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A Deep Dive into the Dead Sea Scrolls · David & Sarah Dig Deep

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  SPEAKER_02: Class is in session, and it's time to dig deep.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: And inside are these ancient, priceless treasures that fundamentally rewrite our understanding of history.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: But then you have to just sit there and watch as this tiny, completely exclusive group of modern scholars act like dragons hoarding that gold for nearly half a century.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell It is genuinely um one of the most frustrating chapters in modern academia.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, they completely locked the rest of the world out of the cave, so to speak, for decades.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Which is wild, right?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: Which is wild, right?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: You'd expect history and archaeology to be these open disciplines that just belong to humanity, but this turned into a fierce monopoly.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: And um we're getting into all of this today by looking through Giza Verme's landmark work, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: Right, the definitive text on this.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: So for this deep dive, we are tracing this entire wild ride from the accidental 1947 discovery of the scrolls through the bizarre 40-year academic cover-up that followed, right down into the actual contents of this ancient desert library, which are just incredible.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell Because the story of the scrolls themselves, like how they were found, how they were fought over and finally liberated, is honestly almost as dramatic as the ancient texts they contain.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_03: It's a you know a brilliant lens for understanding how fragile history can actually be.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell So let's start with that initial discovery, because it sounds like something straight out of a movie.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's the spring of 1947.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Picture the Judean desert near the Dead Sea.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: It is incredibly hot, arid, seemingly lifeless.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Very harsh environment, yeah.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: And a young Bedouin shepherd named Mohammed Adib is out searching for a stray animal.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he just throws a rock into a cave opening on the cliffside.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: But instead of, you know, a dull thud, he hears something shatter.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell He hears the breaking of ancient pottery.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_03: And when he eventually goes inside what we now call Cave One, he discovers these seven large leather scrolls wrapped in linen just resting inside those jars.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: They had been sitting there in the dry heat, totally undisturbed for roughly 2,000 years.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell And reading Vermes' account of the immediate aftermath, it's so funny because it wasn't some highly organized white glove archaeological dig.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: It was total chaos.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: It reminds me of um like an incredibly high-stakes, completely unregulated antique roadshow.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Oh, that is a perfect analogy.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_03: There was absolutely zero protocol.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, three of those initial seven scrolls were purchased by E.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_03: L.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_03: Sukenic, a professor at the Hebrew University, and he essentially bought them through an antiquities dealer in Bethlehem.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Just casually buying them.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell Right.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: And the other four ended up in the hands of a Syrian Orthodox Archbishop in Jerusalem, Mar Athanasius, who literally smuggled them to the United States, and he eventually put an ad in the Wall Street Journal to sell them.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: I still can't get over that.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: An ad in the Wall Street Journal for 2,000-year-old biblical texts.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's absurd.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell And you have to remember the context here for you listening.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is happening right as the British mandate in Palestine is ending, which leads straight into the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: So borders are shifting, bullets are literally flying, and these priceless ancient texts are being passed around in secret.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_03: It was a miracle those first seven scrolls survived the modern world at all, really.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, as dramatic as that was, finding the physical scrolls was only the first step.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_03: The real battle, the one that lasted for decades, was getting access to actually read them.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right, because the desert had a lot more hiding in it.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Vermes points out that between 1951 and 1956, Bedouins and archaeologists just scoured the area and found ten more caves.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And Cave 4 was the absolute motherload.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, Cave 4.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: But it didn't have neatly wrapped scrolls and jars, did it?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: It had thousands and thousands of tiny fragments.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Cave Four was a total nightmare for preservation.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_03: It was essentially this massive shredded puzzle buried in bat guano and dust, tens of thousands of pieces.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Bat guano.
• 5:40
  unknown: Right.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: And to handle this completely unprecedented find, an international team of just seven scholars was assembled, initially led by a French Dominican priest and archaeologist named Roland DeVaux.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: And this is where the academic hubris just totally kicks in.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: This tiny team enacts a strict secrecy rule.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: This began the dark ages of Coumoran research, basically.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_03: DeVaux and his team decided that absolutely nobody outside their hand-picked group was allowed to see the unpublished texts.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: And their reasoning was um somewhat paternalistic.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: They believed they needed to perfectly reconstruct, translate, and interpret everything before releasing a definitive version to the public.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't want amateur scholars rushing to false conclusions.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: But the math just doesn't work.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: You have seven people, most of whom had full-time teaching jobs at other institutions, right?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Trying to piece together tens of thousands of crumbling leather fragments.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: They bit off way more than they could chew.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_03: Far more.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_03: And because DeVoe ran the team with this sort of unquestioned, almost patriarchal authority, there was no real institutional oversight.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, no one could fire them for missing deadlines because there were no deadlines.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_03: Years turned into decades.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_03: Some of these original scholars literally passed away without ever publishing the texts they were assigned.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: You're kidding.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_03: And they would treat the scrolls like personal property.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_03: They'd pass the translation rights down to their own graduate students in their wills, keeping the secrecy rule completely intact.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell It functions exactly like a cartel.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: An academic cartel hoarding knowledge.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, every monopoly eventually fractures.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: Fast forward to the fall of 1991, and we get this massive open source revolution.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't some polite agreement to share either.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was essentially an academic heist.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: It really was.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_03: It was a very dramatic collapse.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: Public pressure had been mounting for years, obviously.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: Scholars who were locked out were just furious, and the dam finally broke when the Huntington Library in California, led by William Moffat, announced they had a secret photographic archive of the scrolls.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell, which was kept as a fail-safe in case of war, right?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Exactly.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_03: And they unilaterally decided to just open it to all researchers.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_03: And around the exact same time, the Biblical Archaeology Society published computer reconstructions of the texts, which completely bypassed the cartel.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell I want to focus on that computer reconstruction for a second because the ingenuity is just brilliant.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: From what I understand, the official team had created a private concordance for their own use.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: And a concordance is basically an index of all the words found in the fragments and the few words directly surrounding them.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Right, just a tool to help them piece it together.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell But a bootleg copy of this index leaked.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Yes.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: And two scholars, Ben Zion Wachholder and Martin Abeg, they realized they didn't actually need the physical fragments if they had the index.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Oh, that's so smart.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they used a computer program to cross-reference all those overlapping word strings.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_03: So if fragment A has the words light and dark and fragment B has the words dark and truth, the computer links them together.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_03: They literally reverse-engineered the actual text purely from the index.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: That is amazing.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it just shattered the cartel overnight.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: The official team was entirely outflanked.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, they had absolutely no choice but to lift all restrictions.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Which brings us directly to Giza Vermes.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: His career perfectly tracks the agony and the ecstasy of this whole saga.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: He published his first article on the initial scrolls in 1949.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: He gets his doctorate in 1953.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: But because of the cartel, he is locked out of the majority of the K4 fragments for almost 40 years.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_03: His patience and dedication are just staggering when you think about it.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_03: But when the texts were finally liberated in 1991, Vermes was ready.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_03: He spent the next four and a half years just intensely reading and analyzing the newly freed fragments so he could synthesize his complete English translation.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it really highlights the massive shift in our understanding.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Vermes contrasts the initial 1947 worldview, which was based on just those first seven complete scrolls, with the full picture that emerged by 2003.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because by 2003, almost all 39 volumes of the official Discoveries in the Judean Desert series were finally published.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: It was a total paradigm shift.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: We went from looking through a tiny keyhole at a few isolated texts to throwing the door wide open on this massive, nuanced library of ancient Jewish thought.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: The complexity of the religious landscape in the first century suddenly came into incredibly sharp focus.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so the texts are finally freed, the gatekeepers are gone, and we have this massive library.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Vermise breaks down the roughly 800 original documents into four major categories.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: You have the biblical texts, the Apocrypha, the Pseudippography, and these entirely novel sectarian writings.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_03: And each category serves a really distinct purpose.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: The biblical texts are obviously familiar to us.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_03: The Apocrypha, books like Tobit and Jubilees, are texts that were widely read and valued, but eventually didn't make the cut for the standard Hebrew Bible.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: Then you have the Pseudipographa.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: And these are the texts uh attributed to ancient legendary figures, right?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like the Book of Enoch.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Yes, exactly.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: Pseudopigrapha literally means false writings in Greek, though not necessarily in a deceptive way.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Wait, how is it not deceptive?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Well, it was actually a common ancient practice to write a text in the name of a famous patriarch like Enoch or Moses.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_03: It was done to give the text authority and root its apocalyptic visions in deep history rather than to trick people into a forgery.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, okay, that makes sense.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I want to drill down into the biblical text first, because Vermes points out a dynamic that totally changes how we view the history of the Bible itself.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Every single book of the Hebrew scriptures is present in the caves, except for the Book of Esther.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: But he notes that these texts show extreme fluidity.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_03: That word fluidity is so key here, and it really shook the foundations of biblical scholarship.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell Because before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the oldest complete Hebrew Bibles we had were the Masoretic texts, which date to the Middle Ages, like around the 10th century.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: And those medieval texts are famous for being incredibly rigid, right?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_03: Extremely.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: The scribes counted every single letter to ensure absolute uniformity.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: So the assumption was that the Bible had always been copied with that exact photocopying precision.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, that was the assumption for a long time.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_03: But the Cave IV fragments proved otherwise.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_03: When scholars compared different copies of the same biblical books found at Qumran, they found minor variations.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_03: They found fluidity.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: But does this mean the Bible we read today is totally wrong or different?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_03: No, not at all.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't that the core narrative changed, the exodus still happened, David still fought Goliath, but we saw what scholars call scribal creative freedom.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell Meaning a scribe in the ancient world felt totally comfortable making edits as they copied?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell Precisely.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_03: Before a rigid official canon was locked down centuries later, the texts were still alive and breathing within the community.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: A copyist might um harmonize two similar passages to make them read better, or update the spelling to match contemporary dialects, or even add a slight theological emphasis that reflected their specific community's beliefs.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell It fundamentally changes the picture.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: It shows that in the first century, the concept of a totally locked-in, unchangeable Bible just wasn't really a thing yet.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: But while those biblical texts show us the evolution of the book, Vermey makes it clear that the non-biblical texts, the sectarian texts, are the true crown jewels of this discovery.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: Without a doubt.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_03: Because we already had various versions of the Bible, but these sectarian texts opened a brand new window into the spiritual ferment of the era.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: They show us the creative religious process of the specific isolated group of people who wrote them and actually lived at the Qumran settlement near the caves.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: To give some context for you listening, in first century Judea, you had the Sadducees who controlled the temple and were very aristocratic.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: You had the Pharisees who focused on the law and the synagogues.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then you had the Essenes.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_03: Right, the third major group.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: And they looked at the mainstream temple establishment in Jerusalem, decided it was completely corrupt, and just headed out into the desert to form their own pure breakaway community.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they were apocalyptic separatists.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: They believed the end of days was absolutely imminent, and that they were the true righteous remnant of Israel, preparing the way in the wilderness.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_03: Well, if you're building a radical separatist community in the desert, you definitely need rules.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_03: And Vermes translates a foundational text called the Community Rule.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Based on this text, this was a highly hierarchical, intensely masculine, celibate society that was just obsessed with perfect holiness.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_03: Obsessed is the right word.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_03: They viewed themselves as the sons of light, physically and spiritually separating themselves from the sons of darkness.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: So intense.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_03: Their pursuit of purity governed literally every waking moment.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: Everything from how they ate to how they bathed to how they spoke was strictly legislated.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the punishments for breaking those rules are so fascinating, because they are incredibly specific.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: Vermes lists them out.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: For example, if you fell asleep during a meeting of the council, 30 days of penance.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_03: Which is no small thing, by the way.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: Penance usually meant a severe reduction in your already meager food rations and exclusion from the pure communal meals, which was the central act of their fellowship.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: So imagine getting your lunch taken away for a month just because you dozed off during a long speech.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's brutal.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: And there's more.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Laughing foolishly, 30 days.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Gesticulating with your left hand, 10 days, going naked before a companion without being obliged to do so, six months.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_03: Six months of penance for that, yeah.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: When I read these, it actually totally humanize them for me.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, you don't legislate against falling asleep in a meeting unless people are actively struggling to stay awake.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: You don't ban foolish laughter unless your monks are out there cracking jokes.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_03: It completely grounds them in reality.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_03: They weren't just these stone statues of piety floating above the sand, you know.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: They were real people living in very close, often irritating proximity to one another under extreme conditions.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_03: The friction of daily life required strict management.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: Alongside those strict rules, their literary output was massive.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: They wrote extensive wisdom literature, and there is one text here that creates a huge aha moment for anyone familiar with the New Testament.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: Vermise translates a text known as 4Q525, which is often called the Beatitudes.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: It's a poetic text instructing the simple on how to seek wisdom.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell And the phrasing in 4Q525 is what makes it so historically significant.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because it repeatedly uses the formula blessed is the man or blessed are those.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it sounds exactly like a cultural rough draft for Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, you know, Blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacemakers.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell It is a profound connection.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_03: Now it's important to clarify this doesn't mean the New Testament writers were secretly copying Dead Sea Scrolls out in the desert.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_03: Rather, it proves how embedded these specific forms of expression, these macarisms or blessings, were in the cultural water of Palestine at the time.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_03: Early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism didn't just emerge in a vacuum.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_03: They grew out of this incredibly vibrant shared Jewish spiritual soil.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_03: The scrolls basically give us the missing link to that shared language.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Which is amazing.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, given how rigidly they controlled their daily behavior and how meticulously they studied wisdom, I would expect their prayer life to be just as grounded and disciplined.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: But Verme highlights liturgical texts that go in a completely different direction.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: They are highly mystical.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, you're referring to the songs for the holocausts of the Sabbath.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_03: And in this context, a holocaust means a whole burnt offering.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: These hymns reveal a highly developed, incredibly complex angelic liturgy.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: So they aren't just like praying for a good harvest or protection from enemies.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Not at all.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: The Essenes at Qumran believe that when they worshipped on earth, they were participating in simultaneous, synchronized worship with the angels in heaven.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_03: The texts describe in vivid detail the celestial sanctuary and the divine throne chariot, which is known as the Merkaba.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: The contrast there is just staggering to me.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: You have a group of men wearing coarse linen, eating reduced rations, sitting in the dusty, blistering heat of the Judean desert.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: But in their minds, when they sing these Sabbath songs, they are standing right next to angels, circling a flaming divine chariot in the throne room of God.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that esoteric mystical experience was meant to bridge the immense gap between their isolated desert camp and the heavenly realm.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: It was um it was their way of transcending their physical reality.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're wondering why this matters to us today, like why we care about an isolated desert sect from two millennia ago, it's because it captures this fragile moment in time, right before the world ended for them.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: They were out there seeking absolute truth, totally unaware that the geopolitical hammer was about to drop.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly, because in 68 CE, during the first Jewish revolt against Rome, the Roman legions marched through the Jordan Valley, and the settlement at Qumran was directly in their path and was ultimately destroyed.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: But before they fled, or well, before they were killed, they took their most precious possessions, their entire library, their entire world view, and they hid them in the caves.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: They wrapped them in linen and put them in jars, hoping to come back for them when the war was over.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_03: And they never came back.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: The scrolls just sat in complete darkness, silently holding the spiritual DNA of a lost community, while the Roman Empire rose and fell, while the Middle Ages came and went, right up until 1947.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: It is incredible to trace that straight line, from a desperate group hiding their prayers from an invading army, to a young shepherd boy throwing a rock, through decades of scholars jealously guarding the fragments in a museum, right to our ability today to open Vermise's book and read those exact same words.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: It is such a triumph of open scholarship.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_03: It really is.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: But before we finish up, Vermise includes one artifact found in Cave 3 that feels like it belongs in a different genre entirely.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_03: Ah, yes, the copper scroll.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_03: It is completely unique among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: Right, because unlike all the others, which were written on leather parchment or papyrus, this one was engraved on thin sheets of literal copper.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not a rule book and it's not a hymn.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: It is an ancient treasure map.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_03: It is an actual inventory of hidden treasure.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_03: Engraved right into the metal, it lists 64 separate caches of hidden gold, silver, precious vessels, and other sprolls buried in various locations all around Judea and Jerusalem.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: We are talking about staggering, almost unfathomable amounts of wealth described in this text.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the immediate question everyone asks is: well, did anyone find it?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: Did an ancient Indiana Jones dig it all up?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_03: And that's the enduring mystery.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_03: Most of those 64 caches have never been definitively found.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_03: The prevailing theory among a lot of scholars is that this wasn't the Essenes treasure, but rather the massive wealth of the Jerusalem temple, hidden away by priests just before the Romans breached the city walls and burned the temple to the ground in 70 CE.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: Which leaves you with one massive lingering thought.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: If those sixty-four caches were buried to hide them from the Romans, and most of them were never recovered, what else might be resting quietly beneath the desert sand right now?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Just waiting for the next shepherd to throw a rock or the next hiker to stumble upon a cave.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: The academic dragons might be gone from Qumran, but the real treasure might still be out there.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: It's a fascinating thought to leave on.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_03: There is definitely always more to discover.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for taking this deep dive with us today.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Keep questioning, keep digging, and we'll see you next time.