What are the Dead Sea Scrolls, what do they contain, and what is their significance?
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Think of it like finding a smaller, Hebrew version of the Library of Alexandria in some forgotten caves, and then being able to accurately date when the manuscripts were preserved. Here’s what I mean by that:
Part of the big deal about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they have many copies of many important Biblical texts and they certainly pre-date Jesus Christ by more than 100 years. Being firmly before Christ is important because it shows that the Biblical and prophetic texts were not later changed to match Christian belief, and that the copies of the Old Testament we have today are highly accurate with regard to earlier manuscripts.
But there’s a lot more to the Dead Sea Scrolls than their strengthening the Old Testament’s claim to accurate transcription. It’s very likely the scrolls were preserved by the Essenes, who were outcast purists from the mainstream religious establishment as it was under pressure from Roman and Greek influence. The Essenes were fanatically dedicated to preserving important documents as well as *understanding* of those documents. In other words, we get the documents, we get commentary on the documents, and we also get the contextual documents supporting the core documents. We get everything from songs to poems to instruction manuals, not to mention whole works. We’re up to nearly 1,000 manuscripts so far, and counting. The Essenes worked hard to interpret prophecy because they were heavily focused on the coming Messiah. (Depending on your belief as to whether or not Jesus Christ was that Messiah, the Essenes were pretty darned accurate in their predictions based on ancient prophecies.)
As a result of the breadth and depth of information contained in them, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide phenomenal insight into the ancient near-Eastern mindset pre-Christ. For Bible scholars, that’s very important because much of the Old Testament was written for ancient Hebrews, so proper understanding of the Bible means being able to estimate how the audience to whom it was written would have originally understood the content. Getting into the head of an ancient near-Eastern culture is difficult, to say the least, for a 21st-century westerner, but we can make better quality efforts thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls. The contextual documents are also really helpful for language translators because they give them a much larger base of sample vocabulary and usage to understand what any given word or phrase might mean. In other words, our translations get more accurate.
Let’s not forget, the non-Biblical-canon portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls are a really big deal because some of the texts were previously mere legends, or very unsubstantiated or partial copies from much later sources, but then were hugely validated by their being included in the Scrolls. The Book of 1 Enoch is a really good example of this effect: it was considered canon by a very small minority of Christians and largely ignored by mainstream Christianity because nobody could prove if it was accurate from ancient times. But, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1 Enoch is taken a lot more seriously by a much wider swath of Christianity now than it was 50 years ago. It helps us understand how these ancient people thought about the events at the very beginning of human history. If you want to read Genesis and understand some of the references, 1 Enoch is super helpful. Pretty cool stuff.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Dead Sea Scrolls are *recent* in terms of their effects on our understanding of ancient scriptures. What I mean is, we’re still finding stuff, then there’s a lag from when a jar is found to when it can actually be opened, then assembled and interpreted, then picked up by scholars, then studied and analyzed, and then make it into mainstream sources able to be read and understood by your average church-goer or history buff. In other words, the Dead Sea Scrolls are changing commentaries and study materials as we speak because we’re learning more and more. One example of this development is recent scholarly work being done to understand what the Hebrew calendar originally was prior to being changed and influenced by Gregorian and Julian calendars.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are much more than just validation of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament). They’re a comprehensive and extraordinarily detailed source of an entire mindset, culture, and religious scholarship that, without the Essenes or whomever went to great effort to preserve the manuscripts, was lost to and/or obscured by the passage of time.
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