After spending some time admiring this big tree, we made our way inside the museum to find us some scrolls. The security guards were kind enough to inform us that no electronic devices were permitted to be on and that our cell networks need to be turned off as well. There were no pictures allowed either. I tried to sneak a picture at one point and a lady walked up to me and told me to shut off my phone or she'd pluck my eyes out and confiscate my phone! (Ok... that didn't really happen)
This was the first entrance to the top level of the exhibit. You spend your time, roughly thirty minutes, looking a pictures of Israel and reading explanations of where the scrolls came from (the Dead Sea!) and their significance. They also spend a good deal of your time attempting to convince you that it took millions of years to form the Dead Sea's unique sea bed and that San Diego is remarkably similar to Israel. This felt like the longest part of the exhibit.
This is where they keep the scrolls. No camera's allowed inside :(. I wanted to sneak some shots but security cameras are bred in hordes in this museum!
They gave us these phone-like, wireless, listening units that had number pads on them. If you punched in the corresponding number of the particular item being exhibited inside the... cave... a message would play with the details concerning the display. This seemed to work well, except when you get fast at it... suddenly everything is in Spanish.
Push the numbers sllloooowwwwlllyyy.We made our way around inside and learned some interesting things. I
did listen to every exhibit display message so as not to be left wondering if I had skipped the
one that contained something important.
The Dead Sea scrolls
do contain
some Biblical writings, most notably Isaiah, but contain many more documents that carry other significance, such as Biblical commentaries, cultural reports, songs, and legal papers. Obviously, unless you have interest in these sorts of documents, learning about them can try your patience a bit.
There was also a lot of information, relics, and papers regarding
Qumran, the "settlement" that was just above where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.
Qumran was destroyed by Roman invasion but there are still remains there that archaeologists find most interesting. Pots, inkwells, furniture, and a fortune's worth of coin! Based on the research done on Qumran, many scholars believe that there were scribes at Qumran that were directly responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls. They hid the scrolls, among other things, in the caves below Qumran when they feared an attack from the Romans.
Of the scrolls, the most interesting were
Isaiah and
Enoch.
The Isaiah text is
almost entirely complete and predates any known written copy of the book. And since it has been available to scholars since the 50's, it is odd that it has not been utilized in modern translations of the Bible as it is long been considered to be more accurate than the Masoretic version which it predates by over 1,000 years.
Interestingly though, this turns out to be of little importance because scholars found that, after careful comparison, the two texts are nearly identical with no substantial differences at all! This stands as a very useful fact to argue against the common accusation that the Bible has been corrupted or poorly interpreted throughout the ages (often an argument made by Mormons and other offshoot Christian or Jewish sects). Scholars also find this interesting because it makes Isaiah one of the most well preserved texts in the history of known literature.
Gleason Archer, a respected Scholar, wrote,
"
Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (A.D. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The five percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling."
Enoch is also quite an interesting find. Though it is just a fragment, it is interesting that it was found amongst so many pieces of what we would call "canon". Many scholars also claim that Jude quotes from this very book in Jude 14 and 15. Though the book of Enoch is rejected as part of our scriptures, I found it very interesting. The fragment that was discovered reads as follows (thanks
ibiblio!):
"12. ...But you have changed your works, 13. [and have not done according to his command, and tran]sgressed against him; (and have spoken) haughty and harsh words, with your impure mouths, 14. [against his majesty, for your heart is hard]. You will have no peace. Ena I iii 13. [They (the leaders) and all ... of them took for themselves] 14. wives from all that they chose and [they began to cohabit with them and to defile themselves with them]; 15. and to teach them sorcery and [spells and the cutting of roots; and to acquaint them with herbs.] 16. And they become pregnant by them and bo[re (great) giants three thousand cubits high ...]"
This strange bit of text is very familiar if you've done your homework on Nephilim in the Bible. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of nonsense. But the startling number of 3,000 cubits is quite intriguing... maybe the Israelites
weren't lying when they said they'd found "giants" in the land.
Speaking of giants....
They claim that Goliath is on record in the scrolls as being only about 6'7", contrary to what our Bible claims his height was. They say that it was due to an inaccuracy in later texts that people thought Goliath was a giant. It seems unlikely to me, however, that the Israelite army was scared stiff of a 7' giant :).
Another thing that was somewhat humorous was that everything in the exhibit was dated with the acronyms "
BCE" and "
CE" (rather than "BC" and "AD"). And under most of the exhibit items were little labels saying that
this was the new "official" dating system.
