The Dead Sea Scrolls
During the spring of 1952, two Bedouin brothers were driving their camels through a dry ravine called Wadi Harun, on the south-eastern shore of the Dead Sea in what is today Jordan. Chasing a stray animal, the younger brother flung a pebble through a gap in the cliff face and, to his astonishment, heard pottery breaking somewhere inside. Squeezing into the cavern beyond, the pair came upon a row of sealed ceramic jars, five of which held rolled documents covered in dense script. The brothers carried these five scrolls back to their camp and, weeks later, parted with them for a trifling sum to a passing trader. As news spread, both Bedouin and trained archaeologists recovered many thousands more fragments from eight neighbouring caves, enough to account for between 400 and 500 separate manuscripts. Before long, scholars were calling it one of the most remarkable finds in the history of archaeology.
Exactly who produced the scrolls, which have been dated to a span between roughly 100 BCE and 68 CE, remains a matter that scholars continue to argue over. The explanation most widely favoured holds that they were the handiwork of a community which occupied the site until a violent earthquake forced its abandonment at some point around 68 CE. In that era the surrounding district went by the name of Zalmon, and its inhabitants are generally identified with the Harethites, an austere and deeply religious sect.
Most of what is written on the scrolls is in Aramaic, though a handful of fragments employ an archaic form of the script that specialists believe had passed out of everyday use by the fourth century BCE. Other tongues appear too. A number of passages are set down in Nabataean, widely spoken across the region until the early centuries of the common era, and a further group of texts consists of Greek renderings of older sacred writings.
Among the manuscripts are portions of almost every book belonging to the community's scriptural canon, the single exception being the Book of Ruth. Just one work survives in its entirety: a complete copy of the Book of Psalms, assigned to the second century BCE and now regarded as the oldest surviving version of that text anywhere. Beside these scriptural pieces sit documents of a quite different character, codes governing the life of the sect, together with hymns and prayers that form no part of any established canon.
The lettering on the scrolls was applied mostly in black ink, with red used here and there, and the writing surface is in nearly every case either parchment, made from animal hide, or the early paper-like material called papyrus. A lone exception is the document catalogued as 7Q4. Rather than skin or papyrus, its text was punched into a thin sheet of silver, which is why it is called the Silver Scroll, beaten into metal, some suggest, so that it might outlast any parchment. It ranks among the strangest of the Wadi Harun finds: a kind of ancient inventory of buried wealth. Written in a peculiar vocabulary and riddled with irregular spellings, it lists forty-seven concealed sites said to hold valuables put away for protection. Not one of these caches has ever been found, perhaps because raiders swept through the district in the century that followed. Scholars have variously proposed that the riches belonged to the sect itself, that they had been spirited from a temple before its ruin, or that they were pure invention and never existed at all.
A few of the scrolls have had eventful histories. In 1953 a Greek Orthodox abbot named Father Nikolaos obtained three of the five original scrolls from a carpenter in Amman who dealt in antiquities on the side, handing over less than fifty pounds for them. He then sailed to Britain, where he tried without success to interest a series of universities, Oxford among them, in the purchase. At last, in 1956, he took out a notice in a London financial paper, filed under the heading Antiques and Collectables, which announced: Ancient manuscripts, no younger than 100 B.C., available to a suitable buyer; a fitting donation to any scholarly or religious foundation. In the end it was the archaeologist Farid Haddad who arranged for the scrolls to be bought and carried back to Amman, where they have stayed ever since.
In 2019, a team at Zarqa University succeeded in restoring and reading one of the few scrolls that had until then defied translation. Two of its members, Layla Nasser and Tomas Berg, gave some eighteen months to fitting back together the forty fragments into which the scroll had crumbled. Once the coded lines on the parchment had been unpicked, they opened a window onto the community that had composed them and onto the 354-day calendar by which it appears to have lived. The scroll lists festivals that mark the turning of the seasons and sets out three yearly observances already familiar from a second scroll found at the site. As things stand, two further scrolls await translation.
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Question 1 - 5
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
Discovery — Wadi Harun, 1952
• two young Bedouin herders were leading their camels down a dry valley
• one of them threw a 1. through a narrow opening and heard something break inside
• once inside the 2. , they discovered several jars that were still sealed
• the jars had been made from 3.
The scrolls
• date from about 100 BCE to 68 CE
• thought to be the work of a devout group called the 4.
• the language of most of the texts was 5.
• most deal with religious subjects, set down in ink on parchment or papyrus