The Dead Sea Scrolls

There have been fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls that have popped up on the market in the last 20 or so years. And so how many of these fragments have surfaced and were purchased?

I think since 2002, I’ve counted around 80.

But you and a handful of others were able to gain access to some of these and conduct some analysis, which resulted in a pretty attention-grabbing conclusion. Which was what?

We’re suspicious that probably all of them are forgeries.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How go things today, Dan?

Good, good. I’ve made some plans. I’ve booked a trip to the Museum of the Bible to see fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I hear is going to be great. Oh, wait, well, maybe that won’t work out. We’ve got an expert on to help us with that.

Speaking of which, let’s introduce our guest for today. This is an old friend of mine, this is Kipp Davis. He is a public scholar of the Hebrew Bible with specializations in early Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thank you so much for being here, Kipp.

Hey guys, it’s good to see you. Yeah, I’m, I’m afraid to tell you, Dan, that, that if you’re going to go see Dead Sea Scroll fragments at the Museum of the Bible, you’re, you’re going to be disappointed.

You might have actually been disappointed while they were still there.

Just as part of your general disappointment.

With the whole experience with the Museum.

Of the Bible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I, I like, I like any show where we can start off by sort of pooping on the Green family’s failed attempt at a.

Anyway, so a little, little inside baseball here. I don’t know if anybody gets in trouble for this, but I went to a Bible translation conference several years ago, going on probably eight or nine years ago, and I was talking with some folks and Bible translation is significantly funded by the Greens through a variety of different organizations. And what some of the consultants were telling me was that it is widely known that the Greens believe or somebody among them— And I’m just passing on what I was told as an outsider, that the idea is as soon as the Bible is translated into every language in the world, that will catalyze the Second Coming. Yeah, I mean, I think that that funding is—is that talked about in.

Some of that is mentioned in. Okay, I mean, this is, what’s the.

Book for those of us who can’t, for those listeners who can’t see what’s happening.

Oh, this is Candida Moss and Joel Baden’s book on the Green family, Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby, which is just—the title is just apparently.

The hobby that they’re engaged in is bringing about the Apocalypse.

So that’s a nice big part of it. It is.

I’ve had other folks who also work in Bible translation tell me that one of the huge concerns is that the funding is all going to, just pumping out more languages and they’re not like, doing all the work that goes along with it, like literacy programs, more research for translators so that they can ensure that their translations are better, all that kind of stuff. It’s just pump out more translations. Go, go, go. And in the hopes that they will bring the Second Coming as an even faster thief in the night. So.

All right, let’s, let, let, let’s get off of the, of the Hobby Lobby Green family and, and get into some more interesting stuff. Kipp Davis, thank you for joining us.

You didn’t give me an opportunity to say get off the Hobby Lobby horse.

It was right there.

Opportunity missed. I apologize. I, I’m, I’m excited. I want to talk about some, some scrolls. Yeah, I, I know very little. I think a lot of people, the world is kind of this place where like, everybody knows that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a thing.

And then more or less, you know.

They don’t know what it is, though. Like, I think there’s a significant portion of the population who are like, oh yeah, Dead Sea Scrolls. What is it? I don’t know. I, I, I have no idea.

So that is a, that is a step ahead though, of my, my oldest son’s kindergarten or I think it was his first grade teacher. When I had come back from, from the University of Manchester where I was doing my, my PhD, my family was here in Canada and I was going back and forth quite a bit. I picked him up from school and it was the first time I had met her and introduced myself, shook her hand, you know, and she says to me, she goes, yeah, she says, so I really just have to ask. So are they actually squirrels?

I think there’s a, there’s a, like a children’s or young adult book series, The Dead Sea Squirrels. Yeah. Awesome. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

All right, so, so the Dead Sea Squirrels. What we’re, what we’re on about is, so, did Qumran have a lot of interesting rodents? I assume that’s why we’re talking about squirrels.

I’m sure they did. I’m sure they did.

Well, so for those, for those people like me who don’t have a lot of knowledge, can you give us. Can we start by just giving a background on what these are, where they were found, when they were found? Just give us the, you know, the broad swath of, of what we’re talking about here.

Yeah, absolutely. So I’m not Dan’s and my former teacher, the great late Peter W. Flint, but he would tell you that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the greatest archaeological discovery of all time.

They are. South African accent as well.

Yes. Yeah, I can’t do it, so I’m not even gonna try, but nobody can do South African.

That’s impossible.

So they’re pretty great, though. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a set, a series, I suppose, of Jewish manuscripts, predominantly written in Hebrew with some Aramaic and a handful in Greek that were discovered in the Judean Desert, which is just south and east of the city of Jerusalem. The vast majority of the scrolls, I need to say at the outset, people get confused about this. The Dead Sea Scrolls technically refer to any discoveries of manuscripts in this region all the way from, you know, the, the, the further north in places like Wadi Sdeir or, yeah, let’s say Wadi Sdeir, down south to sites like Nahal Hever, Murabbaat, and even Masada.

From Masada you could consider part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But when most people think about the Dead Sea Scrolls, if they think about the Dead Sea Scrolls, they’re thinking about the massive collection of manuscripts that was discovered in 11 caves that are within a 1 1/2 kilometer radius of a site called Qumran. It’s a site of ruins that scholars believe was occupied by Jewish ascetics. Basically. Josephus and Pliny the Younger tell us that these people were affiliated with the Essenes, a religious sect of Judaism who was basically out in the middle of the desert waiting for the end of the world, waiting for the last days when Yahweh would finally come in power and destroy the Romans.

And they need to talk to the Green family.

Yes, right. I mean, they were the Greens before the Greens, actually.

And they were a. They were a separatist group that considered the priesthood that was in control of the temple to be illegitimate. And so they, they were more like the Bundys in that regard. They were like, we’re going to live by ourselves in the mountains and.

Yeah, yeah. Very interestingly, somebody asked me the question this week because I did a video about sacrifices in the Old Testament and somebody had asked me the question about Jewish ideas regarding sacrifice in the Second Temple period and moving forward, and I had the opportunity to tell him. One of the interesting things about the writers and the collectors of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they were this, you know, they, they came out of the temple establishment in Jerusalem. They were disenfranchised, but their expectation was that the great eschatological temple was going to be established in the same place as the. They expected the Jerusalem Temple to basically be, be eliminated. But in the meantime, of course, they can’t perform any sacrifices.

But the people who lived in Qumran who wrote and collected the Dead Sea Scrolls, thought that they entered into worship on a regular basis into the eschatological temple with God and they worshiped alongside of the angels. We have a series of texts called the, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice where they explain in some detail the procedures of what scholars tend to think they, they, they, they undertook on a regular basis.

So kind of a mystical stream of tradition.

In that regard that we’re transcending this realm to, to commune with God and the angels in that temple.

And this also helps to explain a lot of. They were also quite obsessed with ritual purity in, within this group. And, and part of the reason for that was because their expectation was that they were regularly in the company of divine beings. So it’s, it’s really, really important to make sure that, that you’re dressed your best.

Yeah, well, you know, company’s coming over, you want to be, you want to be in, you know, you want the, the carpet to be clean and all that sort of.

Absolutely. But so I, I guess I, sorry, I, I got off on a bit of a tangent there. You asked about the scrolls. What’s really, for me, at least what’s, what’s most exciting is, is the scrolls themselves, the manuscripts that were discovered in these 11 caves. This was back between 1947 and 1953. Most of the discoveries were made by, by, by members of the Taamireh Bedouin tribe, nomadic sheep herders that, that circulate through the region. Archaeologists did discover some of the manuscripts, but, but most of the caves ended up getting scoured by, by, by these people ahead of time.

Now, Kipp, I wonder if you could clear something up for me. I have heard before and, and people hear a lot of rumors about the Dead Sea Scrolls, but I have heard that the archaeologists who are kind of curating the, the gathering of the scrolls offered to or they were paying these Bedouin groups by the fragments, which was a big mistake.

Oh yes. Yeah.

I, I can immediately see some problems.

Popping up in that because it incentivizes to fragment things that they found.

And this is, this is a true story. Okay, so early on the, the Bedouin were, were scouring the desert and finding these manuscripts and then bringing them to an antiquities dealer by the name of Kando. And Iskander Khalil Shahin is his, is his, his name, but everybody called him Kando. And then he would, he would, he basically acted as the middleman between the scholars then and the, and the people who would, would find the scrolls. And of course, because they’re just excellent at doing business, right, they, they agreed on, on a price for per fragment of material. And the pieces kept getting smaller and smaller as they were coming in. They soon settled on, they realized what was going on. Scholars oftentimes don’t, don’t.

They’re not on the ball right away with everything. So it takes a few minutes sometimes.

But their focus is different.

They have a different, a little bit. Yeah, yeah. So but they, they eventually settled on a price per square centimeter of material that they brought in. And I personally think too, this is, this is not something, this is, this is something a bit anecdotal, but it plays into some of the stuff we’ll talk about later. I tend to think as well, importantly, they, they set a price per square centimeter of inscribed material. So I tend to think, and we have some documentation for this, that, that pieces of manuscripts, pieces of leather or parchment. Most of the scrolls are made of vellum or parchment, but small pieces of these that came in that didn’t have any writing on them but were part of a handle sheet or part of a margin of the scroll, I suspect may not have even been purchased or had been carelessly discarded or put away somewhere.

We have some documentation from Roland de Vaux who was overseeing the project when it began. He talked about setting aside some of these larger uninscribed pieces because he had planned on doing an investigation with them with regards to scribal practices or something like that. But nobody knows what happened to these uninscribed bits or where they went. And that’s honestly one of the problems that plagues scrolls research today. And it’s pretty consistent. One of my colleagues at the University of Agder, Arstein Justnes, has been running a project now for the last four, three or four years, I think, where one of the, the purposes and goals of this project is to locate missing fragments, fragments that we have in, you know, many of the thousands of photographs that have been taken over the, the past 70 years, but are no longer in the inventory at the Israel Antiquities Authority or the Shrine of the Book or any of the other places where scrolls, manuscripts now reside.

So. Sorry, this is, this is just, just tangents galore.

No, no, this is, this is good. This is good. One thing that we haven’t. Oh, sorry, keep going with what you were saying.

Well, I was, I was gonna say, is there a, a worry that there might be some, some writing that newer technology might be able to reveal on some of these? Or is it more a concern for just filling in all the gaps and in our understanding? Is there a hope that maybe some of these pieces that are not inscribed on might be able to connect inscribed pieces? What might be some of the deliverables of, of getting these, as many of these fragments back as possible?

Well, the uninscribed ones in particular are just any. So I, for my, I mean, my, my real interest by my, my focus as a scholar tends to be on scribal practices, manuscript construction, manuscript function, something that some of us like to call material philology. And for a person like me, even the uninscribed bits of a manuscript are intensely interesting because they do provide us information about the scrolls as artifacts, as archaeological, as objects of study. They’re valuable not just for the text that they contain, but in their own right. You know, the manuscripts themselves reveal a tremendous amount of information to us about the people who made them and the purposes behind that. So this is the kind of stuff that, that I’m interested in and the.

Kind of stuff that is hard to write. A grant proposal.

True enough. I want to, I want to go looking and looking for, and studying all these, all these, these blank pages.

Give me money to find blank pages, please.

So talk to us a little bit about. I, I, Sorry, I’m still on the. We’re still figure. I still want to figure out what the heck these things are. So you mentioned that some of them are talking about, like, the practices of the people who had them at.

You know, at the time. But there’s also. But that’s not like. So what people are mostly interested in.

Right. I’m, I’m still, I’m still trying to explain what these things are all about.

Right, let’s get, let’s get back into it.

So we have these, this massive collection of, of manuscript fragments. The numbers are there. There’s. There’s not a precise number, we’re talking about tens of thousands of individual fragments. Most of them are quite small, you know, the size of a credit card, sometimes even smaller. We have a handful of complete intact manuscripts. Things like, like the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is probably the most famous of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, is a completely intact copy of Isaiah that measures 27ft long.

It’s all 66 chapters from chapter one through to chapter 66 in. I believe it’s 58 columns of text. Is it 13? 13 sheets all stitched together. But most of them don’t look like that. Most of them are tiny little pieces because they’ve been sitting in caves for thousands of years. They’ve been, they’ve been, you know, eaten away at, by, by small animals and, and they’ve, they’ve deteriorated. And as such, we’re left with these. It, it, these, these fragments of all sorts of different sizes all mixed up and, and, and bunched up together that scholars have spent the better part of the last 70 years since their discovery trying to piece together and trying to figure out what’s there. So among these 10,000 fragments, we figure that there are probably somewhere around 600 individual scrolls that belonged to. Most believe that they all belong to this group that lived at this site in Qumran, although the data do suggest.

That many of these scrolls were brought in from elsewhere. Oh yeah, but come from all around.

Exactly. So. And I would even say there’s some question about how closely related all 11 caves are to one another. You know, and there’s, and there’s open questions as well about whether, you know, all the 11 caves were serving the same purpose. One of, one of my colleagues, Joan Taylor, who is out at King’s College in London, has has forwarded some really good ideas, I think, about cave one in particular. The caves are all numbered in the order in which they were discovered. And cave one, because a number of the scrolls were discovered inside of these earthen jars, she thinks that these were possibly like ancient forms of a geniza. A geniza. It’s like a depository for your manuscripts in a Jewish synagogue that have worn out and are no longer suitable for public usage.

You can’t destroy them or throw them away. They have to be carefully, respectfully deposited and retired. She thinks maybe a couple of the caves could have been something like that. The, the most prominent of the caves, Cave 4, which is located literally right at the Qumran site. It’s within a hundred meters of the, the ruins themselves. Dan has been to, to Qumran. I’m sure he’s, you know, been right to the wadi edge and seen the, seeing the cave for himself.

Usually when you see photos of Qumran, what you see is a little kind of ridge jutting out and there’s a little hole right in the middle of the ridge and that’s cave four. And Qumran is right across that little gully from it. And so there’s a lookout point where you can just sit.

Exactly.

And look into the hole in the wall.

That’s right. And significantly this is a, this is a man-made cave. So I mean the region, the area there is just honeycombed by thousands of these natural caves. This one is man-made. And within this cave is where scholars discovered, found or I should say the Bedouin found the vast majority of material. It’s, you know, over 500 of the manuscripts come from just this one cave. So the, the thought generally is that this was probably almost like a library. This, this individual cave, Cave 4. For there’s even, there’s even some elements within the cave. There’s, there’s divots and holes in the wall that suggest maybe they supported shelving units where more scrolls were brought in and, and, and deposited and retrieved. So yeah, all that to say there we have open questions about a lot of what’s, what’s going on here.

Right. We’re not even sure. I think it’s, it’s probably a good bet just based on proximity that, that the caves belong together. But there’s even still some open questions about that.

What about, sorry, just, just to sort of paint the picture, were these caves big enough for a person to stand up straight in or are they like, are they little caves that you gotta kind of.

So I’ve only been in, I’ve only been in three of them. And so yeah, like Cave 4. Yeah, you can stand up in, in Cave 4 and Cave 1, Cave 11 is more difficult. But yeah, and, and some of these other caves look like they were places that, that you know, people just in a rush. As the, the story, the story goes. The, the, the, the theory is that in 70, in the year 70 CE, the, the Essenes were there for almost 200 years. And then in the year 70, the Romans sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple and then started making their way down to the west and south along the, the shore of the Dead Sea to go to Masada to take care of the, the last of the, the rebels who were holed up there. And on the way down to Masada they, they, they just took a little pit stop at Qumran, demolished and burned the place and then went on their way.

And, you know, the, the people living at Qumran saw them coming undoubtedly, you know, from some distance, freaked out about the fact that the Roman army is bearing down upon our little settlement. So, yeah, probably stashed bunches of these manuscripts away and ran for their lives, hoping maybe they would come back to collect them. And clearly none of them made it back. Yeah, and we actually have. I’ll just say this one more thing about that. Some of the manuscripts actually have clear slices right through them that were made by like a sword just, just hacking through and cutting the, the material itself.

Now you, you mentioned the Essenes being in the area for around 200 years. What are the earliest? And most of these manuscripts are dated paleographically, maybe some through carbon dating, but what are some of the earliest dates? And we put the, the cut off right around 68 to 70 CE. Yeah, that’s when the most recent ones were made. But when, when are our earliest ones dated?

So the oldest ones potentially date back to as early as 250 BCE. That’s probably a little ambitious. I would say, safely 200.

And we have a handful of of these manuscripts. We’ve got copies of the Book of Jeremiah , the Book of Samuel, the book of Exodus that all date, date back this early. I think maybe even a copy of the Book of Enoch. I have to double check that. So, and here’s the significance, or maybe not the significance, but one of the first big significances of this discovery was that between 200 to 300 of these manuscripts are copies of books that are in our Old Testaments. And within this collection, there’s at least a fragment of every single book that appears in the Old Testament, except for the Book of Esther , technically also the Book of Nehemiah .

But scholars assume it was there because as Nehemiah was collected along with Ezra, and we have Ezra there, so scholars think possibly also, probably also Nehemiah. And the other reason this is significant is because prior to this discovery in 1947, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts we had of the Old Testament came from medieval codices, the Leningrad Codex, the Aleppo Codex, which date to like the 10th century. 9th, 9th, 10th century, right?

Yeah, right around 900, 850, 900. Now, were there, did we have fragments of other things, because Aleppo used to be complete, and now it’s, it’s pretty fragmentary in the Pentateuch. And then the Leningrad Codex is the, is the oldest complete manuscript of the entire Hebrew Bible. Is there anything between the Dead Sea Scrolls and Aleppo. That is just fragmentary.

Just that handful. No, there’s a couple of things. Like there’s most prominently the, the Nash Papyrus is a, is a papyrus sheet. No one can see my hands or only half of you can see my hands. It’s about 10 centimeters by 20 centimeters. It, it dates to probably 100, maybe 150 BCE and it’s, it’s a collection of the Ten Commandments, basically, with some interesting variation in it. But this was like, this was importantly not a copy of a biblical book, quote, unquote. This was just a, a single sheet of like the Ten Commandments. So is that a biblical text? I’m not even sure. Right, so, so the exciting thing about this was that really the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls pushed textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible back in one discovery like a thousand years.

And within the scrolls too, we have discovered multiple copies of individual biblical books. There’s fragments from 22 individual manuscripts which contained parts of the Book of Isaiah . There’s 30, I think it’s 32 copies of manuscripts that contain, you know, parts of Deuteronomy, 37 that contain parts of Psalms. So they had, they had clearly a strong interest in the Bible.

Well, and you mentioned Enoch earlier. I, if I recall, there were what, 14 different manuscripts of Enoch. Yeah. I think was the most, other than Genesis, Psalms, Deuteronomy and Isaiah, wasn’t it?

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It raises all sorts of interesting questions, just not, I mean, right away about the, about the text of the Hebrew Bible, the text of the individual books, but also about ideas regarding biblical authority or Scripture, the development of canon. All of this stuff is, is, is wrapped up in there and, and the.

Inviolability of the text because you have these multiple manuscripts, people are handling multiple different manuscripts that have significant differences between them.

Really.

They seem to be okay with this.

Totally. And I’m sure you’ve talked about this before. The Book of Jeremiah famously differs between the Greek translation of the Book of Jeremiah in the Septuagint and the Hebrew version that survives in the Masoretic Text in the Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo.

So that’s considered the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible. Your translations are going to primarily be based off the Leningrad Codex, which is part of the Masoretic tradition.

Yeah. So that one is that, that one is 13% larger, longer than, than the Septuagint version, which is substantial. When you’re talking about. I’ve actually done the word count. I don’t remember it offhand, but it’s about 55,000 words.

Wow. You know, it, it’s, it’s a substantial difference. And then of course, the, the Greek text, the Septuagint version is, is also in a dramatically different arrangement. And when you do a careful comparison between the two versions, the Masoretic version that survives in the Hebrew and the Septuagint version that survives in the Greek, you can see very obvious theological programs at work in terms of updating and changing and altering the material. So. And the amazing thing about this is that, yes, within the Dead Sea Scrolls there are six copies of the Book of Jeremiah , and two of those follow the text and the arrangement of the Septuagint in Hebrew. So, you know, one of, one of the things, I actually ran into a pastor once while I was still an MA student who asked me when he found out that I worked on, on I was doing work in biblical studies.

He, he asked me. He goes, so tell me something. He says, I can’t figure this out. How is it the Greek translators of Jeremiah managed to get it so wrong? You know, and I’m so, it’s just that’s, that’s a, that’s a common thought. It’s a common idea that, you know, not even the, not just the text is authoritative or inspired or inerrant, but you have to have like, the right version and everybody just sort of picks their favorite. Right.

And we have, we have a lot of differences even in the arrangement in Samuel and Kings as well. In fact, I think some of the most significant differences are in some of the witnesses to Samuel and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which suggest quite a bit of textual fluidity, but tolerated textual fluidity. They, they didn’t seem to have an issue the way.

No, it just doesn’t seem to be a question that, that was raised on a regular basis. And we have other, like. No, go ahead, Dan.

I was just going to say, can you talk a little bit about some of the difference? Like what kinds of differences are we talking about? Like, what are the, Talk to me about some of the, the most significant things that, that surprise you about. You know, first of all, as you’re talking about differences between scrolls from that era and then now differences between that and what we’re used to reading in our translations or, or whatever.

Okay. I, yeah, so, I mean, I think in terms of specific examples, probably the most prominent one would be in one of the copies of Samuel. I believe it’s in 1st Samuel, chapter 11. There is a large expansion in one of the manuscripts found at Qumran in the story of Nahash the king. It’s the, it’s the Ammonites, isn’t it, Dan? King of the Ammonites.

Yeah, yeah. Where we, we’ve got this weird story where, where something has happened and suddenly a demand is being made.

Yes, something has happened. The king of the Ammonites Nahash has showed up at Jabesh Gilead and, and basically threatening the city and threatening to, to put out the eye of, of every man in the city. And, and it is, it’s a bit of a jarring interruption into, into the narrative there. And prior to the discovery of this manuscript, I believe it’s 4Q Samuel A, there was no information from any of the other manuscripts nor from the Septuagint about, about what’s going on here. And lo and behold, we find this text which has literally an entire paragraph of material of explanatory information about, you know, what was going on. And do you have the text there, Dan?

I’m, I’m pulling it up right now. Yeah. So I’m looking at if, if anybody would like to see you. You can find English translations of the biblical and the non biblical Dead Sea Scrolls. There’s also a book called The Biblical Qumran Scrolls: Transcriptions and textual variants with where, if you’re really interested in this kind of stuff, this presents the Hebrew text and then there’s a critical apparatus that presents all of the, of the differences between the text and the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text and all that kind of stuff.

Oh, here it is. All right, so it’s, it’s, it’s 1st Samuel, chapter 10, verse 27. I’ll just read. This is the NRSV. I’ll start here in, in verse 26 it says Saul also went to his home in Gibeah and with him went warriors whose hearts God had touched. But some worthless fellows said, how can this man save us? They despised him and brought him no present, but he held his peace. And then the text goes on to say about a month later Nachash the Ammonite went up and besieged Jabesh Gilead. And all the men of Jabesh said to Nachash, make a treaty with us and we will serve you. But Nachash the Ammonite said to them, on this condition I’ll make the treaty with you, namely that I gouge out everyone’s right eye and thus put to disgrace upon all of Israel. And you’re kind of looking at that and going, wow, this guy is triggered.

Yeah, that’s extreme.

Yeah, right.

That’s not a good deal. He’s not making a good deal.

So here in, in 4Q51 we have this. The, the text doesn’t break like it, like it did in. In. In the, the translation I read, it goes on to say, prior to the introduction of. Of Nachash the Ammonite, it says now Nachash, king of the Ammonites, had been grievously oppressing the Gadites and the Reubenites. He would gouge out the right eye of each of them and would not grant Israel a deliverer. No one was left of the Israelites across the Jordan whose right eye Nachash, the king of the Ammonites, had not gouged out. But there were 7,000 men who had escaped from the Ammonites and had entered Jabesh Gilead. So, I mean, there’s a whole, there’s a whole chunk of. Of new information in there that, that nobody, nobody had seen in hundreds, maybe thousand years or more before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

We had some hints about this because I think. I think Josephus relates this story. I can’t recall for sure. I’d have to go back and look. So that’s, that’s maybe one of the most prominent examples, But I’ll talk about one that I quite like, and it’s not an obvious one, but one of my favorite things about the Dead Sea Scrolls is in how they inform us about the development of the texts of the Hebrew Bible, about the development of Scripture. And Christian apologists are very fond of pointing to the Dead Sea Scrolls and specifically pointing to copies of the Book of Daniel that were discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls as, you know, proof of the fact that this is a book that must have been written by Daniel himself, living in Babylon in the 6th century, because, you know, traditional theories.

Is this something you guys have talked about before?

Yeah, we did a show about the Book of Daniel .

Yeah. Okay.

But it’s, you know, it, it’s never hurt to. Hurts to give a refresher.

Yeah, sure. Sort of thing. So, so, like, just very briefly, scholars are uniformly convinced that the Book of Daniel was not completed until well into the second century after the Hasmonean revolt, and that the prophecies in the Hebrew portion, beginning in chapter 8 through to 12, were all written after the fact and, you know, set in the mouth of Daniel as if they were predictions of the future. This is known. So, you know, the date of the Book of Daniel tends to be, or at least these Parts of the Book of Daniel and the completion of the Book of Daniel tend to be around the 160s. So with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are several copies of manuscripts containing the Book of Daniel .

And many Christian apologists pointed to this right away and were very excited about the fact that these manuscripts were there because they concluded it could not, it was just not possible that the Book of Daniel could be so widely circulated and so popular in such a short period of time, from the time of its composition to the time of its circulation. Now, I’m not going to make any judgments about the quality of that argument.

This is how often Christian apologists will tend to talk about the Book of Daniel . But you need to, when you do some work, when you look into what’s actually there from the Book of Daniel and the Dead Sea Scrolls, this paints a fascinating picture because, yes, we have eight copies of individual Daniel manuscripts in the collection. And yes, two of these copies look like they’re all fragmentary. But in terms of how scholars work and the way that we can reconstruct the material, we’re pretty convinced that two of them did contain the complete book. Now, those manuscripts are dated to, at best, the early first century CE or probably closer to the middle of the first century CE. So right away, these manuscripts are like up to 200 years already removed from the completion of the Book of Daniel .

What’s really fascinating is the rest of the material, I think, because the rest of the manuscripts, when you attempt to reconstruct them, you end up with manuscripts that only contain portions of the Book of Daniel . And the Book of Daniel ’s funny, because half of it’s written in Aramaic and the other half is written in Hebrew. And in terms of their content, they tend to, they’re quite different. You know, the Hebrew texts of Daniel are these, these wild apocalyptic visions. The Aramaic texts are these, are these super fun stories about these, these clever Jewish exiles living in Babylon and always getting the better of that, that goofy king Nebuchadnezzar, you know, or, or, or old man Nebuchadnezzar.

Oh, yeah, always getting.

So, anyway, anyways, so we have these, these, these two parts and fascinatingly what we find is a couple of these manuscripts look like they were just copies of Aramaic tales. Some of these manuscripts look like they were just copies of a Hebrew vision or maybe two or three of these Hebrew visions in the final part. So as a scholar of the scrolls and somebody who, who works with the material and is interested in questions of development and, and, and authority, and such, I look at that and I go, this is so obvious. I mean, we have, you know, in the first century B.C. In, you know, maybe the early second century B.C. We have physical examples of what the Book of Daniel looked like before it became our biblical Book of Daniel .

We have examples of it in the pieces that it was probably circulated as for some time. And in addition to that, we also have other manuscripts which feature this figure Daniel written in Aramaic as part of these, these tales of him serving in the Babylonian court, but do not appear in our Bibles. It’s wild.

That’s fascinating. That would be, to use the documentary hypothesis as kind of an analogy, it would be like stumbling across J while it was circulating independently and D while it was circulating independently. And then something else that may have been L, M, N, O, or Q that never got worked into the Pentateuch. It’s. And of course, because everything is so fragmentary, we can’t know for sure exactly what the full manuscripts looked like, but at least the data point in that direction that it looks like we may have pieces of pre-Daniel traditions floating around preserved at Qumran.

Maybe one of the best known. Sorry, I was going to say just maybe one of the best known of these unknown Aramaic tales is a, is a manuscript called the Prayer of Nabonidus. And it’s just a couple of fragments and it’s, it’s weird because it’s written in the first person and it’s Nebuchadnezzar speaking about what a great guy he is and, and how amazing he is. And look at this beautiful city that I’ve built. There’s nobody like me on earth. And then suddenly, God speaks to him and says, you know, you’re a prideful. Sorry, can I say that on?

Yeah, we’ll allow it just one time.

All right, all right. You know, I am, you know, I’m going to put you in your place. I’m going to reduce you to a beast and you’re going to go wander out in the fields for seven years until you learn your lesson. And of course, this happens very interestingly. This, there’s this, a couple of fragments of this manuscript that scholars identify as the Prayer of Nabonidus, where the text of the story looks really similar to this, but with some interesting differences. It’s not Nebuchadnezzar speaking in the first person. It’s the, the last king of Babylon, Nabonidus speaking in the first person. And he’s speaking about how he was afflicted with an illness for seven years, an illness so bad that he ended up having to be removed from the city of Babylon. He couldn’t even be in Babylon anymore. And then he tells us in this personal account of his that a, an anonymous Jewish magician came and helped him and healed him and praised God, the only God, the God of the Jews forever.

So, you know, scholars look at something like that and they say sure looks an awful lot like this story of Nebuchadnezzar. Except, you know, maybe somebody decided to update the story and, and swap out the, the wildly unpopular Nabonidus and largely, you know, unknown by this time, probably Nabonidus for, you know, a famous guy like Nebuchadnezzar. So interesting.

Now one of I, I just wanted to bring up my favorite variant reading from, from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Yes, please.

A lot of my research is on conceptualizations of deity and particularly the early history of Adonai, the God of Israel and their distinction from El. Deuteronomy 32:8 and 9. Very, very famously we have 4QDeuteronomy j, one of the fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls that was discovered. That’s only a few words, but we can tell it is definitely Deuteronomy 32 , verse 8. There’s nothing else that could be. And in the Masoretic Text, if you pull out many Bibles today these days, there are a lot that are correcting this. But it talks about how the Most High separated the peoples, divided up the nations according to the number of the sons of Israel. And then you go look in the Septuagint it says according to the number of the angels of God. And this is a head scratcher. But some scholars were like, you know, the Septuagint translators like to take gods or sons of God and render it angels of God. So maybe what Deuteronomy 32:8 originally said was according to the number of the sons of God.

But it seems like the Septuagint probably had two variant readings of this text and was like, let’s keep them both. And that’s what ended up in, in the Greek translation. And then the Masoretic Text was uncomfortable with, with whatever reading they had or someone before them changed it. And we get this kind of milquetoast passage. But we can restore what was most likely original where God is telling the gods to, or somebody is telling the gods to worship the God of Israel.

That’s right.

Which I think just, just fascinating. It’s, and it’s, it’s so amazing that we have those things. And it makes you wonder what, what was eaten by a mouse or what, what was destroyed in the process of excavation or what just immediately, immediately turned to dust when it was exposed to the air or something like that.

There’s, or as well as ripping up.

Documents into smaller, you know, there’s a, there’s a famous, there is a famous black and white photograph that was snapped sometime in the, in the forties or the fifties of G. Lankester Harding, who was the director of the Palestinian Authority, the Antiquities Authority at the time that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. And he is, he is poring over some manuscript fragments, studying them very intently. And he’s got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth with, with the, the ash on it like an inch and a half long. Like it’s barely holding on there. It’s just about to drop and incinerate the whole thing. Yeah, it’s, it’s wild. You know, I was going to say one other thing about those two manuscripts Dan. One of them, one of the things that, that I particularly like about them, and this is because I’m, I’m like one of these weird manuscript scribal practices guy.

These two copies of the book of Deuteronomy are not copies of the book of Deuteronomy . They’re smaller manuscripts. They are so 4Q. Deuteronomy j. The first one contains text from. See if I can get this right. It’s Deuteronomy chapter 5, and then Exodus chapter 12 and then the whole song of Moses and that’s it. Right. And then the other one, 4Q. Deuteronomy q is just the song of Moses, which is, which is Deuteronomy 32 so these. I actually, you know, I, I’m getting out of the. And I’m trying to get people out of the habit of even calling these manuscripts of Deuteronomy because they’re not, they are manuscripts of, in the one case, this, this single poem, the single poetical composition that ended up getting plugged into the book of Deuteronomy or maybe was the source of what became the book of Deuteronomy over time, but it existed on its own right at this point.

Oh, so, so you’re not, you’re not saying that this was like the Reader’s Digest version of Deuteronomy. You’re saying that this predated Deuteronomy and was included into Deuteronomy? Maybe.

Perhaps. I mean, the theories are. The theories that, you know, there’s a couple of theories about how this happened. I tend to think that that Deuteronomy 32 was probably the original core and the rest developed around it. And these manuscripts are, you know, they’re. The first one is, dates to, I think, 50 BCE and the other one is, is a little bit older. It’s closer to about 100 BCE but if you think about that, this is, this is close to the time of. So this is the time of the Hasmoneans. This is the time of Herod, when you still have this very obviously polytheistic sort of theology within the text themselves. I. Now, one of the reasons for that, this is, this is an idea that, that has been forwarded by Benjamin Ziemer, and I quite like this.

So I’ve, I’ve adopted it and I’m telling everyone. So how, how is it that these manuscripts of Deuteronomy survived that long in this form? And where did the alternative reading that appears in the Masoretic Text of Deuteronomy 32 , verse 8 to 9 come from? Yeah, the way he answers this question is he says, well, one of the things that we see in, not just in the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is certainly part of what we see in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but I would say Jewish scribal practice by and large, on the whole, you see a tendency towards harmonization. What I mean by that is, you know, disparate parts of the text and the theology. There’s this concentrated effort to try and get everything to match and, and, and, and, and to align with one another. This is why the Samaritan Pentateuch has taken, you know, chunks from the Book of Numbers and inserted them in, in the book of Deuteronomy and vice versa.

To make sure where we have these parallel stories that they’re all, you know, the same. We can’t.

Yeah. The same thing happens in the New Testament where you’ll have a reading from Matthew that gets in or a reading from. From Mark that gets inserted into Matthew. So that Jesus’s story is the same across the two books.

Yeah, exactly. So we tend to think. I tend to think this was probably also happening in the book of Deuteronomy , and I think it’s probably happening pretty early. So the way Benjamin Ziemer puts it, he puts it like this. We know the reading from the Masoretic Text is instead of God giving Yahweh his inheritance as one of the sons of the gods, as one of the sons of El, He’s. He’s giving. Him. He’s giving an inheritance according to the number of the sons of Israel. We know from Genesis chapter 46 that there were 70 people who, who came to Egypt in Jacob’s family, the sons of Israel. Right. We also know from Genesis chapter 10 that there were 70 nations right. In that genealogy.

So the thought is that at the time when, you know, the book of Deuteronomy was being put together with these other texts, like from the Torah, that this created a bit of a problem, and this was one way that they corrected this. Ah, okay. You know, yes, we’re, we’re, we’re flattening some of this polytheism, but at the same time, we’re providing this further explanation and this coherence that we see already in places like Genesis chapter 46. Yeah. And Genesis chapter 10. So the reason why. And, and the reason why it’s interesting that these manuscripts are small manuscripts. This is part of how a reading like this survives. Because these are not part of the book of Deuteronomy , because these are not part of a larger Torah as these people understand it, as they’re reading it.

They don’t even think to. To make this kind of a correction because there’s, there’s not really any, Any need to.

Well, it’s not being brought together into a single corpus with this other text, which the juxtaposition is not saying, hey, we need to, we need to make these agree. So I want to make sure we have an opportunity to talk about this because you were instrumental in some recent research that has taken place relative to the Dead Sea Scrolls. And I remember over a decade ago, us talking and you talking about not a lot of research into the materiality of the scrolls and you being very interested in understanding the production of the scrolls and, and their materiality. And, and I actually think that might.

Have been one of our, one of our first conversations.

Oh, really? I think at Trinity Western.

Yeah, yeah.

For those who. I don’t know if we said it yet, but when I was at Trinity Western University for my second master’s thesis in lovely. Langley, British Columbia. Kipp, was there, was it a postdoc or were you on the faculty you had done?

I think I was on a, I think I was on a postdoc.

Postdoc at Trinity Western teaching some classes and stuff. And, and we became fast friends. So there have been fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls that have popped up on the market in the last 20 or so years and they’re being bought on.

Here at my house.

They’re, they’re being bought up by like the Greens and by universities, particularly Christian oriented universities. I think Azusa Pacific is one of the main ones, but there are a few different ones.

Southwestern Baptist.

Southwestern Baptist. Okay. And, and one of my favorite variants was a part of one of these fragments from Deuteronomy 27 where we have the Gerizim reading.

Oh yeah, right.

So instead of, instead of Moses saying that you’re going to shout these things from Ebal, it actually says Gerizim, which would be a variant reading that supports the antiquity of the Samaritan tradition. And so how many of these fragments have surfaced and were purchased? I think since 2002?

I, I’ve counted around 80.

Oh my gosh. I, I think I’ve only read about less than a dozen of them.

But there have been so, and, and the, the inventories are not as, as this goes when one of the difficult things is so much of our information comes from collectors who have purchased these things and have everything to lose. Yeah. In terms of their, their authenticity and.

Then subjecting them to analysis.

Yeah. And then dealers and antiquities sellers who aren’t all that cooperative either. So the numbers are not especially consistent.

But you and a handful of others were able to gain access to, to some of these and conduct some analysis which resulted in a pretty attention grabbing conclusion. Which was what?

We’re suspicious that probably all of them are forgeries. Wow. We’re, we’re confident, we’re, we’re confident that a huge number of them are forgeries. And scientific forensic testing has been conducted on, I think it’s nine fragments from the Schoyen collection on all 16 fragments from the Museum of the Bible and has demonstrated with a high degree of confidence that yes, they are. In fact, they were in fact produced in modern times. So. And this was. So the. And this wasn’t something that. This was part of. My. My second postdoc was in. In Norway and I went there. One of the things I was supposed to be working on was the publication of Martin Schoyen’s fragments and artifacts in his private collection from Qumran. And it was in the course of doing that work that I and a few of my colleagues started to get very suspicious about these fragments that we were working on.

And then at around the same time, I was also asked by Emanuel Tov to help him with the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments belonging to Hobby Lobby to the Green family in the Museum of the Bible. So now you just held up.

Sorry, you’ve just held up two books to your camera. Give us the titles of those books.

Just so that we. So this is. This is a book you can’t buy anymore because it was discontinued by Brill. So this is. This is Dead Sea Scrolls fragments in the museum collection. So this is the edition. The edition of forgeries belonging to the Museum of the Bible. And because they’re forgeries, that’s why you can’t buy it anymore. Yeah, maybe it’s worth something. I don’t know.

Maybe it’s worth as much of those as those scroll fragments.

Oh, that’d be something. The other one, Gleanings from the Caves. Dead Sea Scrolls Artifacts from the Schoyen Collection is published by T and T Clark. Is. And it’s not just. It’s not just Dead Sea Scrolls fragments. There’s a couple of other items of interest in here as well. There’s a. There’s like a. A piece of a sandal. There’s. Schoyen’s got a. A jar, one of the. The jars from Qumran. He’s got like an ink well and a little bronze altar. So it’s. It’s also artifacts. But. So that was published by T and T Clark. And that one I. I do believe you. You still can buy. Because by the time we. We got around to getting the book published, we had already settled on nine of his 32 fragments that we were pretty confident were forgeries.

And when we ran the forensic testing on them, they all turned out to very probably be forgeries. And I’m couching my language here because as my friend, the great physicist who helped us out in Berlin always tells me, we can’t prove anything.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah, they’re. They’re fakes.

So what you’re telling me is that I shouldn’t let you anywhere near my fragment.

No, this is, this is the great lesson, right. And even I have to say this was a, I’m a pretty naive person, I think, in, in many respects. And, and when a few of us started to have suspicions about Schoyen’s fragments, the first thing we did, one of my colleagues, Arstein Justnes, started putting just data together and he compiled a 30 page memo of just things about the fragments that seemed odd, suspicious, peculiar, raised questions that, that we couldn’t answer and you know, indicated that maybe these are fakes. And he sent that memo to Mr. Schoyen. And to his credit, Schoyen basically gave us the freedom to do the work necessary to make this determination.

Now with some caveats, he told us at the outset that he, he would only allow us to test those fragments which we were most, most concerned about, the ones we had the highest suspicions on. So we had to sort of narrow the list down so it ended up being nine. I, I think I have gone on record as saying I think there’s probably more in the Schoyen Collection. But as you can imagine, once we, we demonstrated that nine of his fragments were forgeries, he wasn’t about to say, oh yeah, go test the rest, go after him.

Come on, man.

So one of the nice things about working with the Museum of the Bible was that once somebody convinced them, and there was a group of people working in the curatorial department at the time, Kristian Eshelman, Josephine Dru in particular, were instrumental in convincing the Museum of the Bible that they needed to do this. So the nice thing about working for the Museum of the Bible was they had lots of money and these tests are really expensive. So they had the wherewithal to undertake the expense and, and I spent another, you know, two years after I had had worked on and, and helped publish the book of the fragments, I then spent the next two years working on, you know, demonstrating that they were all forgeries, which was a weird.

That’s, that’s good for a second book right there. That’s a great sequel.

Yeah, right.

Which, it’s, it’s kind of funny like if you see Dead Sea Scrolls for sale in the New York Times, maybe, maybe give second thought to that. However, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were originally found. Yeah. Back in the 40s, they did that. They put an ad in the New York Times.

Wall Street Journal.

Wall street, was it? Wall Street Journal.

Wall Street Journal, yeah. Yeah. So there’s an interesting story about that.

Actually, you know what, I’m sorry, I am going to cut you off. We have gotten overtime and I want that interesting story. But I’m going to be very mean to our listeners and say that if you want to hear this interesting story, you’re going to have to become a patron of the show and go and listen to our after party where Kipp will join us and tell us this fascinating story. But until then, Kipp Davis, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Would you tell our friends at home how they can find your work where they can, where they can find more of you out there in the universe?

Absolutely. So I have a YouTube channel where I’m publishing most of my content these days. It’s just my name, Kipp Davis. I make videos about the Bible, about the, the critical study of the Bible. I do a lot of work countering ridiculous and pseudoscientific claims about the Bible. Very much like Dan, but not as, as frequently as Dan. My material tends to get into the weeds a little bit. So. And then I also have, I have a course, an online course called Israelite Religions: Facts on the Ground and Propaganda in the Bible that you can find on MVD Courses where I basically go through. It’s a 13 hour course, it’s 18 lectures where I go through and try to uncover what the religions of ancient Israel actually really looked like and then how those ideas developed into the text that we have in our Hebrew Bible.

And I think, I think that’s it. I think so.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We’ve. It’s been a treat having you. If you friends at home would like to hear the rest of the story that Kipp’s gonna tell us and, and more fun chat. You can become a patron over at patreon.com/dataoverdogma if you join at the ten dollar a month level you will be able to to to hear the after party that we’ve been talking about. If you would like to contact us, you can reach us. The email address is contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology