THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS.. WHO WROTE THEM?

Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit goes on display in Minnesota
March, 15 2010



Back in 1947, a Bedouin shepherd was searching for a lost goat in the hills by the Dead Sea. He threw a rock into a cave, perhaps to startle out an animal, and heard the sound of breaking pottery. When he entered the cave, he found 10 ceramic jars and a treasure a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts dating to the time of Jesus.

At least, that's how the story goes. When it comes to the Dead Sea Scrolls, there is more mystery than certainty.
"The great question about the scrolls is: Who wrote them? And there is no answer yet," said Mike Day, a senior vice president at the Science Museum of Minnesota, where a major exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls opened recently.

By incorporating new archaeological finds and recent scholarship, the exhibit is the first to fully present two competing theories: Were the scrolls written and collected by an ultra-religious Jewish group living in the desert? Or were the manuscripts smuggled out of Jerusalem on the eve of the Roman invasion in A.D. 70 and hidden for safekeeping in the wilderness?

"We could just tell one side and create a tight little story about who created the scrolls, but that wouldn't be telling the science," said Ed Fleming, the museum's curator of archaeology, who worked with other staff and Israeli authorities to design the exhibit.

Even without the lively debate over their origins, the scrolls have massive appeal. They include the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible, what Christians refer to as the Old Testament. RELATED LINKS

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Some have called their discovery the most important archaeological find of the 20th century. During the next seven months, "The Dead Sea Scrolls: Words That Changed the World" will display 15 scroll fragments on loan from the Israeli Antiquities Authority, along with dozens of ancient artifacts - many on public display for the first time - that illustrate daily and religious life in first-century Israel.

Churches and other groups reserved tickets months in advance. Still, more than half a century after their discovery in the Judean Desert, no one knows who copied these ancient texts or how they got there.

It took decades for the scrolls to be pieced together, studied and published. About a quarter of them were identified as portions of the Bible. Every book in the Old Testament is represented with the exception of Esther.

IMPORTANT NOTE

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MAYA RESEARCH UPDATE

UI profs Maya research aims to illuminate commoners
August, 16 2010


North Korea has unearthed a large Koguryo mural tomb dating back to around the fifth century, a development archaeologists say will shed fresh light on folk culture, customs and cultural exchanges in ancient East Asia.

At the height of Maya classical culture, a drought may have been responsible for the civilization's downturn, which may offer clues to what we may face in a combination of growing population and dwindling resources.
That's part of the reason a University of Illinois anthropology professor, Lisa Lucero, plans to continue to visit Belize's dry season, studying the ultimate in wet 25 freshwater pools that help her understand Maya culture from the farmer's side as well as the king's.

Lucero notes that the massive temples of Maya civilization have their share of researchers, studying royalty, human sacrifice and the evolution of sport, while she's rare in studying what the little guy did.

As she writes in her book, "Water and Ritual: The Rise and Fall of Classic Maya Rulers" (University of Texas Press), "the average commoner was an active participant (in rituals) and had some say in the amount of tribute paid as well as to whom. Commoners were willing to contribute surplus (crops) because rulers offset problems that arose as a result of seasonal vagaries not enough or too much water."

In a part of the world where there's "not a drop of water" for months at a time, in normal years, in addition to other droughts that occur less frequently, the Maya rulers were "classic water managers," Lucero says.

On a hot August day in Urbana that's chilly by Belize standards, Lucero talks about her work, funded by the National Geographic Society and an Arnold O. Beckman Award, in the southern Maya lowlands.

This year, and, she hopes next year, she has worked with divers in the limestone pools of Cara Blanca, or White Face, a reference to the exposed limestone.

Some of the caves may be as much as 200 feet deep, a dangerous challenge for divers. Lucero said divers are concerned about the mixture of gases needed for the depth they include helium.

But the divers have already been useful, she said, in collecting artifacts such as sacred water jars, and she hopes the core samples they've taken using common plastic plumbing pipe would yield clues to the drought.

So far, divers have explored eight of 25 known pools.

In the sediment that falls constantly to the pool floor, Lucero hopes to find a record of hundreds of years. Minute evidence can speak loudly, she says; for instance, a plethora of grass pollens could indicate that the jungles' trees had died off for a period.

In the pools and in nearby trenches, Lucero's team has found everything from water jars to a bone from an ancient giant sloth, a species that died off 10,000 years ago. If the sloth was brought down by a hunter, it could help date the entry of humans into the lands that became Maya.

The caves and sinkholes, called cenotes, were portals to the underworld, Lucero said.

Maya structures are found near at least two of them. There, pools would have been sacred entrances to the depths, the source of life through water and earth.

The Mayas needed a reliable source of water for massive farms that fed the temples. Lucero said the Cara Blanca pools have a constant depth, fed from subterranean sources.

When the Mayas were hit with drought somewhere between 800 and 900 A.D., the pools would have been especially important as life-givers.

The water jars she found could have been offerings to the rain god or some other god, asking for an end to the drought, she said.

Ironically, the water may not have been very healthful to drink.

Northwestern University's Patricia Beddows, one of the divers as well as a hydrologist, found the water in the largest pool was full of minerals that could have led to kidney stones.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS UPDATE

Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery Solved? July, 28 2010 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NEWS The recent decoding of a cryptic cup, the excavation of ancient Jerusalem tunnels, and other archaeological detective work may help solve one of the great biblical mysteries: Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The new clues hint that the scrolls, which include some of the oldest known biblical documents, may have been the textual treasures of several groups, hidden away during wartime- and may even be "the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple," which held the Ark of the Covenant, according to the Bible. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 60 years ago in seaside caves near an ancient settlement called Qumran. The conventional wisdom is that a breakaway Jewish sect called the Essenes- thought to have occupied Qumran during the first centuries B.C. and A.D.- wrote all the parchment and papyrus scrolls. But new research suggests many of the Dead Sea Scrolls originated elsewhere and were written by multiple Jewish groups, some fleeing the circa-A.D. 70 Roman siege that destroyed the legendary Temple in Jerusalem. "Jews wrote the Scrolls, but it may not have been just one specific group. It could have been groups of different Jews," said Robert Cargill, an archaeologist who appears in the documentary Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls, which airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel. (The National Geographic Channel is part-owned by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.) The new view is by no means the consensus, however, among Dead Sea Scrolls scholars. "I have a feeling it's going to be very disputed," said Lawrence Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University (NYU). Dead Sea Scrolls Written by Ritual Bathers? In 1953, a French archaeologist and Catholic priest named Roland de Vaux led an international team to study the mostly Hebrew scrolls, which a Bedouin shepherd had discovered in 1947. De Vaux concluded that the scrolls' authors had lived in Qumran, because the 11 scroll caves are close to the site. Ancient Jewish historians had noted the presence of Essenes in the Dead Sea region, and de Vaux argued Qumran was one of their communities after his team uncovered numerous remains of pools that he believed to be Jewish ritual baths. His theory appeared to be supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, some of which contained guidelines for communal living that matched ancient descriptions of Essene customs. "The scrolls describe communal dining and ritual bathing instructions consistent with Qumran's archaeology," explained Cargill, of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Dead Sea Scrolls: "Great Treasure From the Temple"? Recent findings by Yuval Peleg, an archaeologist who has excavated Qumran for 16 years, are challenging long-held notions of who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. Artifacts discovered by Peleg's team during their excavations suggest Qumran once served as an ancient pottery factory. The supposed baths may have actually been pools to capture and separate clay. And on Jerusalem's Mount Zion, archaeologists recently discovered and deciphered a two-thousand-year-old cup with the phrase "Lord, I have returned" inscribed on its sides in a cryptic code similar to one used in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. To some experts, the code suggests that religious leaders from Jerusalem authored at least some of the scrolls. "Priests may have used cryptic texts to encode certain texts from nonpriestly readers," Cargill told National Geographic News. According to an emerging theory, the Essenes may have actually been Jerusalem Temple priests who went into self-imposed exile in the second century B.C., after kings unlawfully assumed the role of high priest. This group of rebel priests may have escaped to Qumran to worship God in their own way. While there, they may have written some of the texts that would come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Essenes may not have abandoned all of their old ways at Qumran, however, and writing in code may have been one of the practices they preserved. It's possible too that some of the scrolls weren't written at Qumran but were instead spirited away from the Temple for safekeeping, Cargill said. "I think it dramatically changes our understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls if we see them as documents produced by priests," he says in the new documentary. "Gone is the Ark of the Covenant. We're never going to find Noah's Ark, the Holy Grail. These things, we're never going to see," he added. "But we just may very well have documents from the Temple in Jerusalem. It would be the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple." Dead Sea Scrolls From Far and Wide? Many modern archaeologists such as Cargill believe the Essenes authored some, but not all, of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Recent archeological evidence suggests disparate Jewish groups may have passed by Qumran around A.D. 70, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, which destroyed the Temple and much of the rest of the city. A team led by Israeli archaeologist Ronnie Reich recently discovered ancient sewers beneath Jerusalem. In those sewers they found artifacts- including pottery and coins- that they dated to the time of the siege. The finds suggest that the sewers may have been used as escape routes by Jews, some of whom may have been smuggling out cherished religious scrolls, according to Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls. Importantly, the sewers lead to the Valley of Kidron. From there it's only a short distance to the Dead Sea- and Qumran. The jars in which the scrolls were found may provide additional evidence that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of disparate sects' texts. Jan Gunneweg of Hebrew University in Jerusalem performed chemical analysis on vessel fragments from the Qumran-area caves. "We take a piece of ceramic, we grind it, we send it to a nuclear reactor, where it's bombarded with neutrons, then we can measure the chemical fingerprint of the clay of which the pottery was made," Gunneweg says in the documentary. "Since there is no clay on Earth with the exact chemical composition- it is like DNA- you can point to a specific area and say this pottery was made here, that pottery was made over here." Gunneweg's conclusion: Only half of the pottery that held the Dead Sea Scrolls is local to Qumran. Scroll Theory "Rejected by Everyone" Not everyone agrees with the idea that Dead Sea Scrolls may hail from beyond Qumran. "I don't buy it," said NYU's Schiffman, who added that the idea of the scrolls being written by multiple Jewish groups from Jerusalem has been around since the 1950s. "The Jerusalem theory has been rejected by virtually everyone in the field," he said. "The notion that someone brought a bunch of scrolls together from some other location and deposited them in a cave is very, very unlikely," Schiffman added. "The reason is that most of the [the scrolls] fit a coherent theme and hang together. "If the scrolls were brought from some other place, presumably by some other groups of Jews, you would expect to find items that fit the ideologies of groups that are in disagreement with [the Essenes]. And it's not there," said Schiffman, who dismisses interpretations that link some Dead Sea Scroll writings to groups such as the Zealots. UCLA's Cargill agrees with Schiffman that the Dead Sea Scrolls show "a tremendous amount of congruence of ideology, messianic expectation, interpretation of scripture, [Jewish law] interpretation, and calendrical dates. "At the same time," Cargill said, "it is difficult to explain some of the ideological diversity present within some of the scrolls if one argues that all of the scrolls were composed by a single sectarian group at Qumran." Caves Were for Temporary Scroll Storage? If Cargill and others are correct, it would mean that what modern scholars call the Dead Sea Scrolls are not wholly the work of isolated scribes. Instead they may be the unrecovered treasures of terrified Jews who did not- or could not- return to reclaim what they entrusted to the desert for safekeeping. "Whoever wrote them, the scrolls were considered scripture by their owners, and much care was taken to ensure their survival," Cargill said. "Essenes or not, the Dead Sea Scrolls give us a rare glimpse into the vast diversity of Judaism- or Judaisms- in the first century." It is important to note the reality of the Alexandria Library being a place for the collected knowledge of many nations, civilizations and ancient knowledge. Why then is it so hard to believe there were many knowledgeable ones that came from many lands and contributed the knowledge they held within to be saved for a later civilization to find and comprehend? Humanity has not quite grasped the concept of enlightened beings. Hopefully, science will catch up to reality sooner rather than later.

IMPORTANT NOTE HERE



CONSCIOUSNESS COMES IN MANY SHAPES AND FORMS. SCIENTISTS AND HUMANITY HATE TO CHANGE THEIR HISTORY BOOKS AND UPDATE TO NEWER VERSIONS OF REALITY. WHAT A PITY


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