Dead Sea Scrolls

Many ideas found in the Dead Sea Scrolls recur in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament and in the earlier parts of the Talmud. In addition, many parallels with Iranian concepts provide evidence of the extent to which Jewish thought was indebted to that source during the intertestamental period (2nd and 1st centuries bc).

The many similarities between the thought and idiom of the scrolls and of the New Testament are of special interest. Both emphasize the imminence of the kingdom of God, the need for immediate repentance, and the expected discomfiture of Belial, the Evil One. Similar references occur in both to baptism in the Holy Spirit, and the faithful are similarly characterized as “the elect” and the “children of light”; for biblical references, see, for example, Titus 1:1, 1 Peter 1:2, and Ephesians 5:8. These parallels are more striking because the Qumrān brotherhood was active at the same time and in the same area as John the Baptist, whose ideas were subsequently reflected in the teachings of Jesus.

As they were discovered, the manuscripts were put under the control of the Israeli Antiquities Authority by the government of Israel. The longer and more complete scrolls have been published by the American School of Oriental Research, the Hebrew University, and the Jordanian Service of Antiquities. The majority of the material is in tiny, brittle fragments, however, and the pace of publication has been exceedingly slow. In September 1991, scholars at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, announced that they had used a published concordance to create a computer-generated text of one of the unreleased scrolls. The same month, officials at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, granted unrestricted access to the library's complete set of photographs of the scrolls, and subsequently the scholars of the Israeli Antiquities Authority likewise consented to allow unrestricted access to all unpublished material. Most of the scrolls reside in the Shrine of the Book and in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, and in the Museum of the Department of Antiquities in Amman.