The Dead Sea and Qumran

On Wednesday morning, we rolled out of Jerusalem headed down toward the Dead Sea. When I say down, I literally mean down. Jerusalem sits on top of Mount Zion, an elevation of about 2,500 feet above sea level. The Dead Sea is approximately 1,300 feet below sea level, so you do the math. It is raining as we leave Jerusalem, but the Dead Sea is located in one of the most arid climate regions on earth. Rain is rare there. It actually did rain on us; but not much.

Our first destination is the Qumran area, near the northern most end of the Dead Sea. Here lived a group of people who called themselves Yachad. In Hebrew, yachad means together. The Yachad lived in a communal society, and their primary concern was ritual purity. The ruins of their village gave some indication of the way they lived, but the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls opened up a whole new world of knowledge about them. The Yachad considered themselves to be the true keepers of the faith and believed that the battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness was soon to come. They left Jerusalem to live in the desert away from the evil and corruption going on in Jerusalem and even in the Temple.

The first of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by accident in 1946 by a young shepard boy looking for a lost goat. The scrolls he found were hidden in a cave, sealed in tall clay containers. He had no idea what he had discovered, and neither did his father who sold them to someone in the market for a few dollars. In turn the scrolls were sold to the head of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem. They soon came to the attention of the head of the Archaeology department of Hebrew University, but events of 1948 made it impossible for archaeologists to go to the area to search for more scrolls.

When the news got out that four scrolls were eventually sold for $250,000, Bedouins began combing the area for more. Eventually, about 900 scrolls were discovered, and people are still looking for more today. The contents of the scrolls were finally made public after about thirty years of research by various scholars and archaeologists.

The scrolls contained most of the books of the Hebrew Bible, commentary written by the Yachad, and other scrolls dealing with the rules of the community. The primary significance of this discovery is that these writings predate the oldest known examples of ancient biblical writing by over 900 years.

What happened to the Yachad? The Jews of Jerusalem revolted against the rule of Rome around the middle of the first century. Though the Yachad had nothing to do with Jerusalem or the revolt, the Roman legions marching on Jerusalem regarded them as the enemy nevertheless and wiped them out in 68 C.E. two years prior to their eventual conquest of Jerusalem. The Yachad may have forseen this and decided to store these precious documents where the Romans would not find them. Today, the scrolls are on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in the Shrine of the Book.

Next, on to Masada…

-Wayne



Photos below of the Dead Sea and Qumran

Floods at Masada, Snow in Jerusalem

After we left Qumran, we headed south toward Ein Gedi, and on toward Masada. We got within a few miles of Masada when we were blocked by a small torrent of water rushing accross the road. Though it rained very little in the desert, the rain in the higher elevations was running down to the Dead Sea. We waited for a while hoping the flood would subside but to no avail. I have been to Masada before, but going there with the seminar group would have been a totally different experience. I'm sorry we did not make it there, but we used the opportunity to spend some time at the Dead Sea. I decided not to go in the water since the weather was not so good. The rain did produce a beautiful rainbow.

Meanwhile, back in Jerusalem, the rain that was falling in the morning had turned to snow! Now that is something you don't see every day... About an inch of snow fell on the city and covered it with a blanket of white, but the temperature was not cold enough to cause problems with ice on the roads. The snow was mostly gone by the end of the next day.

On Thursday, we will be visiting some places of interest in Tel Aviv.

-Wayne