Dead Sea Scrolls

      I think caves are alluring in a way not fully recognized by humanity since cavemen (well, and Aeneas). Last weekend our group took a day-long trip to see Qumran, the Dead Sea, and Masada. The more one unpacks what each of these destinations entails, the more incredible it seems that they can all be done within a certain number of hours.

Our bus left bright and early driving due east toward the Dead Sea, part of Israel’s border with Jordan. Not long later the bus swung onto a side road and bounced to a stop. We  tumbled out into the desert a bit bleary-eyed. Our intrepid guide bounds to the front and beckons us toward rock-mountain formations that abruptly develop out of the ground a few hundred meters away. (A common theme in these tours is how much more energetic the middle-aged academics who lead us around remain after hours of talking and walking while we collapse at every pause onto the nearest rock.) Word spreads that we are heading toward ‘Cave 11,’ one of the caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Our guide, an expert in this field, begins to explain the story of the scrolls, their context in history, and their effect on our knowledge of this period. The first scroll was discovered in the 1940s accidentally by a goatherd who threw a rock (at his goat??) and heard pottery breaking. Over time the existence of more scrolls became clear and the area was canvassed by competing archaeologists and Bedouins. The scrolls were found hidden in caves- very few preserved in pottery, more often broken into tiny fragments partially buried. Some fragments are copies of canonical scripture (most famously the whole book of Isaiah), some are extra-canonical (so-called apocrypha), and sectarian manuscripts, which outline the rules and beliefs of the ancient Jewish sect responsible for the presence of the manuscripts, the Essenes.

We move to a couple other caves and receive a more thorough context for the history of the Essenes, who formed a bizarre sort of ascetic proto-commune. Before long we are already behind schedule and file back toward the bus. Surely not alone, I start to mentally reconfigure my future into possibility of becoming an archaeologist. Or caveman.