The Community of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Between 1947 and 1956 the remains of hundreds of manuscripts were found in eleven caves in the cliffs near Qumran, on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea (Dead Sea Scrolls Leon Levy Digital Library, Discovery Sites). They date from the third century BC to the first century AD. Some are copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible. Others are Jewish religious writings of the period, and about a quarter of these seem to be the work of one community: its rules, its commentaries on Scripture and its hopes for the end of the age (Dead Sea Scrolls Leon Levy Digital Library, Introduction).

The Community Rule is that group’s own handbook. It lays down how members were admitted, how they ate together and how offences were punished. It teaches that humanity is divided between the righteous and the wicked and that all things are predestined (Community Rule 1QS, Israel Museum description) (Community Rule 4Q258, description). One passage, in its rules for the community’s instructor, speaks of a time for “clearing the way” in the wilderness, which the translator takes to mean the study of the law (Community Rule 4Q258, translated by E. Qimron (compare 1QS 9.19–20)). The words echo Isaiah’s call to prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness (Isaiah 40:3), the verse the Gospels apply to John the Baptist (Mark 1:2–4).

The Damascus Document tells how the movement began. In the “end of the wrath”, it says, 390 years after Nebuchadnezzar, God caused a root to grow from Israel and Aaron. For twenty years they groped like blind men, until God raised up for them “a teacher of righteousness” (Damascus Document CD 1.5–11). It speaks of those who went out from the land of Judah and entered “the New Covenant in the land of Damascus” (Damascus Document CD 6.5, 19), and it makes rules for members who live in camps, marry and have children (Damascus Document CD 7.6–7).

Greek and Roman readers knew of such a group as the Essenes. Josephus, who names them beside the Pharisees and Sadducees, describes men who held their property in common, bathed before a common meal, kept the sabbath with great strictness and admitted new members only after three years of testing. Most did not marry, and they lived in many towns (Josephus, Jewish War 2.119–161). He counts about four thousand of them (Josephus, Antiquities 18.18–22). Pliny the Elder, writing in the AD 70s, places a settlement of Essenes west of the Dead Sea, with En-gedi “below” them (Pliny, Natural History 5.73 (5.15 in Bostock and Riley)). That the people of the scrolls were Essenes is an inference from these descriptions, widely but not universally accepted (Dead Sea Scrolls Leon Levy Digital Library, Introduction); see the dating note.

The scrolls contain copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible more than a thousand years older than those known before (Dead Sea Scrolls Leon Levy Digital Library, Introduction), among them an almost complete Isaiah of about 125 BC (Great Isaiah Scroll Israel Museum description). And they show, from its own writings, a Jewish movement that was still active in the lifetime of Jesus and that spoke, as the New Testament does, of preparing the way in the wilderness and of a new covenant (Jeremiah 31:31) (Luke 22:20). No Christian writing was found among the scrolls (Dead Sea Scrolls Leon Levy Digital Library, Historical Background).