Reflections of a Canadian Churchman

The History of the Community –  Identifying the Key Players through Biblical Interpretation   The Dead Sea community did not write a straight-forward account of their history and there are very few uncoded historical references in the surviving texts.  Thus, it is difficult to try to reconstruct the history of the sect  –  d ifficult,  but not impossible.  As Geza Vermes has written:   “Most of the knowledge we possess of the sect’s history originates from works of Bible interpretation.  The Qumran writers, while meditating on the words of the Old Testament prophets, sought to discover in them allusions  to their own past, present and future.  Convinced that they were living in the last days, they read the happenings of their times as the fulfilment of biblical predictions.” (Vermes, 49).    Thus, if we have some rudimentary understanding of the history of the period, it is possible that we can try to “break the code”, as ...

Discovery and Publication of the Scrolls For a very brief overview of the discovery of the scrolls and their subsequent publication,  read Geza Vermes Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, Introduction, pp 1-10 (For further in depth optional reading, James VanderKam, Dead Sea Scrolls Today , chapter 1). Identifying the Community Philo of Alexandria Pliny the Elder The scholarly consensus is that the Dead Seas Scrolls are somehow connected with the archaeological remains of Khirbet Qumran, a settlement near the shore of the Dead Sea.  It has been postulated that Scrolls formed the library of an ancient Jewish sect that resided at Qumran and that the texts were hidden during the Jewish (War 66-70 C.E) and remained there until they were discovered in 1947. Some of the texts are clearly of a sectarian nature (that is, they seem to have come from a distinct sect of early Judaism), while other texts, such as the biblical texts, are non-sectarian in nature.  Who were the people ...