Aramaic Apocryphon of Daniel,” one of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments in an exhibition at the Jewish Museum. They are not really scrolls. They are scraps — darkened, cracked fragments of parchment. Yet the faded ink strokes of Aramaic or ancient Hebrew refer to epic incantations: to trumpets blowing in battle, to praise of the righteous and condemnation of the wicked, to “the heavens, the earth and all its thinking creatures.”
Go see these six encased bits of ancient text at the Jewish Museum’s new exhibition, “The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Ancient World,” before it closes on Jan. 4. Go, but not because these scraps are themselves new to our understanding. Though these six “scrolls” have never been seen in New York before, and though three have never before been exhibited anywhere, the literature about these findings has become as voluminous and familiar as the texts are gnomic and condensed.
And the story of the Bedouin goatherd who in 1947 tossed a stone in a cave above the Dead Sea, heard the shattering of pottery, and discovered scrolls that proved to date from the third century B.C. through the time of Jesus, is now legendary. That single cave led the way to 10 more caves hiding scrolls in the same region. Seven scrolls of that first find were followed by fragments of more than 800 others written in some 500 different hands.
Go see these fragments, too, even if the exhibition, a collaboration with the Israel Antiquities Authority, is not fully satisfying. It seems to suggest that since so much has already been said, there is no need to rehash the scandals and hypotheses that surround the scrolls. The show’s curator, Susan L. Braunstein, has chosen instead to stand back and point, reminding us of the scrolls along with archaeological discoveries from Qumran, the ancient settlement beneath the caves.
Those discoveries are easier to comprehend than the scrolls and, in appearance, are more sensational, offering rare artifacts preserved in the desert’s time capsule: the base of a leather sandal that could still be worn, a woman’s hairnet, a fragment of cloth with an indigo decoration.
Go, finally, because there is something rarely felt in exhibitions, and which the critic Walter Benjamin argued was heading toward extinction. In the 1930s he suggested that art objects were now so easily reproduced that they were being stripped of their “aura.” Aura, he suggested, is connected with uniqueness, but it also involves a sense of distance. An object possessing aura stands at a distance from us, no matter how near we get to it.
Here, you can feel the essence of this idea. Even though you can lean over these cases, even though there seems nothing intrinsically remarkable about these bits of parchment, they stand alien and apart; their history and their significance make them seem immeasurably remote.
Yet they are also intimately close to us. Some scholars have speculated that Jesus or John the Baptist could have handled these scrolls; certainly Christianity developed out of their milieu. And their preoccupations with messianism, communal law and textual exegesis foreshadowed the concerns of later Judaism.
One scroll here refers to a messianic figure, “the Son of God,” and seems to anticipate the Annunciation in Luke. Another includes excerpts from Jeremiah, one of the earliest biblical texts in existence (225 to 175 B.C.). This combination of familiarity and strangeness makes the scrolls seem beyond our conceptual, if not our physical, grasp.
But there is something else here also worth paying attention to. In the midst of many of the explanatory labels are understated signs of a revolution during the last 15 years. Until then, the scholarly cult devoted to these scrolls was as tightly knit, self-regarding and monastic as the cult those scholars imagined produced the scrolls.
Here were scrolls in use during an astonishing period of what the exhibition notes were “political upheavals” in ancient Israel — religious revolts, the rule of Herod the Great, the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70. What led to their being so carefully stored in these caves?
Modern interpreters resemble their ancient counterparts in finding their own reflections in these texts. The major scrolls of the first cave were ultimately purchased by Israeli representatives and were quickly published; they have been displayed and stored at the Israel Museum in the Shrine of the Book. They were treated as precious foundational documents — the earliest evidence of the beliefs and Scripture that shaped Judaism during the last centuries of Israelite autonomy, 2,000 years ago.
But after the 1948 war, Jordan annexed the West Bank, took control of the caves and appointed the Rev. Roland de Vaux of École Biblique et Archéologique Française in East Jerusalem as overseer of an international team of scholars that would publish the scrolls. Then came 40 years in which the scrolls were passed among generations of scholars like esoteric possessions, until the lack of progress was called by the Oxford scholar Geza Vermes “the academic scandal par excellence of the 20th century.”
It is discomfiting, too, to see photographs in which scholars — who pieced together fragments using scotch tape — smoke over them as destructive daylight streams onto tables.
In addition, Jewish scholars were deliberately excluded from de Vaux’s original eight-member team, which was dominated by Roman Catholic priests and scholars. De Vaux later rejected offers by Israelis to help his team and persisted in referring to Israel as Palestine.
In the 1967 war Israel won control over the caves and scrolls, but two decades passed before it asserted any real authority over the project. One of de Vaux’s early appointees, John Strugnell, became head of the team in the 1980s but was dismissed in 1990 after an interview in which he called Judaism a “horrible religion” that “should have disappeared.”
De Vaux and Strugnell were not alone on the team to have a scorn of political or religious aspects of Judaism, a strange situation given that the scrolls demand an intimate understanding of ancient Jewish politics and religion. But their interpretations tended to reflect more a frame of mind than a doctrine, portraying the group that created the scrolls in the scholars’ own image.
Though the identification of the scrolls with a sect of ascetic Essenes was first made by Prof. Eleazar Sukenik of Hebrew University, that vision was filled out by de Vaux and his colleagues. De Vaux’s excavations at Qumran led to his theory that it housed a monastic celibate group living in the desert, isolated from other Judaic movements; in the dissent and messianic passions reflected in the scrolls, these devotees embodied almost proto-Christian sensibilities. Over decades this became orthodoxy, made immutable because until the 1990s the texts were largely inaccessible to outsiders.
Then came the deluge. Once pressure by scholars and by the journal Biblical Archaeological Review led to publication of the texts, and new excavations had begun, other hypotheses proliferated. (See “The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls” by Philip R. Davies, George Brooks and Philip Calaway, published in 2002 by Thames & Hudson, for a good summary.)
The Essene hypothesis remains dominant. But this exhibition hints at the range of disagreement, including the suggestion that the scrolls were a “random collection of texts reflecting the beliefs of several distinct Jewish groups,” perhaps even hidden in caves by refugees fleeing the Romans who sacked Jerusalem in the year 70.
The archaeological evidence also raises questions. If Qumran housed a monastic group, why does a nearby cemetery hold bodies of women and children? How did a woman’s linen hairnet arrive here? What about the mysterious “copper scroll” in one cave that refers to buried treasures? Some believe Qumran was a military fortress, others that it was a center for the manufacture of pottery or date honey.
And so, the show suggests, what we are left with right now, at this “particularly stimulating moment in Dead Sea Scroll scholarship,” is a mystery. In these relics are the remnants of a world that seems extraordinarily close to us but also seems destined to remain infinitely distant.
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