit say it is the largest collection of biblical Dead Sea Scroll fragments ever assembled in the United States.

They were written about the time Jesus Christ lived, and only about 100 miles from the Galilean landscape where he preached.

Sally Gedosch, a visitor from nearby Gulf Shores, found herself trying to imagine the hands that produced the scrolls in the Judean desert 2,000 years ago.

“It’s just fascinating to think about it,” she said. “I’m trying to imagine what it must have been like, but I just can’t.”

The display of the scrolls and related items ends April 24.

On display with them are pottery, coins and related artifacts that tell the story of the Essenes, a small community of ascetic Jews who lived apart on the scorched and arid northwest shore of the Dead Sea and who are widely believed to have created the scrolls.

The exhibit also displays a collection of rare Bibles, a page from a 15th century Gutenberg Bible and Roman glass.

The scrolls came to light in 1947, when a young Bedouin shepherd threw a stone into a dark cave above the Dead Sea and heard the distinctive clink of pottery breaking. He recovered the first of the scrolls.

Systematic exploration yielded more than 900 documents in 11 caves. Some had been stored in jars; others lay intact or in fragments on dusty cave floors, preserved by the arid climate.

The find dazzled scholars. The scrolls contained portions of all the books of the Bible except Esther. But mostly they consisted of nonbiblical apocalyptic literature and secular documents. Some explained the rules for living in the community that produced them.

Although a few scholars dispute that the Essenes created the scrolls, the consensus attributing the manuscripts to the wilderness sect is a broad one. From about 130 B.C. to A.D. 68, the Essenes lived lives of severe discipline and ritual purity in a community called Qumran in the Judean wilderness. They studied Scripture and prepared for a world-shaking clash between the “sons of darkness” and the “sons of light.”

In a sense, they were the Branch Davidians of their day, not unlike the followers of David Koresh outside Waco, Texas, in the early 1990s, said James Bowley, a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss.

It is not a long leap to imagine the New Testament wilderness prophet John the Baptist an Essene, Bowley said. But the evidence is mixed. “Certainly possible and not unlikely, … (but) not close to a certainty,” he said.

“At the very least, what is most probable and totally reasonable is that John, being at the same time and in the same region, knew of the community and of at least some of their ideas.”

Although the scrolls were written in about the same period that Jesus Christ lived nearby, scholars believe there is no reference to him. Nor is there any indication that the Essenes in the last days of their community were aware of what must have been a small but growing band of Christ’s followers, Bowley said.

Although the Exploreum’s marketers have accurately pitched the exhibit to their Bible Belt audience as “the oldest surviving texts of the Bible,” the scrolls actually reflect the Bible’s complicated, organic development, Bowley said. It is a story far removed from the image of a collection of books that appeared long ago and never varied from their original forms.

Indeed, the Hebrew Bible _ the Christian Old Testament _ did not exist when the scrolls were produced. Not until about the second century would a consensus emerge on which books would be discarded and which should be included in an authoritative collection of this sacred literature, Bowley said.

One scroll, the Book of Jubilees, seems to have been terribly important to the Essenes, he said. By contrast, there’s only a tiny scrap of the Book of Chronicles, reflecting their own theological emphasis. Yet today Jubilees is out of the Bible and Chronicles is in.

“Different Jewish communities had different collections of scrolls,” he said. “The Essenes would have had many that other communities would have, plus some others.”

Moreover, the scrolls deeply underscore a point scholars had already known: There was no standard version of biblical texts in play. Instead, individual biblical compositions and other Jewish writings developed through time and went through various stages and editions before arriving at the form we have today, Bowley said.

“People writing different versions of Jeremiah are Jews of the same period, with the same concept of God. While the versions might have some differences in terms of order or arrangement, does that change our basic concept of God? No. It doesn’t change the theology.”

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Scholars previously had identified at least three early versions of many books of the Hebrew Bible.

Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Emanuel Tov found that about a third of the scrolls follow one tradition, about a tenth follow another, and a little more than half are “nonaligned,” or faithful to none of the previously known three, Bowley said.

In some ways, too, the knowledge gleaned from the Dead Sea Scrolls has found its way into the Bibles on today’s bookshelf.

Scholars have long known, for instance, that Psalm 145 engages in word play, in that each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. But they also knew the psalm was incomplete: One of the letters _ and thus one of the verses _ was missing, Bowley said.

The copy of Psalm 145 in the Dead Sea Scrolls provided the answer in verse 13, beginning, “Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom …”

“Look in your Bible, and you’ll see that verse is twice as long as the others. Critics think that small section of the poem fell out of the ancient manuscript tradition, and now it’s been restored. It comes from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” he said.

(Bruce Nolan writes about religion for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans)

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