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Fall Asleep to The Dead Sea Scrolls _ The Words That Survived 2_000 Years · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: In nineteen forty seven, a teenage shepherd threw a stone
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  Speaker 1: into a cave. He was not looking for anything sacred.
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  Speaker 1: He was looking for a lost goat. The cliffs above
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  Speaker 1: the Dead Sea were pale and dry in the morning light,
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  Speaker 1: and the boy climbed without thinking, the way boys do
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  Speaker 1: when they are following an animal and not yet considering
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  Speaker 1: where the path is going. He threw the stone. He
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  Speaker 1: heard something break in the dark. It was not the
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  Speaker 1: sound of rock hitting rock. It was something different, something hollow,
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  Speaker 1: something that had been waiting a very long time to
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  Speaker 1: be disturbed. He did not go in that day. He
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  Speaker 1: came back with a friend, and when they finally ducked
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  Speaker 1: through the low opening and let their eyes adjust to
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  Speaker 1: the dark, they found tall clay jars lining the walls.
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  Speaker 1: Most were empty or filled with dirt, but two of
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  Speaker 1: them held something wrapped in linen, brown and stiff with age.
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  Speaker 1: They did not know what they were holding. Nobody alike did. Tonight,
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  Speaker 1: we are going to walk into that cave together. We
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  Speaker 1: are going to follow those scrolls from the hands of
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  Speaker 1: a teenage boy who did not know what he had found.
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  Speaker 1: Through the most contested and celebrated archaeological discovery of the
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  Speaker 1: twentieth century, and all the way to the questions. Those
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  Speaker 1: ancient writings are still asking of anyone willing to listen.
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  Speaker 1: You do not need to know anything coming in. You
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  Speaker 1: only need to be here, breathing, willing to follow the
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  Speaker 1: sound of something breaking open in the dark. The night
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  Speaker 1: is long, the scrolls have been waiting two thousand years.
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  Speaker 1: Let us begin chapter one, The Shepherd Boy and the
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  Speaker 1: Broken Jar. His name was Muhammadadeb. He was fifteen years
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  Speaker 1: old or thereabouts. Nobody recorded his exact age, and he
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  Speaker 1: himself may not have known it with precision. What we
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  Speaker 1: know is that he was a member of the ta
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  Speaker 1: Amira bedouin Tryebe, that he had been tending goats in
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  Speaker 1: the cliffs above the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea,
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  Speaker 1: and that on a morning in the early weeks of
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  Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven, one of his animals wandered off. The
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  Speaker 1: cliffs in that region are not gentle. They are a
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  Speaker 1: landscape that does not apologize for itself. Pale limestone faces
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  Speaker 1: dropping sharply toward the blue gray surface of the Dead Sea,
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  Speaker 1: the lowest point on the surface of the Earth, four
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  Speaker 1: hundred and thirty meters below sea level. The air is
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  Speaker 1: dry in a way that is almost aggressive. The sun
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  Speaker 1: reflects off the rock and off the water simultaneously, so
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  Speaker 1: that even on a cool morning, you feel the heat
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  Speaker 1: coming from two directions at once. Mohammed climbed. That is
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  Speaker 1: what shepherds do. You follow the animal, and you trust
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  Speaker 1: your feet on the rock, and you do not think
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  Speaker 1: too much about where the path is going. He found
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  Speaker 1: the cave opening, almost by accident, a dark gap in
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  Speaker 1: the pale cliff face, low enough that he would have
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  Speaker 1: to duck to enter. He threw a stone in the
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  Speaker 1: way you do when you are not sure what is inside.
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  Speaker 1: Not brave, not afraid, just a boy checking a cave
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  Speaker 1: the way boys have always checked caves, with a thrown
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  Speaker 1: rock and a moment of listening. The sound he heard
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  Speaker 1: was not what he expected. It was a sharp crack
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  Speaker 1: followed by a kind of hollow resonance, not rock hitting rock,
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  Speaker 1: something harder but more fragile, something made He did not
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  Speaker 1: go in alone. He went back to camp, told another
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  Speaker 1: boy named Jumar what he had found, and the two
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  Speaker 1: of them returned. Some accounts say they went back the
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  Speaker 1: same day, others say it was the following morning. The
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  Speaker 1: details of that particular morning are the kind that get
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  Speaker 1: reshaped each time a person tells a story that turns
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  Speaker 1: out to matter more than they realized when they were
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  Speaker 1: living it. What is not disputed is what they found inside.
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  Speaker 1: The cave was roughly eight meters long and perhaps two
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  Speaker 1: meters wide. The floor was uneven. The walls curved inward
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  Speaker 1: at the top, the way limestone caves do when they
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  Speaker 1: were formed by water moving through rock a very long
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  Speaker 1: time ago. Along the walls, embedded in the sediment of
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  Speaker 1: the floor were tall, cylindrical jars. Most scholars who later
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  Speaker 1: examined the sight counted somewhere between forty and fifty. Most
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  Speaker 1: of them were broken or empty, or packed with wind
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  Speaker 1: blown dirt that had filtered in over centuries. But two
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  Speaker 1: of the jars were intact, and inside them, wrapped in
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  Speaker 1: linen cloth, darkened and stiffened with age, were the scrolls.
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  Speaker 1: The boys took them, that is what happened. They did
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  Speaker 1: not know they were standing in the middle of the
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  Speaker 1: most significant biblical discovery in a century. They were teenagers
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  Speaker 1: who had found something strange, and they took it the
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  Speaker 1: way people take things they do not yet understand. That
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  Speaker 1: understanding will come later. The scrolls sat in their tent
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  Speaker 1: for weeks. The linen smelled of something old and mineral.
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  Speaker 1: The leather was dark and cracked at the edges. One
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  Speaker 1: of the adults in the camp eventually arranged to have
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  Speaker 1: the material evaluated in Bethlehem, then in Jerusalem. The first
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  Speaker 1: scholar to examine them was shown three scrolls and initially
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  Speaker 1: dismissed them. Then a second scholar looked more carefully, then
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  Speaker 1: a third. Within two years, the academic world was in
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  Speaker 1: a state of barely controlled excitement. The scrolls included a
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  Speaker 1: complete copy of the Book of Isaiah, older by a
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  Speaker 1: thousand years than any previously known Hebrew manuscript of that text.
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  Speaker 1: They included a commentary on the Book of Habakuk. They
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  Speaker 1: included a document nobody had seen before written in Hebrew,
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  Speaker 1: describing the rules and practices of a religious community that
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  Speaker 1: had apparently lived in the desert. But Cave One, as
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  Speaker 1: it came to be known, was only the beginning. Over
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  Speaker 1: the next nine years, eleven caves in the same cliff system,
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  Speaker 1: above a site called Kirbet Kumrun were systematically searched and excavated.
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  Speaker 1: Each one yielded fragments. Cave four alone a cavity, hollowed
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  Speaker 1: into the soft mile of the cliff face close to
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  Speaker 1: the settlement, contained the remains of more than five hundred
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  Speaker 1: separate manuscripts, not full scrolls. Mostly the fragments were small,
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  Speaker 1: some of them no larger than a postage stamp, torn
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  Speaker 1: and crumbling and bearing only a few legible words. But
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  Speaker 1: there were so many of them that scholars spent decades
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  Speaker 1: working out which fragment belonged to which manuscript, the way
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  Speaker 1: you would work out a puzzle with no picture on
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  Speaker 1: the box in a language you are still learning, with
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  Speaker 1: pieces that kept disintegrating under your fingers. The total yield
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  Speaker 1: of all eleven caves was somewhere between queen eight hundred
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  Speaker 1: and nine hundred manuscripts, depending on how you count, texts
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  Speaker 1: from almost every book of the Hebrew Bible, texts from
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  Speaker 1: books known but never before seen in Hebrew, texts from
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  Speaker 1: books nobody had heard of at all, And underneath all
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  Speaker 1: of it the same question that Mohammaded Dib had accidentally
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  Speaker 1: cracked open on that pale morning in nineteen forty seven.
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  Speaker 1: Who put these here? And why did they never come back?
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  Speaker 1: The answer to that question begins not in the cave,
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  Speaker 1: but in the ruins of a settlement at the base
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  Speaker 1: of the cliff, a few hundred meters from the water's edge,
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  Speaker 1: a place called kum Ran, where the people who made
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  Speaker 1: the scrolls had lived and prayed and copied out their
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  Speaker 1: texts by lamplight and waited for something they believed was coming.
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  Speaker 1: They waited a long time. What came was not what
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  Speaker 1: they hoped for, but they left the words behind, sealed
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  Speaker 1: in clay, wrapped in linen, hidden in the dark, and
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  Speaker 1: two thousand years later a boy who was looking for
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  Speaker 1: a lost goat found them. There is a word in
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  Speaker 1: Hebrew that appears repeatedly in the oldest of those scrolls,
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  Speaker 1: a word that the community at Kumran used to describe
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  Speaker 1: the quality they were trying to build their entire lives around.
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  Speaker 1: The word is emmet. It is usually translated as truth,
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  Speaker 1: but its root meaning reaches deeper than that. Firmness, reliability,
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  Speaker 1: the quality of being present in the same way, in
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  Speaker 1: the same place, doing the same faithful thing, regardless of
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  Speaker 1: what the circumstances around you are doing. The emmet of
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  Speaker 1: those jars, sealed against the desert air for two thousand
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  Speaker 1: years is how the words survived and the emmet of
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  Speaker 1: a teenage shepherd who followed a lost goat into an
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  Speaker 1: unexpected part of the cliff is how they were found.
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  Speaker 1: Both kinds of faithfulness were necessary, the patient kind and
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  Speaker 1: the accidental kind, the deliberate preservation and the unplanned discovery.
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  Speaker 1: That is usually how it goes with the things that
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  Speaker 1: matter most. The great arrivals almost never announce themselves. They
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  Speaker 1: come through the ordinary action of some one who was
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  Speaker 1: not looking for them, at a moment that did not
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  Speaker 1: feel significant until later, by means of something as unremarkable
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  Speaker 1: as a thrown stone. Rest for a moment. Let your
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  Speaker 1: breathing slow. The cliffs above the Dead Sea are pale
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  Speaker 1: in the moonlight right now, exactly as they were on
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  Speaker 1: that morning in nineteen forty seven, the same rock, the
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  Speaker 1: same silence, the same dry air that kept the jars
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  Speaker 1: intact across two millennia. We have only just arrived at
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  Speaker 1: the edge of the story, and there is so much
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  Speaker 1: more ahead chapter two, the community at the edge of
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  Speaker 1: the desert. Before we can understand what was in the scrolls,
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  Speaker 1: we have to understand who made them. This is the
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  Speaker 1: part of the story that most people skip or treat
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  Speaker 1: too briefly. They want to get to the contents to
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  Speaker 1: the question of what the scrolls say about the Bible
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  Speaker 1: and about Jesus and about the things that scholars have
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  Speaker 1: argued over for seventy years, And those questions are coming.
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  Speaker 1: We will get to all of them. But if you
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  Speaker 1: skip the community, you miss everything that makes the scrolls
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  Speaker 1: more than a historical curiosity. You miss the reason the
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  Speaker 1: texts feel the way they feel. You miss the thing
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  Speaker 1: that makes a person lying in the dark to night
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  Speaker 1: feel against all logic, that these words were somehow written
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  Speaker 1: for them. So let us take our time here. The
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  Speaker 1: site of Kumran sits on a narrow plateau at the
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  Speaker 1: northwestern edge of the Dead Sea, at the base of
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  Speaker 1: the cliffs where the caves are. The plateau rises slightly
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  Speaker 1: above the shoreline, commanding a view of the water to
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  Speaker 1: the east and the cliff face to the west. The
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  Speaker 1: landscape is not beautiful in the way that landscape are
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  Speaker 1: usually called beautiful. It does not have the lushness of
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  Speaker 1: a valley or the drama of a mountain. It has
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  Speaker 1: something else, a severity, a stillness, the kind of silence
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  Speaker 1: that has texture that you can feel against your skin
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  Speaker 1: when the wind drops. The settlement that archaeologists uncovered there
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  Speaker 1: was occupied with some interruptions, from roughly the second century
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  Speaker 1: before Christ until the year sixty eight of the Common Era,
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  Speaker 1: when the Roman army arrived and ended it. At its height,
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  Speaker 1: the community that lived there probably numbered somewhere between one
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  Speaker 1: hundred and two hundred people. They shared meals in a
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  Speaker 1: large communal room. They had an elaborate water system, a
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  Speaker 1: network of channels and cisterns carved into the plateau, capable
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  Speaker 1: of holding hundreds of thousands of liters fed by a
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  Speaker 1: seasonal stream from the cliffs above. They had a long,
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  Speaker 1: narrow room where scholars believe at least some of the
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  Speaker 1: screa rolls were copied. The dried inkwells and writing benches
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  Speaker 1: still visible in the ruins two thousand years later. They
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  Speaker 1: had left Jerusalem. That was the essential fact about them.
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  Speaker 1: They had left on purpose. To understand why, you have
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  Speaker 1: to understand what Jerusalem was in the second century before Christ,
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  Speaker 1: the city was not simply a religious center. It was
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  Speaker 1: a political one. The High Priesthood, which controlled the Temple
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  Speaker 1: and therefore the entire religious economy of Jewish life, had
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  Speaker 1: become entangled with political power in ways that many deeply
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  Speaker 1: observant Jews found intolerable. Foreign rulers had intervened in the
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  Speaker 1: appointment of high priests, men had purchased the office. The
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  Speaker 1: sacred calendar, the precise ordering of feast days and sabbaths
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  Speaker 1: and new moons that governed the rhythm of Jewish worship,
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  Speaker 1: had become a matter of political negotiation rather than divine command.
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  Speaker 1: For some people, this was a common compromise they could
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  Speaker 1: live with. They stayed in Jerusalem, they worked within the system.
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  Speaker 1: They believed that imperfect faithfulness was still faithfulness. For others,
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  Speaker 1: it was not a compromise they could make, and the
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  Speaker 1: people who eventually settled at Kumran were among those others.
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  Speaker 1: The group most scholars associate with the Cumran community is
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  Speaker 1: a movement known as the Esenes. The historian Josephus, writing
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  Speaker 1: in the first century of the Common Era, describes the
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  Speaker 1: Essenes with evident admiration. They numbered in the thousands, he says,
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  Speaker 1: spread across Judea, but concentrated in certain communities. They rejected
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  Speaker 1: personal wealth. They shared everything. They bathed frequently in cold
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  Speaker 1: water for ritual purification. They rose before dawn to pray.
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  Speaker 1: They studied their texts with an intensity that Josephus describes
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  Speaker 1: as remarkable even to an outside observer. What drove the
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  Speaker 1: specific community at Cumran into the desert was most scholars
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  Speaker 1: believe a dispute about the priesthood and the calender. Their
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  Speaker 1: own texts refer to a figure they call the Teacher
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  Speaker 1: of Righteousness, a priest who had been wrongfully removed from
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  Speaker 1: his position by some one they call the wicked priest,
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  Speaker 1: and who led his followers into the wilderness to preserve
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  Speaker 1: the true interpretation of the law. The Teacher of Righteousness
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  Speaker 1: is never named in the scrolls. We do not know
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  Speaker 1: with certainty who he was, but his influence saturates the
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  Speaker 1: documents the community left behind. They quote him. They interpret
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  Speaker 1: scripture through his lens. They believe that God revealed to
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  Speaker 1: him truths about the meaning of the prophets that had
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  Speaker 1: not been revealed to any one before him. They went
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  Speaker 1: into the desert because they believed the desert was where
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  Speaker 1: faithfulness still existed in its undiluted form. The connection was
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  Speaker 1: not accidental. The Hebrew prophets had spoken of the wildernes
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  Speaker 1: as the place where God's people would be renewed, where
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  Speaker 1: they would hear his voice again after a long silence.
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  Speaker 1: Isiah had written of a voice crying in the wilderness,
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  Speaker 1: preparing the way of the Lord. The community at Cumran
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  Speaker 1: believed they were that voice. They believed they were the preparation.
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  Speaker 1: Their daily life had a structure that is almost impossible
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  Speaker 1: to imagine sustaining, and yet they sustained it for nearly
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  Speaker 1: two centuries. They woke before dawn. Morning prayer was followed
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  Speaker 1: by work, the kind of practical communal labor that keeps
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  Speaker 1: a settlement functioning in a desert environment. Mid Day brought
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  Speaker 1: more study. The communal meal in the evening was treated
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  Speaker 1: with the solemnity of a sacred rite. Bread was blessed
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  Speaker 1: and broken. The meal was eaten in silence or accompanied
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  Speaker 1: by the reading of texts. After the meal, more study
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  Speaker 1: late into the night. Membership in the community was not
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  Speaker 1: taken lightly. A person who wished to join went through
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  Speaker 1: a process that took two years. In the first year,
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  Speaker 1: they were permitted to live alongside the community and observe,
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  Speaker 1: but they did not eat with them, and their property
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  Speaker 1: remained their own. In the second year, if the community
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  Speaker 1: voted to accept them, they began participating in the communal meals,
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  Speaker 1: but still retained their property. Only at the end of
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  Speaker 1: the second year, if a final vote confirmed their acceptance,
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  Speaker 1: did they transfer everything they owned to the community pool
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  Speaker 1: and become full members. The community rule. One of the
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  Speaker 1: scrolls found in Cave I, describes in careful detail what
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  Speaker 1: happened if a member violated the community's standards. Interrupting another
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  Speaker 1: member during a session of community study resulted in a
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  Speaker 1: ten day reduction in food rations. Speaking foolishly resulted in
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  Speaker 1: thirty days. Lying about property resulted in exclude lusion from
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  Speaker 1: the communal meal for six months. These were not invented problems.
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  Speaker 1: A community that felt the need to write down a
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  Speaker 1: rule against foolish laughter had almost certainly dealt with the
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  Speaker 1: disruption that foolish laughter causes when everyone is trying to
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  Speaker 1: hold on to something serious in the middle of a
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  Speaker 1: difficult world. There is something about this community that matters
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  Speaker 1: even more than their discipline, something that the archaeological record
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  Speaker 1: makes quietly clear, and that the scrolls themselves confirm. They
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  Speaker 1: were afraid not of ordinary dangers, not of the desert
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  Speaker 1: or the heat, or the difficulty of their lives. They
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  Speaker 1: were afraid of something they could see happening around them
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  Speaker 1: and could not stop they watched the world they had
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  Speaker 1: grown up in, the world organized around the covenant between
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  Speaker 1: God and his people being dismantled peace by peace. The
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  Speaker 1: priesthood corrupted, the calendar, overwritten, the sacred texts interpreted by
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  Speaker 1: people with political interest costs rather than faithful ones. So
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  Speaker 1: they went to the edge. They went to the place
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  Speaker 1: where they could still do what they believed they were
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  Speaker 1: supposed to do without compromise for as long as they had,
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  Speaker 1: and they wrote it all down. They wrote it down
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  Speaker 1: because they believed that what they knew needed to outlast them.
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  Speaker 1: Their texts reveal a community that believed it was living
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  Speaker 1: in the final era, before a great conflict that would
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  Speaker 1: end history as they knew it. They did not know
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  Speaker 1: when it was coming, but they believed they were preparing
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  Speaker 1: for it with every text they copied, and every rule
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  Speaker 1: they followed, and every pre dawn prayer they offered into
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  Speaker 1: the cold desert air. The writing was the preparation. The
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  Speaker 1: library was the testimony. When the Roman army arrived in
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  Speaker 1: sixty eight of the Common Era, marching south from Jericho
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  Speaker 1: and sweeping through the settlements along the way, the community
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  Speaker 1: at Kumrah had perhaps days, perhaps hours to decide what
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  Speaker 1: to do with two centuries of accumulated texts. They put
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  Speaker 1: them in jars, They sealed the jars, they carried them
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  Speaker 1: up the cliffs and hid them in the caves. And
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: then they did not come back. We do not know
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  Speaker 1: exactly what happened to them. The settlement shows evidence of
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  Speaker 1: violent destruction at a level that matches the period of
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  Speaker 1: the Roman advance. Some may have fled south, some may
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  Speaker 1: have joined defenders at other fortresses. Some may simply have
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  Speaker 1: been killed where they stood. What we know is that
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: for nearly two thousand years, no human hand disturbed those jars,
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  Speaker 1: until a boy who was looking for a lost goat
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: threw a stone into the dark and heard something break.
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  Speaker 1: There is something worth sitting with before we go further.
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  Speaker 1: These people built their whole lives around the conviction that
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: truth needed to be preserved at any cost. They organized
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  Speaker 1: their mornings and their meals, and their finances and their
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  Speaker 1: relationships around that conviction. They spent decades copying texts by
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  Speaker 1: lamplight in a desert settlement because they believed the words
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  Speaker 1: were worth more than the comfort of living somewhere easier.
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  Speaker 1: And then they gave up their lives and trusted the
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  Speaker 1: words to the dark. That kind of faithfulness does not
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  Speaker 1: ask for anything from you to night. It does not
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  Speaker 1: need your agreement or your admiration. It just sits there
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  Speaker 1: in the historical record, quietly asking one question, what do
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  Speaker 1: you believe is worth preserving? And what are you willing
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  Speaker 1: to do to preserve it? The night is generous. Take
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  Speaker 1: your time with that. Chapter three eleven caves, nine hundred manuscripts.
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  Speaker 1: The story of the Dead Sea Scrolls is not the
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  Speaker 1: story of a single discovery. That is the part that
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: surprises most people when they first encounter it. They imagine
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  Speaker 1: one cave, one set of jars, one dramatic morning in
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  Speaker 1: the desert. The image is clean and satisfying the way
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: origin stories usually are a boy, a stone, a crack
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: in the cliff face, and suddenly the ancient world gives
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: up its secret. But that is not what happened. What
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: happened was slower, stranger, and in many ways more extraordinary
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: than a single discovery could ever be. What happened was
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: eleven caves found over nine years by an unlikely combination
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: of Bedouin tribesmen, competitive archaeologists, a Jordanian army officer, a
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: group of scholars who disagreed about almost everything and the
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: particular quality of desert air that keeps leather intact for
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: two millennia. Cave one was found in nineteen forty seven,
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: but the significance of what it contained was not immediately
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: clear to the outside world. The scrolls moved through several
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: hands before reaching scholars who could evaluate them properly. Some
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: were purchased by a Syrian orthodoxox archbishop, some were acquired
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: by a Hebrew university professor. The process was slow, complicated
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: by the political situation of the region, which was itself
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: in the middle of a transformation that would change the
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: map of the Middle East permanently. By nineteen forty nine,
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: the location of Cave one had been identified by archaeologists
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, and a proper excavation
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: had been carried out. What they found confirmed what the
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: scrolls themselves had suggested. The jars were purpose made for
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: scroll preservation, tall and cylindrical, with fitted lids sealed against
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: the dry desert air. This was not accidental preservation. Someone
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: had worked to make it last. But Cave one had
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: yielded only seven major scrolls and a collection of smaller fragments,
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: and the question that serious scholars were already asking quietly
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: at first and then more urgently, was whether there were
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: other caves. The answer came not from the archaeologists, but
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: from the Bedouin, the tar Meire tribe, the same group
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: that had produced mohammeded dB had understood something that the
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: academic world took longer to grasp. The cliffs above Kumran
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: were riddled with cave openings. There were hundreds of them,
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: some barely large enough to crawl into, some opening into
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: chambers thirty or forty meters deep. If one cave had
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: held scrolls, others might too, and the scrolls, as the
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: Bedouin had already discovered, had monetary value as antiquities that
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: scholars and institutions were willing to pay for. They began
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: searching systematically in a way that the archaeologists, with their
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: limited funding and competing priorities, could not match. They knew
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: the terrain, they had grown up in it. They moved
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: through the cliffs with a speed and efficiency that no
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: outside team could replicate. Cave Too, was found by Bedouin
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: searchers in nineteen fifty two. It contained fragments of texts
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: from the Hebrew Bible and fragments of the Book of
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: Jubilees and the Book of Enoch. Those ancient texts we
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: have explored together on other nights from this channel. The
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: Jubilees fragments alone were significant. Here were pieces of the
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: same text in the original Hebrew that the Ethiopian Church
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: had been preserving in translation for sixteen centuries. Two traditions,
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: the desert caves and the Highland monasteries confirmed as preserving
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: the same words across two thousand years. Cave three was
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: found by archaeologists the same year. It contained a small
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: number of Biblical fragments and one object unlike anything found
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: in any other cave, a scroll made not of leather
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: or papyrus, but of copper, rolled into two sections. Too
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: brittle to unroll without destroying it, it would take years
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: before or a team could cut it into strips thin
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: enough to read what they found inside. Is one of
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: the most discussed and debated documents in the entire collection,
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: and we will spend time with it later in this journey.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: Cave four was found in September of nineteen fifty two,
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: and Cave four changed everything. It was not an impressive cave. Physically,
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: it was a cavity hollowed into the soft mile of
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: the cliff face close to the Kumran settlement itself. What
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: was inside was not intact scrolls. It was fragments, thousands
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: upon thousands of fragments scattered across the floor, mixed with
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: the sediment of two thousand years of wind and animal activity.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: The jars that had once held them had collapsed or
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: been disturbed by time. What remained was a puzzle of
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: a scale that nobody had anticipated. The number of individual
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: manuscript fragments recovered from Cave four is estimated at some
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: point where around fifteen thousand. Those fifteen thousand fragments, when
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: scholars eventually began sorting and matching them, turned out to
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: represent close to six hundred separate manuscripts, with some scholarly
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: estimates running higher, from nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible,
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: from texts that had been known only in translation until
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: that moment, from texts that nobody had read since the
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: first century of the Common era. The physical process of
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: recovery was itself a kind of archaeology of human endurance.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: Fragments were purchased from the Bedouin, who had found them,
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: matched with other fragments photographed under controlled conditions and placed
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: in labeled boxes. Scholars worked on their knees on long tables,
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: holding fragments up to the light, squinting at characters written
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: in an ink that had faded from black to dark
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: brown over twenty centuries. Some fragments were no larger than
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: a thumbnail. Some bore only two or three legible letters.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: Each one mattered. Each one was a piece of something
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: that had once been whole. Caves five through ten were
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: found in the years following nineteen fifty two, some by Bedouin,
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: some by archaeologists. Each added something to the portrait. Cave
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: eleven was the last major discovery, found in nineteen fifty six.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: After Cave four, it was the most significant. It contained
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: a nearly complete scroll of psalms and the Temple Scroll,
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: the longest of all the Dead Sea scrolls, at nearly
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: nine meters, describing an idealized temple and its rituals in
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: extraordinary detail. Nine years, illeven caves somewhere between eight hundred
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: and nine hundred manuscripts. To put that in perspective, before
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven, the oldest known complete Hebrew manuscript of
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: the Old Testament was a codex copied in the year
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: one thousand and eight of the Common Era. The Dead
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: Sea Scrolls pushed that date back a thousand years. In
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: a single decade of searching a thousand years of textual transmission,
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: suddenly had a witness. What that witness revealed was remarkable.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: The texts were in almost all essential respects the same
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: as the later manuscripts, not identical. There were differences, and
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: scholars have spent decades analyzing them with great care. But
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: the differences were in the overwhelming majority of cases, minor
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: spelling variations, small additions or omissions, words that differed in
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: detail but not in meaning. No major theological claim of
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: any Biblical book was altered by any variant found in
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: the caves. The substance held, the message held, the story held.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: There is a woman named Patricia. She taught high school
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: English for thirty years in Ohio, teaching students how to
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: hold a source with appropriate respect and appropriate skepticism simultaneously.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: She read about the textual comparison between the scrolls and
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: later manuscripts one winter and stopped at that chapter for
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: a long time. She wrote in the margin of her book.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: This is what faithful transmission looks like. She is right,
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: and the scrolls are the evidence. But the collection is
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: not only about confirming what was already known. A significant
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: portion of the scrolls, perhaps a third of the total,
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: consists of texts that were not part of the standard
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: Biblical canon, Texts that had been known in other languages
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: but never seen in Hebrew, Texts that had been lost entirely,
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: texts that existed nowhere else on earth until that stone
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: was thrown on a dry morning in nineteen forty seven.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: Those texts tell a different kind of story, not a
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: glory about transmission and preservation, but a story about the
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: breadth and complexity of the religious world that produced both
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: the Scrolls and, a generation later, the New Testament, a
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: world where the boundaries of the Sacred Library were still
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: being defined, where multiple interpretations of the law existed simultaneously,
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: where people were asking with genuine urgency, the same questions
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: that people are still asking tonight. Understanding that world does
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: not diminish the texts that eventually became canonical. It does
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: something more interesting. It shows you how wide the river
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: was before it narrowed into the channel. We have inherited,
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: and it gives you a deeper appreciation for what was
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: preserved and why it mattered enough to preserve. The caves
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: were not a library that survived by accident. They were
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: a library that survived because people believed, with everything they
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: had that some things are worth more than safety, and
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: more than comfort, and more than the ordinary human preference
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: for not carrying burdens that are heavier than you need
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: to carry. They carried them anyway up the cliff face
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: into the dark, and the dark kept them ill. Even
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: caves nine hundred manuscripts, two thousand years of silence, and
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: a boy who was looking for something else entirely found
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: the door that had been waiting for exactly the kind
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: of person who was not trying to find it. That
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: is the nature of this kind of discovery. It does
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: not wait for the right expert. It waits for the
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: right moment, and the right moment arrives when it arrives,
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: through whatever ordinary action happens to be in progress at
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: the time. Chapter four, the Great Isaiah Scroll, when the
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: Bible met itself. Of all the scrolls that came out
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: of those eleven caves, one stands apart, not because it
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: is the oldest. Though it is among the oldest, not
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: because it is the most contested, though scholars have pored
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: over it with the kind of attention usually reserved for
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: legal documents and love letters. It stands apart because of
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: what it is. In the simplest possible terms. It is
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: a complete book of the Bible, written on leather twenty
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: one hundred years old, preserved so well that you can
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: read it under normal light, without enhancement, without reconstruction, without
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: filling in missing letters from context. It is the Great
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: Isaiah Scroll, and the story of what it tells us
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: not just about the prophet Isaiah, but about the entire
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: question of whether the Bible we hold to day is
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: the Bible that existed two thousand years ago, is one
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: of the most quietly astonishing stories in the history of
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: human knowledge. Let us start with the physical object, because
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: it earns its own description. The Great Isaiah Scroll is
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: seven point three meters long, that is nearly twenty four
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: feet of prepared leather, seventeen separate sheets stitched together at
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: the edges with linen thread covered on one side, with
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: fifty four columns of carefully written Hebrew text. The letters
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: are dense and even the work of a scribe who
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: had been doing this for years, whose hand was steady
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: and whose concentration was deep. There are occasional corrections, places
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: where a letter was written incorrectly and scraped away, or
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: where a word was omitted and added above the line
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: in a smaller hand. These small human errors, preserved in
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: the leather for twenty one hundred years, make the scroll
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: feel inhabited in a way that a perfect text could not.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: Someone was here, someone held this pen. Someone made a
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: mistake and fixed it. The scroll contains all sixty six
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: chapters of Isaiah without interruption, no pages missing, no columns destroyed.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: Bollos have identified two main scribal hands in the text,
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: suggesting that two different people worked on it, one taking
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: over from the other part way through. The transition is
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: so smooth that a casual reader would not notice it.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: Two scribes trained in the same tradition, maintaining the same
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: care across the full length of a scroll that would
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: have taken months to complete. The scroll was found in
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: Cave One in nineteen forty seven, among the first scrolls recovered.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: It eventually made its way to a bank vault in
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: New Jersey, the oldest known complete Hebrew manuscript of any
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: biblical book waiting in a safe deposit box while its
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: owner placed an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal seeking
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: a buyer. That detail never loses its strangeness. The most
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: significant Hebrew manuscript in the world sitting in New Jersey
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: for sale. In nineteen fifty four, the scroll was purchased
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: on behalf of the state of Israel and return to Jerusalem,
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: where it has been housed in a specially designed underground
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: vault at the Israel Museum ever since, in a room
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: called the Shrine of the Book, built in a shape
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: that echoes the lid of the scroll jars in which
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: it was found. But the scroll's most important contribution to
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: human knowledge is not about its physical preservation or its
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: unlikely journey. Its most important contribution is what happens when
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: you compare it line by line to the Book of
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: Isaiah as it appears in modern Bibles. The standard Hebrew
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: text that underlies most modern translations of the Old Testament
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: belongs to what scholars call the Massoretic tradition, a system
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: of careful scribal transmission whose earliest complete surviving manuscript dates
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: to the year one thousand and eight. Of the common era.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: For centuries, scholars had no way to verify whether this
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: tradition accurately represented what the Biblical books had looked like
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: a thousand years of earlier. The Great Isaiah Scroll gave
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: them a witness from that earlier period, and what they
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: found when they laid the two texts side by side
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: was this. The scroll belongs to what textual scholars call
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: a proto massoretic tradition. The overwhelming majority of its text
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: agrees with the later Masoretic manuscripts. Most scholarly measures placed
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: the level of agreement very high, somewhere in the range
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: of ninety five percent. The differences that exist are almost
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: entirely matters of spelling, scribal habit, and minor wording. Scholars
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: who have studied both texts in careful detail have found
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: that no major theological claim of the Book of Isaiah
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: is altered by any variant between the two. The word
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: the Scribal tradition used for this work of faithful transmission
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: was messerah, which gives us the English term massoretic, But
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: mesura means more than tradition. Its root means handing, over
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: passing from hand to hand with deliberate care, like a
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: flame carried from one lamp to another, so that the
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: light does not go out. The scribes who produced the
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: Massoretic tradition were not passive copyists. They were active guardians.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: They counted the letters in each book of the Bible
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: and recorded the totals, so that any copy that deviated
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: from the correct count could be identified and corrected. They
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: noted the middle letter of each book, the middle word,
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: the middle verse. They marked unusual spellings and grammatical forms
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: with notations in the margin, flags to future copyists that
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: this particular word was to be copied exactly as written,
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: even if it looked like an error. They developed an
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: entire system of careful notation devoted to the single purpose
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: of making sure that nothing changed. The Great Isaiah Scroll,
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: written a thousand years before the Massoretic manuscripts by people
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: who had not yet developed the full apparatus of that notation,
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: validates their work. It shows that the text the Maserreats
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: were so carefully preserving, was, in all its essential features,
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: the same text that the Cumran community had copied and
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: sealed in Ajar in the first century before Christ. The
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: light did not go out. There is a man named Thomas.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: He is forty four years old, and he grew up
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: in a household where the Bible was read every morning
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: at breakfast a chapter before the day began, without discussion
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: or commentary, just the words read aloud in the same
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: translation his grandfather had used. He left that practice in
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: his twenties, when his relationship with faith became more complicated.
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: He did not stop believing, exactly, but he became uncertain
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: in ways he had not been as a child, and
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: the uncertainty was uncomfortable to carry in a tradition that
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: did not always leave room for it. He heard about
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: the Isaiah Scroll comparison in a podcast several years ago
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: and looked it up. Afterward. He sat with what he
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: found for a long time. A thousand years of hand
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: copying across political upheaval and exile and diaspora and persecution
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: and the complete reorganization of the Jewish world after the
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: destruction of the Temple, and the text arrived essentially intact.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: He did not know exactly what to do with that,
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: but it settled something in him that had been unsettled
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: for a long time. Not the theological questions, those remained
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: as complicated as ever, but something about the care the
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: deliberateness of it, the fact that somewhere in every century
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: between the Kumran scribe and the Masoretic copyist, there had
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: been a person who believed the words were worth counting.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: He called his father that evening. They talked for an hour.
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: The scroll was in the background of the conversation, the
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: way some discoveries are present without being aimed. The Great
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: Isaiah Scroll is now available to view in its entirety
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: online in high resolution photography that allows you to zoom
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: in on individual letters, to see the places where the
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: scribe's hand hesitated, to read the marginal corrections in the
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: smaller handwriting of someone who came after and noticed what
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: needed fixing. There is something about seeing the actual letters,
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: the ink that a human hand applied to leather twenty
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: one hundred years ago that makes the distance collapse in
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: a way that translation cannot quite achieve. You are not
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: reading about the scroll. You are looking at the same
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: marks that the scribe looked at when he lifted his
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: pen and reviewed what he had written, checking it against
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: the text he was copying, satisfying himself that he had
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: gotten it right. He got it right, and the tradition
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: he was part of got it right generation after generation,
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: in conditions that should have made accuracy in possis, war, exile, persecution,
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: the burning of libraries, the disappearance of communities, the loss
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: of languages, the ordinary entropy of time, which destroys almost
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: everything given long enough, almost everything. Not this. There is
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: something in the survival of the Great Isiah Scroll that
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: goes beyond the scholarly significance of a textual comparison. It
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: is the feeling, when you sit with it long enough,
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: that you are in the presence of something that was
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: meant to outlast the people who made it, that the
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: care those people poured into its creation was itself a
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: kind of prayer, an act of faith, directed not at
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: the past, but at the future, at people they would
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: never meet. In circumstances they could not imagine who would
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: need the words. They did not know you. But you
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: are the reason the words were worth counting. You are
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: the end point of a chain of faithfulness so long
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: that its beginning disappears into the ancient world. And tonight
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: the Isaiah Scroll has found its way to you. Breathe
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: let that in. Slowly, the words survived, the chain held,
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: and the scroll, after twenty one hundred years is still
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: saying what it was always saying. Let it say it
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: to you tonight. In this quiet before the Sleep comes
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: Chapter five, The Rule of the Community, How They Lived.
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: There is a document among the Dead Sea Scrolls that
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: most casual readers overlook, not because it is unimportant, quite
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: the opposite. It is one of the most complete and
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: carefully written texts in the entire collection, preserved in multiple copies,
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: clearly central to the life of the community that produced it.
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: But it does not have the romantic appeal of a
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: prophecy or the mystery of an unknown text. It does
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: not raise dramatic questions about the boundaries of the biblical
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: canon or the reliability of ancient transmission. It is, in
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: the plainest possible terms, a rule book, and yet if
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: you spend time with it, really spend time with it,
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: it becomes something more than a rule book. It becomes
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: a window into the daily life of people who decided
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: that the gap between what they believed and how they
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: lived was a gap they were no longer willing to tolerate.
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: People who sat down together and asked a question that
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: most communities, ancient or modern, find too uncomfortable to ask seriously,
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: What would it actually look like to organize a human
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: life around what we say we believe. The document is
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: called the Serikha Yahad in Hebrew. The word yahad means
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: togetherness or unity in the deepest sense, not merely a
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: group of people who share a geography or affiliation, but
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: people who have chosen deliberately and at cost to become
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: something together that they could not be separately. The Yahad
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: was not a casual association. It was a total reorientation
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: of life. The Rule of the Community, found in Cave I,
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: is the most complete copy, though fragments of at least
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: ten other copies were found in other caves, suggesting that
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: this document was in active use across the community's history,
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: copied and recopied as new members joined and the community's
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: practices evolved. It covers everything from the theology that underpinned
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: the community's existence to the specific penalties for specific violations.
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: It begins with purpose. Before it tells anyone what to do,
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: it tells them why. The purpose of the community, according
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: to the Rule, was to seek God with a whole
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: heart and soul, to do what is good and write
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: before Him as He commanded through Moses and through all
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: his servants the prophets, to love everything he has chosen,
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: and hate everything he has rejected. To distance one's self
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: from all evil, and to hold fast to all good deeds.
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: That is the charter. Everything else flows from it. The
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: process of joining was a two year journey that left
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: nothing to chance. In the first year, a candidate lived
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: alongside the community and observed, but did not eat with them,
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: and their property remained their own. In the second year,
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: if the community voted to accept them, they participated in
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: the communal meals, but still retained their property. Only at
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: the end of the second year, if a final vote
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: confirmed their acceptance, did they transfer everything they owned to
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: the community pool and become full members. The transfer of
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: property was not incidental, It was the physical enactment of
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: the theological commitment. You could not half join the Yahad.
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: The commitment was total or it was nothing. Once a
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: full member, each person participated in the annual review. Every year,
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: each member was evaluated and assigned a rank. A member
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: who had grown in wisdom and faithfulness over the year
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: might rise, a member who had fallen short might fall.
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: This was not punitive in intention, It was diagnostic. The
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: community asking together, who are we becoming, and whether we
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: are becoming it faithfully. The penalty system described in the
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: rule is the section that modern readers often find most striking.
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: Lying about property resulted in exclusion from the communal meal
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: for one full year. Speaking without being recognized to speak
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: in the formal assembly resulted in a ten day penalty.
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: Laughing in a way that disrupted the assembly carried thirty days.
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: The specificity of these rules tells you something important. These
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: were not invented problems. These were the solutions to real
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: situations that real people had created by behaving in ways
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: that made communal life harder than it needed to be.
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: And there is a detail in the rule that scholars
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: have found particularly significant, a detail that connects the life
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: of the Cumran community to a practice that would become
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: central to early Christianity, the communal meal. The rule describes
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: the meal in careful terms. When the table has been
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: set and the new wine prepared, the priest shall stretch
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: out his hand first to pronounce a blessing over the
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: first portion of the bread and the new wine in
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: the community's meal. The priest acts first, he blesses the bread,
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: he blesses the wine, and only after his blessing do
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: the other members partake. A second document in the collection,
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: known as the Rule of the Congregation, describes a more
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: eschatological version of this same meal, a meal set in
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: the end times, presided over by the Messiah. When the
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: Messiah enters, the priests shall sit first, and then the Messiah,
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: and then the rest of the congregation, and the priest
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: shall stretch forth his hand to bless the bread and wine. First.
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: Scholars who have studied the earliest Christian sources, including the
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: accounts of the Last Supper in the Gospels and the
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: description of the Lord's Supper in the Letters of Paul,
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: have noted the structural similarity with a care that goes
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: beyond casual observation. The same gestures, the same order, bread
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: blessed and broken, wine blessed and shared, a leader acting
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: first on behalf of the community. This does not mean
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: that the Last Supper was simply a cumran meal with
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: different participants. The theological meaning that the Gospels attached to
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: what Jesus did at that final meal is specific and irreducible,
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: but it does mean that when Jesus took bread and
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: broke it, he was doing something in a ritual language
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: that the people around the table already spoke. He was
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: taking a form they knew and filling it with a
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: meaning that would take the rest of human history to
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: fully understand. Now Here is the detail that most people
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: miss entirely, the detail that stops you when you encounter
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: it for the first time, and makes you sit quietly
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: for a moment with what it means. The Comran community
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: ate this meal every single evening, not on feast days,
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: not on Sabbath, only every evening. One hundred and fifty
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: people in a desert settlement, some of them former priests
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: from Jerusalem, some of them young men who had left
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: comfortable lives to live in the wilderness, some of them
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: people who had been in the community for decades, and
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: some who had been there for months, all of them
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: sitting down together in that long communal room as the
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: sun dropped behind the western cliffs, and the shadows of
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: the Dead Sea grew long and blue, and the stars
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: came out one by one above the desert. Every evening,
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: the bread, the wine, the blessing, the silence, for nearly
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: two hundred years. Think about what that means, not as theology,
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: just as a human fact. Think about the number of
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: evenings that represents. Think about the people who sat down
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: at that table when they were young and idealistic and
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: full of certainty, and the people who were still sitting
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: down at it thirty years later, slower and more weathered,
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: with fewer certainties but perhaps a deeper kind of faith.
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: Think about the evenings when someone was missing because they
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: were sick, and the evenings when a new member joined
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: the table for the first time and the community made room.
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: Think about the last evening, the evening when the bread
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: was blessed and the wine was shared and nobody knew
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: it was the last time. That detail changes the communal
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: meal from a historical curiosity into something you can feel,
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: into something that a person lying in the dark to night,
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: at whatever hour this has become, can recognize from the inside.
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: There is a woman named Margaret. She has been a
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: hospital chaplain for eighteen years in a city in Minnesota.
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: She sits with people at the ends of their lives,
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: in the hours when the ordinary structures of daily existence
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: fall away and what remains is something more essential. She
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: told a colleague once that the thing she notices most
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: at the end is not the dramatic moments. It is
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: the daily ones, the people who say, in those last hours,
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: I wish I had eaten more dinners slowly, I wish
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: I had stayed at the table longer. She read about
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: the Kumran communal meal in a book on Second Temple Judaism,
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: and something in the description stayed with her for days.
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: She could not entirely say why, only that it had
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: something to do with the fact that those people had
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: understood before the last evening arrived, that the meal itself
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: was the point, not preparation for something more important, the
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: meal itself every evening for two hundred years. The rule
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: of the community is, at its heart, a manual for
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: not missing the meal, not for heroes, not for people
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: with extraordinary gifts or extraordinary faith, for people who had
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: decided that the ordinary faithfulness of one more day, one
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: more evening at the table, one more morning prayer in
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: the cold desert air was the thing that held everything
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: else together. That kind of faithfulness does not announce itself.
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: It just continues until it cannot continue any longer, and
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: then the words it lived by gets sealed in a
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: jar and carried up a cliff face and trusted to
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: the dark. Chapter six. The War skal darkness before the dawn.
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: Not all of the Dead Sea scrolls are peaceful. That
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: is something worth acknowledging before we go further. The portrait
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: of the Cumran community that emerges from the rule of
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: the community is one of discipline and study and communal care,
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: of people who organize their days around prayer, and their
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: evenings around shared meals, and their years around careful self examination.
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: And that portrait is accurate as far as it goes.
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: But there is another document in the collection that shows
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: a different face of the same community, a face that
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: is harder to sit with, that requires more context to understand,
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: and that, once understood, reveals something about the human experience
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: of faith in dark times that is more honest than
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: most religious texts allow themselves to be. The document is
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: called the megilat Ha Milhammer in Hebrew the War Scroll.
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: It was found in Cave one, among the first scrolls
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: recovered in nineteen forty seven. A second copy, more fragmentary,
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: was found later in Cave four. The main copy runs
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: to nineteen columns of text, though the original document was
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: almost certainly longer, with portions no longer preserved. It is
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: written in a clear, assured hand suggesting a scribe who
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: knew this text well enough that the words came without hesitation.
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: What it describes is a war, the final war, the
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: war between the sons of Light and the sons of darkness,
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: a cosmic conflict that the community believed would end history
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: as they knew it and inaugurate a new age under
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: the direct reign of God. Let us sit with that
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: for a moment before we go into the details, because
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: the temptation when modern readers encounter apocalyptic literature like this
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: is to categorize it quickly and move on, to file
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: it under a familiar heading and feel that you have
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: understood it. That categorization is easy. It is also wrong.
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: The War Scroll is not a fantasy of violence. It
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: is not the product of people who wanted to harm
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: any one. It is the product of people who had
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: watched the world they loved be systematically destroyed, who had
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: no political power and no institutional allies, and who found
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: in the ancient prophetic tradition of their faith a framework
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: for understanding their situation that did not require them to
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: pretend the destruction was not real, or that the people
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: causing it would not ultimately be held accountable or that
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: the darkness they were living through was the last word.
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: It is a theology of hope dressed in military language,
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: and once you read it that way, it reads very differently.
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: The conflict the scroll describes is forty years long, not
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: forty continuous years of battle. The scroll divides the forty
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: years into alternating periods of warfare and sabbatical rest, six
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: years of fighting followed by one year of rest, then
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: more fighting, then more rest. Even the final cosmic conflict
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: between light and darkness pauses, according to the War Scroll,
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: to keep the commandment about the seventh day. This detail
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: is not accidental, and it is not small. Think about
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: what it means. The community that wrote the War Scroll
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: believed they were describing the end of the world, and
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: in their description of the end of the world they
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: built in the Sabbath. They could not imagine a reality,
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: even a cosmic final reality, that did not observe the
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: rhythm God had established at the beginning of creation. The
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: sacred structure of time was not something they practiced until
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: something more important came along. It was woven into the
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: fabric of everything, including the fabric of the end. The
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: adversaries in the War Scroll are identified with a precision
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: that places the document firmly in a specific historical moment.
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: The sons of darkness include the Kittim, a term the
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: Cumran community used for the Romans, the army of the
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: Western Sea that had extended its reach into Judea. They
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: include various neighboring peoples, and they include, in passages that
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: are among the most painful in the entire scroll, members
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: of the Jewish community itself, who had, in the community's view,
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: accommodated the foreign powers at the cost of the Covenant.
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: That last detail is the one that requires the most
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: honesty to sit with. The community at Cumran saw themselves
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: as a faithful remnant not only against Rome, but against
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: the compromises of their own people. That self understanding is uncomfortable.
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: History is full of communities that believe they alone had
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: maintained the original purity of the faith. Such communities have
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: sometimes done so serious harm in the name of that conviction.
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: What makes the Cumran community different is what they actually
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: did with it. They went to the desert. They built
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: their cisterns and their communal dining room and their scriptorium.
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: They copied scrolls, They prayed before dawn. They wrote down
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: what they believed would eventually happen, and left the execution
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: of it entirely in the hands of God. The military
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: detail in the War Scroll is extraordinary in a way
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: that surprises most readers when they first encounter it. The
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: troop formations, the arrangement of infantry and cavalry, the use
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: of trumpets and standards for battlefield communication, the rotation of
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: units to maintain fighting effectiveness. These correspond closely to the
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: military practices of the Roman army in the first century
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: before the Common era. Scholars who have compared the War
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: Scroll to Roman military manuals of the period have found
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: the parallels too consistent to be accidental. The community at
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: cumrh knew exactly what they were up against. They had
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: studied the army that had displaced them. They understood its
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: tactics with the same careful attention they brought to the
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: sacred calendar and the precise interpretation of the law. Their
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: retreat to the desert was not ignorance of the world.
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: It was a fully informed choice, made with clear eyes,
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: to live in a way that the world around them
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: made difficult picture what that looked like On an ordinary afternoon.
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: A scribe in the scriptorium bent over the long writing table,
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: the lamp light steady, because the air in the limestone
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: plateau barely moves. The smell of ink drying on leather outside,
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: the sound of the wind coming off the dead sea,
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: the same sound every afternoon at the same hour, so
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: familiar that it has long since disappeared into the background
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: of the day. The scribe is copying the war scroll.
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: He is writing words about a war he believes is coming,
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: a war between everything he loves and the force that
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: has already come once to threaten it. His hand is steady,
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: the characters are even. He is not afraid of the
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: words he is writing. He has made his peace with
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: the darkness. He does not believe the darkness will not come.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: He believes it will come, and he is recording carefully
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: and completely the reason why it is not the end
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: of the story. The scroll also contains some of the
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: most beautiful liturgical poetry in the entire Cumran collection. Before
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: the battle begins, before any trumpet sounds, there is prayer.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: There is acknowledgment that the victory, if it comes, will
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: not be the achievement of human valor. Blessed be the
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: God of Israel. The scroll says, who keeps his covenant
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: of mercy with our fathers, and who remembers his covenant
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: of salvation with the people he has redeemed. That is
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: not the language of people who believe the outcome depends
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: on them. That is the language of people who believe
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: they are participating in something larger than themselves, something that
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: was in motion before they were born and will continue
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: after they are gone, something they are called to be
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: faithful to without being in control of. The darkness they
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: described was real. The Roman army would arrive at Kumran
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: within living memory of whoever wrote these words. The destruction
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: they anticipated did come. Jerusalem fell in the year seventy
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: of the Common Era. The temple was burned, the community
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: was scattered or killed from the outside. Looking at the
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: historical record, it is easy to see the War Scroll
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: as the document of people who were wrong, who believed
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: a deliverance was coming that did not come, at least
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: not in the form they expected. But there is another
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: way to read it. They were not wrong that darkness comes.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: They were not wrong that the structures of power in
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: the world are cape of destroying what is most sacred
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: and most carefully tended they were not wrong, that there
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: are moments when everything a community has built across generations
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: can be swept away in a single season of violence.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: What they left behind, sealed in those jars was their
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: answer to that knowledge, not an answer that pretended the
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: destruction would not come, an answer that said it may come,
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: and when it does, these words will still be here,
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: because we put them somewhere the darkness cannot reach. In
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: the final weeks before the Roman legion arrived, someone in
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: the Kumran community made a decision. We do not know
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: who made it. We do not know whether it was
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: the overseer, the figure the community rule calls the Mebecha,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: or whether it was a decision made together by the
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: full assembly. What we know is that the decision was made,
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: and the preparations had already been in place. The jars
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: were brought out, the rolls were wrapped. Perhaps someone read
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: from the war scroll that evening at the communal meal.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: Perhaps someone prayed the prayer about the God who keeps
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: his covenant of mercy. Someone blew out the lamp in
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: the scriptorium for the last time and looked around the
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: room at the writing tables and the inkwells and the
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: small objects left behind by people who had worked there
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: and would not return. And then they sealed the jars
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: and climbed and trusted. The War Scroll is not comfortable reading.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: It was not written to be comfortable. It was written
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: by people who had looked at the world without flinching,
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: and found in the ancient language of their faith a
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: way to hold the darkness honestly and keep showing up anyway.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: That is a different kind of courage from the courage
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: of the finding. It is quieter. It does not announce itself.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: It just gets up in the morning and copies the
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: next column, and prays before dawn, and eats the communal meal,
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: and seals the jar when the time comes. Rest. Now,
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: you do not need to carry the weight of the
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: War Scroll into your sleep. You only need to carry
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: the thing underneath it. The darkness does not get the
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: last word. It never has not once in the entire
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: length of this long and complicated story, not to night
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: Chapter seven, the night they sealed the jars. There are
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: moments in history that do not announce themselves. They do
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: not arrive with the weight they deserve. They do not
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: feel to the people living inside them. Like the kind
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: of moment that will be remembered. They feel like urgency
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: and fear, and the specific quality of attention that comes
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: when you understand that the time for deliberation has passed,
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: and what remains is only the time for doing. The
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: night the community at Kumran sealed their scrolls into clay
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: jars and carried them up the cl if face was
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: one of those moments. We do not know the exact date.
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: We do not know the names of the people who
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: did it. We do not know whether it was one
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: night or several, whether it was done in panic or
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: in the deliberate calm of people who had been preparing
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: for this possibility for years. The archaeological record gives us
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: the approximate period, the middle decades of the first century
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: of the Common Era, the years when the First Jewish
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: War against Rome was moving from a local uprising into
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: a catastrophic confrontation that would end with Jerusalem in flames
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: and the temple destroyed, and the world that had produced
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: the scrolls gone forever. What the record gives us is
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: the jars, and the jars tell a story that words
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: could not tell. More clearly, the jars were not storage
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: vessels repurposed for an emergency. They were made for this.
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: The cylindrical jars found in the caves, tall and narrow
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: with carefully fitted lids, match a type that archaeologists have
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: not found in significant quantities anywhere else in the region.
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: They were purpose built for scroll preservation, designed with an
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: understanding of what the desert climate required, what the limestone
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: caves could provide, what would need to be true about
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: the container if the contents were going to survive an
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: indefinite period of abandonment. Someone at Kumran had thought about
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: this before the emergency arrived. Someone had understood, perhaps years
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: or decades before the Roman army appeared on the horizon,
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: that a moment might come when the library would need
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: to be hidden, and they had prepared for it. That
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: preparation is one of the most quietly remarkable things about
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: the entire story. In the middle of building a community,
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: copying texts, organizing communal meals, reviewing annual rankings, praying before dawn,
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: conducting the thousand practical tasks of daily life in a
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: desert settlement, someone had also been thinking about what happened
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: if it all had to end suddenly. Someone had been
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: making jars picture the settlement in those final weeks. The
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: community had existed for nearly two hundred years. At that point.
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: The people living there were not the founders. They were
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: the inheritors. They had grown up in the rhythms of
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: the Yahad, had eaten its communal meals, and sat in
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: its assemblies, and been evaluated in its annual reviews. The
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: library they were preparing to hide was not abstract to them.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: It was the library of their community. The scrolls they
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: were wrapping in linen were texts. They had studied, texts,
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: they had copied texts they had heard read aloud at
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: the evening meal for as long as they could remember.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: The Roman tenth Legion had left Jericho and was moving south.
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: The speed of a Roman military advance was organized and relentless.
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: The communities in its path were given a choice that
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: was not really a choice, and those who could not
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: defend themselves were destroyed. Kumran could not defend itself. It
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: was not a military settlement. It had no walls capable
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: of withstanding a Roman assault. What it had was a
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: library and a mission and two hundred years of accumulated faithfulness,
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: and none of those things slowed a legion. So they
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: did what they could do. They gathered the scrolls. They
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: wrapped them in linen cloth, the same linen that appears
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: in fragments in the cave deposits, identifiable by its weave
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: and its preservation across two thousand years. They placed them
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: in the jars, They fitted the lids, They sealed the
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: seams with a care that the desert would honor for
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: two millennia, and then they carried them up. The climb
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: from the settlement to the cave openings in the cliff
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: face is not trivial. The terrain is steep and loose
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: in places, the kind of surface where you have to
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: think about every step where a jar that slipped from
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: a tired grip would shatter on the rocks below. The
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: caves are at different elevations. Getting there with arms full
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: of clay jars in whatever light was available, under whatever
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: time pressure existed, was not easy. They did it anyway.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: We do not know how many people were involved. We
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: do not know how many trips were made. We do
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: not know whether the community had already begun to scatter
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: before the hiding was complete, or whether they stayed until
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: the last jar was placed and the last cave opening
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: was left behind. The site shows evidence of violent destruction
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: consistent with the Roman advance, which suggests that at least
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: some members of the community were present when the army arrived.
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: They did not come back for the scrolls. This is
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: the fact that sits at the center of everything, the
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: absence that makes the discovery possible and the story tragic simultaneously.
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: They did not come back. The people who knew where
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: the jars were, who could have walked straight to each
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: cave without searching, who carried in their memories a map
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: of everything they had hidden, never returned to retrieve it.
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: There are two ways to understand this. The first is
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: simply that they could not. The destruction was complete enough,
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: the disruption of the war catastrophic enough, the scattering of
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: the surviving community thorough enough that the practical possibility of
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: returning never materialized. The people who knew where the jars
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: were died or fled to places from which return was impossible,
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: or found themselves in a world so transformed by violence
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: and loss that the scrolls remained hidden, not because any
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: one chose to leave them, but because the conditions for
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: retrieval never existed again. The second way to understand it
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: is that some of them always intended for the scrolls
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: to wait, That the hiding was not merely a desperate
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: emergency measure, but considered act of transmission, a deliberate decision
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: to entrust the words to the desert and the dark
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: rather than risk their destruction in the violence that was coming.
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: That some of the people who carried those jars up
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: the cliff face understood, or at least hoped, that what
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: they were doing was not just hiding but sending, sending
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: across time to people they would never meet, in circumstances
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: they could not predict, words they believed were worth the receiving.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: We cannot know which of these is true. Perhaps both are.
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: Perhaps the people who sealed the jars were acting from
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: pure survival instinct, saving what could be saved, with no
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: thought beyond the immediate crisis. And perhaps that instinct was
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: itself a form of the faith They had spent their
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: lives practicing, the deep conviction that these words had outlasted
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: everything that had come before and would outlast whatever was coming.
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: Now there is a man named James. He is fifty
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: eight years old, and he lives outside of Nashville. Tennessee.
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: Eight months ago, he received a diagnosis that changed the
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: way he moves through time. Not a death sentence, his
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: doctors were careful to say that, but a serious illness,
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: the kind that reorganizes your relationship to the future, that
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: makes the horizon visible in a way it was not before.
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: In the weeks after the diagnosis, he found himself doing
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: something he had not done in years. He began writing,
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: not a journal, exactly letters, letters to his children, to
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: his grandchildren who did not yet exist, to people he
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: loved who he was not certain he would have time
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: to say everything too in the ordinary course of conversation.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: He wrote about what he believed and why. He wrote
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: about what he had gotten wrong and what he had
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: learned from getting it wrong. He wrote about the things
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: he wanted them to know that he had never found
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: a way to say out loud. He found the letters
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: accumulateaiting in a folder on his desk. One evening. He
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: mentioned them to a friend, and the friend asked what
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: he was going to do with them. He said, I
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: am going to seal them and give them to my
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: daughter to open when she thinks the time is right.
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: His friend said, you are making a time capsule. James said,
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: I am making a jar. He did not explain what
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: he meant. He had been listening to something about the
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: Dead Sea Scrolls the week before, and had heard about
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: the night Kumran was evacuated about the people who climbed
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: the cliff face with their arms full of clay and
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: their library wrapped in linen. He understood something about them
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: that he had not understood before. The sealing of the
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: jar was not a resignation. It was not giving up.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: It was an act of hope, so specific and so
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: deliberate that it required believing, without any evidence, in the
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: existence of a future that you, yourself might not be
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: part of. You only bother to preserve something carefully if
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: you believe there will be someone somewhere worth preserving it.
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: For the people of Kumrhan believed there would be someone
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: worth preserving it. For they were right. It took two
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: thousand years and a teenage shepherd and a broken jar,
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: and decades of scholarship and a night like this one,
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: but they were right. Think about what it means that
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: the first sound the scrolls made after two thousand years
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: of silence was the sound of a jar breaking, not
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: a dramatic announcement, not a voice from heaven or a
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: light in the sky, or any of the signs by
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: which important arrivals are supposed to make themselves known. Just
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: a crack in the dark, a hollow resonance, a boy
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: with a stone who was looking for something else entirely.
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: That is usually how the important things arrive, not announced,
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: not dramatic, through the ordinary action of a person who
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: was not looking for what they found in circumstanceancies that
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: did not feel significant until later, by means of something
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: as unremarkable as a throne stone. Rest. Now, let the
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: image of those sealed jars sit with you as you
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: move towards sleep. Let the cliff face and the darkness
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: and the linen wrapped scrolls be present in whatever room
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: you are resting in to night. You have been carrying
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: things to day, things that feel heavy, and things that
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: feel uncertain, and things that you are not sure you
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: know how to put down. You do not have to
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: put them down to night if you are not ready.
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: But consider this. The people who sealed those jars also
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: carried things. They carried the weight of a world that
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: was ending. They carried the grief of a community that
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: had given everything to a way of life that was
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: about to be destroyed. They carried the knowledge that what
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: they were trying to preserve might not survive, that the
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: jars might break, or be found by people who did
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: not understand what they held, or simply sit in the
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: dark until the leather crumbled to dust and the words
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: disappeared with it. They carried all of that, and they
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: sealed the jars anyway, because some things are worth the attempt,
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: even when the outcome is not guaranteed, Because the act
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: of preservation is itself a statement about what you believe
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: the future holds. Because you do not seal a jar carefully,
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: You do not wrap the scrolls in linen and fit
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: the lid and carry it up a cliff face in
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: the dark, unless you believe there is something worth finding
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: on the other side of the waiting. The jars held
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: the words survived, and tonight, in this quiet room, at
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: this late hour, they reached you. That is not nothing,
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: That is everything. Chapter eight. The Copper Scroll, the treasure
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: that might be real, not everything in the Caves of
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: Kumran fits neatly into the story we have been telling.
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: The Dead Sea Scrolls collection is in the main a
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: coherent archive biblical texts, community rules, hymns and prayers, commentaries
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: on the prophets, war preparation documents. The texts fit together
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: into a portrait of a specific religious community, living a
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: specific kind of life for specific theological reasons. When you
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: spend time with the collection, a portrait emerges, not a
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: simple portrait, not without tensions and contradictions, but a recognizable one.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: And then there is the Copper Scroll. The copper Scroll
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: does not fit the portrait. It does not belong to
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: the same genre as anything else in the collection. It
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: raises questions that decades of scholarship have not resolved. It
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: sits in the middle of the Dead Sea scrolls story
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: like a room in a familiar house that leads somewhere
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: you did not expect adore that are opens onto a staircase,
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: going down into something older and stranger than the house
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: you thought you knew. It was found in Cave three
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty two. Cave three was a modest find
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: in most respects, containing fragments of texts already known from
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: other caves. But at the back of the cave the
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: excavators found something unlike anything recovered from any of the
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: other ten caves two rolled sections of corroded metal copper.
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: As it turned out, each section roughly thirty centimeters wide,
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: rolled so tightly that the interior was not visible, and
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: the brittleness of the corroded metal made unrolling impossible without
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: destroying it. The sections sat in storage for several years
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: while scholars debated how to open them. In nineteen fifty five,
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: a team at the Manchester College of Technology in England
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: used a specially designed circular saw to cut them lengthwise
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: into strips, each one carefully numbered to preserve the sequence.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: The cutting was done under conditions of controlled humidity to
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: prevent further deterioration. It took months of careful work. When
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: the strips were finally laid out in order and the
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: text was readable, scholars found themselves looking at something that
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: had no parallel in the rest of the collection. It
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: was a list sixty four entries, each one describing a
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: location and what was hidden there. The locations were described
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: in terms of landmarks, distances, and directions. The contents were
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: described in terms of weight and material gold, silver, priestly vestments, scrolls,
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: aromatics used in temple worship. Containers of sacred objects. The
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: quantities were extraordinary. The total amount of gold and silver
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: described in the scroll, if you add up all sixty
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: four entries and convert the ancient weight measurements into modern equivalents,
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: comes to somewhere in the range of sixty five tons
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: by most scholarly estimates. Some calculations run higher. The precise
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: conversion is disputed, as is almost everything about this document,
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: but the order of magnitude is consistent across different approaches
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: to the calculation. Sixty five tons of gold and silver
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: buried in sixty four locations across the landscape of ancient
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: Judea waiting to be found if the copper scroll is accurate.
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: That is the question that has driven treasure hunters and
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: archaeologists and curious readers to distraction for seventy years, And
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: the honest answer after all that searching is that nobody knows.
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: The arguments for its genuineness are substantial. The quantities described,
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: while enormous, are consistent with what ancient sources tell us
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: about the Temple Treasury before its destruction. The historian Josephus
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: Is describes the Temple Treasury in terms that suggest extraordinary
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: wealth accumulated over centuries of donations from Jewish communities across
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: the Roman world. The temple was not merely a place
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: of worship. It was a financial institution of the ancient world.
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: If the Roman army was approaching Jerusalem and the treasury
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: needed to be hidden quickly, the quantities in the copper
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: scroll are not inherently implausible. The use of copper rather
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: than leather or papyrus also speaks in favor of genuineness.
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: Copper is expensive, Copper is difficult to work with. Nobody
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: in the ancient world chose copper as a writing surface
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: for routine documents or liturgical texts. You chose copper when
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: you needed something to last, when the information was too
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: important to trust to organic materials that could deteriorate. The
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: choice of copper is itself an argument. It says whoever
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: wrote this bel believed what they were recording was worth
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: the extraordinary effort of recording it in metal. But the
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: arguments against are also substantial. The amounts are, to some scholars,
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: simply too large to be credible in practical terms. Moving
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: sixty five tons of precious metal in sixty four separate
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: operations in the middle of a military crisis strains the
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: imagination past what the historical record can comfortably support. The
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: writing style is also unlike the rest of the collection,
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: more colloquial, more practical, less literary, which has led some
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: scholars to suggest it was produced outside the Kumran community,
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: altogether hidden in the cave by someone with no connection
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: to the community that left everything else there. There is
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: a third possibility, held by a minority of scholars, but
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: worth considering carefully. The Copper Scroll may be a genuine
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: inventory of objects considered sacred, but not literally made of
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: precious metal. In some ancient Jewish texts, the language of
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: treasure is used to refer to sacred texts themselves, to
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: accumulated wisdom, to the teachings of revered masters. Under this reading,
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: the sixty four locations may mark not hiding places for gold,
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: but repositories for sacred knowledge, manuscripts, teachings, interpretations. Under this reading,
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: the copper Scroll is not a map to buried gold.
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: It is a map to buried meaning. No one has
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: found the treasure. Seventy years of searching, some of its
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: systematic and scholarly, some of it enthusiastic and amateur, has
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 1: produced nothing. The locations that can be identified with reasonable
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: confidence have been investigated. They have yielded nothing. The locations
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: that remain ambiguous cannot be confidently matched to any known site.
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: The treasure, if it exists in the literal sense, is
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: still out there, or it was found centuries ago by
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: someone who left no record, or it never existed. In
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: the form the scroll describes. What is not in dispute
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: is the object itself. The copper scroll sits to day
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: in the Jordan Museum in a man displayed in a
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: case that shows the strips cut in nineteen fifty five.
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: The ancient writing, still legible on the interior, surfaces after
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: two thousand years of oxidation. On the outside. Visitors walk
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: past it and stop and lean toward the glass and
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: wonder the way everyone wonders whether the treasure is real.
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: But the object in the case is itself the answer
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: to the question, Regardless of what the text says. Somebody
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: wrote this in copper. Somebody believed that what they were
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: recording was worth the extraordinary effort and expense of recording
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: it in metal that would last when everything else had crumbled.
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: Somebody looked at the c isis they were living through
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: and decided that the most important thing they could do
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: with the time that remained was make sure that something survived.
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: The copper held for two thousand years in a cave
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: in the Limestone cliffs above the Dead Sea, and now
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: it is in a museum, in a man behind glass,
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: asking a quiet question of everyone who leans close enough
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: to read it, not where is the gold? But what
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: did they believe was worth writing in metal? That question
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: has an answer that does not require any further excavation.
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: You are in contact with it tonight, in the simple
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: fact that you are here, and the words are here,
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: and the distance between them has been crossed. The treasure
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: was always the transmission the gold was always the fact
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: that someone cared enough to seal it in something that
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: would last beyond themselves. Sleep. Now the copper scroll has
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: been keeping its secret for two thousand years. It is
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: very good at way. And the most important treasures are
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: never the ones buried in the ground. They are the
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: ones carried forward carefully from one generation to the next
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: through the ordinary faithfulness of people who did not know
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: how long the carrying would take. Chapter nine, What the
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: scrolls say about Jesus. There is a question that follows
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: the Dead Sea Scrolls everywhere they go. It is not
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: always asked out loud. Sometimes it sits in the back
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: of the room during academic lectures, politely unacknowledged. Sometimes it
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: is the first thing a person asks when they hear
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: about the scrolls for the first time, before they know
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: enough to know how complicated the answer is. Sometimes its
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: surfaces in the middle of the night, in the quiet
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: space between waking and sleep, when the defenses that keep
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: difficult questions at a manageable distance have lowered themselves. The
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: question is this, what do the Dead Sea Scrolls say
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: about Jesus? It is the right question to ask, and
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: it deserves a complete and honest answer, including the part
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: of the answer that popular treatments of the scrolls often
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: leave out. So let us begin there. Over the decades
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: since the scrolls were first published, a number of popular
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: writers have claimed, with considerable excitement that the scrolls do,
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: in fact contain direct references to Jesus, to John the Baptist,
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: and to the early Christian movement, hidden under code names
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: and symbolic titles. These claims generated best selling books, documentary films,
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: and a great deal of public interest. In the nineteen
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: eighties and nineteen nineties, The most widely read theories argued
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: that figures mentioned in the scrolls the Teacher of Righteousness
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: and his opponents could be identified with specific New Testament
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: figures if you read the texts through the right interpretive lens.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: These claims did not generate scholarly consensus. The overwhelming majority
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: of Dead Sea Scrolled scholars, working across decades and across
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: different theological traditions, have found these identification theories unconvincing. They
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: are compelling to read, they are also, on careful examination,
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: unsupported by the evidence that scholars across decades and traditions
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: have found in the texts themselves. The community at Kumran
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: was its own community, with its own theology, its own grievances,
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: its own understanding of what God was doing in the world,
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: existing before and during, and in its final years, roughly
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: contemporary with the earliest stages of Jesus's public ministry. The
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: scrolls do not mention Jesus. That is the honest starting point.
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: But if that absence is where your investigation stops, you
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: will miss something more significant than a direct reference could
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: ever be. What the scrolls do with a thoroughness and
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: a specificity that continues to reshape the academic study of
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: Christian origins decades after their discovery. Is show us the world,
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: the exact world, the specific religious landscape of first century Judea,
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: the vocabulary and the imagery, and the theological categories, and
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: the urgent hopes and the deep anxieties of the people
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: among whom Jesus lived and taught and died. They show
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: us what the air was made of. And when you
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: understand what the air was made of, everything Jesus said
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: begins to breathe differently. Let us start with language, because
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: language is where the most precise and most compelling connections
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: are found. The Gospel of John is the New Testament
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: document most deeply saturated in the kind of language found
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: throughout the Dead Sea Scrolls. Before the scrolls were discovered,
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: scholars who notice the distinctive vocabulary of John's gods had
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: a limited set of explanations available to them. Some argued
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: that John's language reflected Greek philosophical influence, particularly the concept
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: of the logos from Platonic and Stoic traditions. Some argued
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: that it represented a late second century development a theological
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: elaboration on the simpler faith of the earlier Gospels, which
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: would place it well outside the first century Palestinian Jewish world.
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: The Dead Sea Scrolls changed both of those arguments permanently.
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: The language that appears throughout John's Gospel the stark contrast
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, the children of
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: light and the children of darkness, the spirit of truth
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: and the spirit of error. Love within the community set
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: against the hostility of the world outside. This language does
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: not come primarily from Greek philosophy. It comes from the
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: Hebrew religious world of Second Temple Judaism. It appears with
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: striking frequency and in strikingly similar forms in the texts
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: the Cumran community was reading and organizing their lives around
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: in the decades before and during Jesus's ministry. The Community
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: Rule contains a passage that scholars call the Treaties on
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: the Two Spirits. It describes two spirits that God placed
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: in humanity at the moment of creation. The spirit of
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: truth leads toward light, toward righteousness, toward the Covenant. The
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: spirit of falsehood leads toward darkness, toward wickedness, toward destruction.
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: Every human being is under the influence of both in
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: varying proportions until the final moment when the spirit of
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: truth prevails entirely. Now read the opening of John's Gospel.
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: In him was life, and the life was the light
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 1: of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: darkness has not overcome it. And later where Jesus praised
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: for his disciples, I have given them your word, and
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: the world has hated them because they are not of
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: the world, just as I am not of the world.
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: The structural similarity is not a coincidence of translation. The
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: Hebrew originals of the Cumran texts and the Greek original
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: of John's Gospel are working with the same conceptual architecture.
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: This does not mean John borrowed directly from the Cumran community.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: It means something more organic and more interesting. It means
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: that this language was alive in first century Judea. It
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: was in the air. It was part of the vocabulary
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: available to any Jewish teacher or writer of the period
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: who wanted to describe the relationship between God and human
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: beings in terms of ultimate allegiance. When Jesus said I
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: am the Light of the world, he was not introducing
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: a foreign concept into the religious vocabulary of his audience.
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: He was taking a concept they already held, a concept
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: they had been meditating on and praying about, and organizing
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: their communities around, and making a claim about himself in
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: relation to it. A claim that was comprehensible precisely because
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: the vocabulary already existed, and a claim that was radical
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: precisely because of what it asserted within that vocabulary. The
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: second major connection involves the concept of the new Covenant.
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: The Hebrew phrase buried hadashah, meaning new covenant, appears in
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: the Damascus Document, one of the most significant texts in
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: the Cumran collection, where the community describes itself as those
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: who have entered the New Covenant. The phrase is drawn
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: from the prophet Jeremiah, who had promised that God would
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 1: make a new covenant with the House of Israel, written
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: not on stone tablets, but on the hearts of the people.
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: The Cumran community believed they were the living embodiment of
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: that new covenant. They had left the corrupt institutions of Jerusalem.
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: They had organized themselves around the purest possible interpretation of
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: the law. When Jesus at the Last Supper took the
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: cup and said, this cup is the new covenant in
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: my blood. He was speaking in a language his audience
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: already held, not introducing the concept, making a claim about
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: its fulfillment in a form and through a means that
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: would take the rest of human history to fully understand.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: The third connection is perhaps the most intimate. The phrase
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: poor in spirit, which appears in the first beatitude of
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: the Sermon on the Mount, has a direct parallel in
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: the Cumran hymns known as the Hodayot or thanksgiving hymns.
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: The Hodaot use a Hebrew phrase that translates as the
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: poor of spirit to describe the members of the community,
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: those who have emptied themselves of pride and self sufficiency
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: and placed themselves entirely in God's hands. The beatitude is
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 1: not simply a state and about economic poverty. It is
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: a statement about a specific posture before God, a posture
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: that the Kumran community had articulated and practiced and written
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: hymns about in the decades before Jesus walked up a
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: hillside in Galilee and opened his mouth. He was speaking
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: a language they had been learning. What follows is not
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: a scholarly conclusion. It is a reflection, and it belongs
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: to anyone who holds both of these traditions with care.
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: The Dead Sea Scrolls are not an argument for Christianity.
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 1: They are not evidence for or against the Resurrection. They
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: cannot answer the theological questions that matter most to people
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: of faith, and they do not try to. What they
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: are is the ground, the specific, historically particular, linguistically precise
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: ground in which the seeds of the New Testament were planted.
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: They show you the soil, and the soil, it turns out,
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: was extraordinarily rich of language and hope and imagery and
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: longing that had been cultivated for centuries by people who
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: believed with everything they had that God was going to
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: do something new in the world. They were right about that.
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: What they could not have predicted was the form the
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: newness would take. The scrolls are the reaching, the New
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: Testament is the arriving, and the connection between them is
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: not a challenge to either. It is the evidence of
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: a conversation that was already in progress when Jesus walked
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 1: into it and said something that changed everything. There is
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: a prayer in the Hodiot that reads, in translation, I
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: thank you Lord, because you have placed me at the
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: source of flowing streams beside the springs of water in
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: a dry land. You have set me beside a plantation
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: of trees, an eden watered from a hidden spring. It
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: was written by someone who lived in the desert, who
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 1: knew what it meant to be thirsty, who had found
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: in the community and the texts and the daily practice
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 1: of the faith, they had chosen something that satisfied athirst.
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: The ordinary world had not been able to meet. And
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: in writing about what they had found, they were preparing
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: a language for someone who would come after them and say,
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: to anyone who was thirsty, come to me and drink.
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: The scrolls did not predict Jesus, but they prepared the words.
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: And that is a different kind of miracle, Not the
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: kind that happens once in a dramatic moment, the kind
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: that happens slowly across centuries, through the ordinary faithfulness of
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: people who kept writing and copying and praying and sealing
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: jars without knowing exactly what they were preparing for Chapter ten,
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: the men who spent their lives on fragments. Every great
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: discovery requires two kinds of courage. The first kind is
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: the courage of the finding, the dramatic moment, the throned stone,
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: the opened cave, the object lifted from the dark into
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: the light. This is the courage that gets remembered, that
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: becomes the story told in museums and documentaries and books
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: written for general audiences. It is real courage when it exists,
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: but it is also, by its nature brief the moment
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: of discovery ends. The second kind of courage is quieter
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: and longer, and much harder to sustain. It is the
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: courage of the understanding the years, sometimes the decades, of
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: painstaking work that transforms a found object into a known one.
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: The patience required to sit with a fragment no larger
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: than a thumb nail and determine from two or three
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: legible characters, and the texture of the leather and the
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: angle of the scribal hand which manuscript it belongs to,
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: and where in that manuscript it fits, and what it
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 1: says and what that means. The Dead Sea Scrolls required
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: both kinds of courage, but it is the second kind
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: that made the discovery into what it became, and the
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: story of the scholars who devoted their lives to that
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: work deserves more attention than it usually receives. When the
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: first scrolls reached the academic world, in the late nineteen forties,
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: the field of Dead Sea scrolls scholarship did not exist.
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: It had to be invented. The scholars who were handed
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: the responsibility of studying and publishing the texts were experts
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: in related fields, but none of them had been trained
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: for this specific task because the task had never existed before.
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: The man given primary responsibility for organizing the scholarly team
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 1: was a Dominican friar and archaeologist named Roland de Vaux.
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: He led the excavations at Kumran and assembled the international
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: team that would work on the scroll fragments, particularly the
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: enormous Cave four collection. They worked in a room at
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem that became known as
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: the Scrollery, long tables under controlled lighting, where fragment after
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: fragment was laid out, examined, photographed, and painstakingly matched with
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: other fragments to reconstruct manuscripts that had shattered into dozens
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: or hundreds of pieces over two thousand years. The work
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: was slow in a way that is difficult to convey.
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 1: You could not rush it. Rushing produced errors, and errors
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: in this work were not recoverable. The patience required was
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: not the patience of waiting for something to happen. It
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: was the active, disciplined patience of a person who has
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: made a commitment to a standard of accuracy that will
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: not bend, regardless of how long the process takes. The
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: scholars also worked without the tools that later generations would
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 1: take for granted. No digital imaging, no multi spectral photography
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 1: that could reveal characters invisible to the naked eye, no
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: database software. They worked with the naked eye, with photographs
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: taken under controlled raking light, with handwritten notes on index cards,
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: with the accumulated knowledge in their own heads of the
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: paleographic styles and scribal conventions of the Second Temple period.
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: Some of them spent years on a single manuscript, years
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: of daily work, of incremental progress, of the specific satisfaction
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: that comes from placing a fragment correctly and seeing the
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 1: text become for the first time in two thousand years
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: legible again. John Strugnell was a British scholar who joined
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: the K four team as a young man in the
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. He was, by the accounts of those who
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: worked with him in his prime, extraordinarily gifted his knowledge
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: of Second Temple Jewish texts was encyclopedic. His ability to
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: read damaged and fragmentary Hebrew and Aramaek was exceptional, even
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: by the standards of a demanding field. He rose to
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: become the chief editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls publication Project,
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 1: the person ultimately responsible for overseeing the publication of the
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: Cave Four texts. He spent four decades on the scrolls,
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: four decades of that second kind of courage, the quiet,
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: daily work of understanding, sitting with fragments and making meaning
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: out of what remained. And then in nineteen ninety he
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in which
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: he made a series of statements that were widely condemned
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 1: as deeply offensive. He was removed from his position. The
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: controversy overshadowed in the public record the four decades of
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: scholarship that had preceded it. He died in twenty twelve.
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 1: The obituaries mentioned both things. His story is not a
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 1: comfortable one. It does not resolve into a simple lesson.
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: It is the story of a human being who was
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: capable of extraordinary dedication and extraordinary failure simultaneously, as human
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: beings tend to be whose life's work was entangled with
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: both in ways that cannot be cleanly separated. But the
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: work exists. The fragments that he spent decades placing correctly
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: are placed correctly. The texts that he worked to make
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: legible are legible. Four decades of daily patients are present
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: in the published volumes that scholars still use to day.
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 1: The work outlasted the man. That is what work at
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: this level does. It becomes part of something larger than
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: the person who did it, something that does not depend
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: on the person's consistency or eventual judgment in order to
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: remain true. By the nineteen eighties, more than thirty years
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 1: after the Cave four fragments had been recovered, a significant
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: portion of them remained unpublished and inaccessible to scholars outside
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 1: the original team. The frustration in the wider scholarly community
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: became something closer to outrage. Here was arguably the most
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: significant collection of ancient Jewish texts ever discovered, and access
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: to a substantial portion of it was controlled by a
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: small group moving at a pace that could charitably be
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: described as unhurried. The situation changed in nineteen ninety one
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: through a combination of scholarly pressure and a decision by
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: the Huntington Library in California, which had obtained a set
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: of photographs of the unpublished fragments and chose to make
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: them available to researchers. The Israel Antiquities Authority then opened
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: access more broadly. Once the photographs were available, the pace
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 1: of scholarship accelerated dramatically. New connections were made, new questions
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: were asked. The collection that had been partly locked away
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: was suddenly available to the full range of ect expertise
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: that the academic world could bring to bear on it. Today,
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: every fragment in the collection has been photographed using multi
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 1: spectral imaging that reveals details invisible to the naked eye.
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: Every image is available online through the Leon Levy Dead
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 1: Sea Scrolls Digital Library, accessible to anyone in the world
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: with an Internet connection. A student anywhere on Earth can
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: examine the same fragments that Rowland de Voe's team handled
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: in the Scrollery in Jerusalem in the nineteen fifties, in
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: higher resolution and with more analytical tools than the original
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: scholars had available. The text that was sealed in darkness
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 1: for two thousand years is now, in a very real sense,
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: more visible than it has ever been. There is a
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: woman named Caroline. She is thirty one years old and
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 1: a doctoral student in Ancient Near Eastern studies at a
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: university in Chicago. He grew up in a small town
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 1: in Mississippi, where nobody she knew had heard of the
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: Dead Sea scrolls. She encountered them for the first time
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: in an undergraduate course and felt, she said, like a
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: door had opened in a wall she had not known
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: was there. She is currently working on a dissertation that
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 1: uses multi spectral imaging data from the Leon Levy Digital
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: Library to analyze scribal hands in the Cave four fragments,
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: attempting to identify individual scribes across multiple manuscripts to understand
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: how the copying work at Kumran was organized and distributed.
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: She works on the same fragments that Strugnell spent four
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: decades on. She has tools he did not have. She
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: is asking questions that would not have been possible to
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: ask until the images were made publicly available. She told
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: her adviser last year that the thing she loves most
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: about the work is the handwriting. That each scribe had
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: a distinctive hand, small habits of letter formation that were
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: as individual as a finger print that after enough time
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: with a particular hand, you begin to recognize it. You
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: begin to feel, she said, like you know someone someone
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: who has been dead for two thousand years, who sat
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 1: in a room above the Dead Sea and copied texts
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 1: by lamplight, and whose individual handwriting survived in fragments no
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: larger than a thumb nail, waiting to be recognized by
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: a graduate student from Mississippi. The work of understanding passes
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: from one set of hands to another, from DeVoe's team
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: in the Scrollery to the scholars who fought for access
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: to Caroline in her office in Chicago, leaning toward a screen,
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: recognizing a hand that has been waiting two thousand years
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: to be known. That continuity is itself a kind of
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: testimony to the conviction that certain things are worth the
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: full effort of human attention, that a fragment of text
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: two thousand years old deserves the same care and patience
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 1: that a fragment of anything worth keeping deserves. The Scrollery
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: is quiet tonight. The fragments are in their cases. The
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: digital images are waiting for morning researchers who will come
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: back to the same questions tomorrow, carrying the work forward,
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 1: one careful observation at a time, and somewhere in Chicago,
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: a young woman from Mississippi is doing the same thing
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: the scribe did in the same spirit, if not the
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: same room, recognizing the marks that a human hand made
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: when it was trying to preserve something worth preserving. The
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: light in that chain has not gone out. Chapter eleven,
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: the Psalms Scroll words you already know older than you thought.
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 1: There is a particular kind of recognition that has no
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: adequate name in English. It is not surprise, though it
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: contains surprise. It is not comfort, though it contains comfort.
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: It is the feeling of encountering something you have known
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: all your life and discovering without warning that it is older,
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: and deeper, and more widely traveled than you had any
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: reason to expect. The feeling of finding out that the
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: words you heard at your grandmother's funeral or at a
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: bedside vigil or in a church on a Sunday morning
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: when you were seven years old and did not yet
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: understand what the words meant but knew they mattered, have
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: been traveling toward that moment for a very long time,
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: longer than you thought, much longer. In nineteen fifty six,
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: in the last of the eleven caves above Cumran, archaeologists
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: found a scroll that would produce that feeling in more
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: people than almost any other document in the collection. Cave
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: eleven yielded a scroll of psalms, not fragments, a substantial
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: scroll containing forty nine psalms, some of them complete, others partial,
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: preserved well enough to be read without reconstruction. The scroll
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: is approximately four meters long, written on seven sheets of
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: leather stitched together with linen thread. The scribal hand is
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: clear and even the work of someone whose fingers knew
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: the shapes of these letters the way a musician's fingers
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: know the notes of a piece they have played for years.
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: The scroll dates to the first century of the Common Era,
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 1: approximately two thousand years ago, placing it in the final
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: decades of the Cumran community's existence. Among the psalms it
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: contains is Psalm twenty three, the same words written on
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: leather by a hand that has been dust for two
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: thousand years in a cave above the Dead Sea, sealed
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: in the dark, while Jerusalem fell and the temple burned,
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: and the world that had produced it was swept away.
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: The Lord is my shepherd. Those four words in the
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 1: Hebrew of the first century of the Common Era, in
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: the handwriting of a scribe whose no we will never know,
• 1:51:01
  Speaker 1: sitting in a cave in the Judean desert for two
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: thousand years, waiting, I shall not want. There is a
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: woman named Dorothy. She is seventy three years old, and
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: she lives in a small house in rural Georgia, where
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: she has lived for forty years. She has buried a
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: husband and a son, and two sisters, and at each
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: of those funerals Psalm twenty three was read. She has
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: heard it so many times that she can hear the
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: voice of each person who read it at each of
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: those services when she thinks of it, now layered one
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: over the other, like transparencies, the same words in different voices,
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: in different rooms, in different decades of her life. She
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: heard about the cave eleven Psalms scroll in a radio
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: program three years ago. She pulled over to the side
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: of the road and sat in the car until the
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: program was finished. She said to her daughter that evening
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: those words were lying in a cave in the desert,
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: while every person I ever loved was being born and
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: living and dying. They were there the whole time. Just
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: waiting to be found again. Her daughter asked, does that
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: change what they mean to you? Dorothy thought about it
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: for a long time. Then she said, it makes them
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: feel like they were meant to survive, like somebody knew
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: they were going to be needed. The Cave eleven Scroll
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 1: does not contain the psalms in the order that modern
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: Bibles present them. The sequence is different, arranged in a
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 1: way that scholars have debated for decades. Some believe the
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: different order reflects a liturgical arrangement, the psalms organized for
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: use in worship rather than for reading in sequence. Others
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 1: believe it reflects a text tradition in which the ordering
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 1: had not yet fully stabilized. The discussion continues. What the
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: different ordering tells us is that the collection of psalms
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: we call the Salter was, in the first century of
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: the Common Era, still in a period of final definition.
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: The question of which psalms belonged and in what sequence
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: were questions that had not yet been answered with the
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: finality they would eventually achieve. And this is where the
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 1: Cave eleven Scroll becomes most extraordinary. Among the forty nine
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: psalms it contains, eight are not found in any standard
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: Biblical collection. They exist in this scroll and in a
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: handful of other ancient sources, and nowhere else. One of
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 1: them is known as Psalm one hundred and fifty one.
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: It is a short poem written in the first person,
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: in which a young shepherd describes his call by God
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: to be anointed king. The content is clearly connected to
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: the story of David, the shepherd boy from Bethlehem, who
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: was called out of the fields while his older brothers watched.
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: This psalm is not entirely unknown to the Christian tradition.
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: It is accepted as canonical by Eastern Orthodox communities, including
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: Greek Orthodox, Coptic and Ethiopia, and churches, which have included
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: it in their versions of the Psalter for centuries. For
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: Christians in those traditions, finding it in the Dead Sea
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: scrolls was a confirmation of something ancient. For the majority
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: of Western Christians, for whom the Psalter ends at Psalm
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty it was a window into the
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: breadth of the tradition before the boundaries were finalized. The
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 1: Cave eleven scroll also contains the Great Hallel, the collection
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: of psalms used in Jewish worship during the Passover Meal.
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: The Synoptic Gospels tell us that after the Last Supper,
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 1: Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn before going out
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: to the Mount of Olives. Jewish liturgical practice of the
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: period is clear about what hymn was sung after the
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: Passover meal. It was the hallel Psalms one hundred and
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: thirteen through one hundred and eighteen. The last thing Jesus
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: and his disciples did before going out to Gathsemone was
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: sing psalms from a tradition that the Cave eleven scroll
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 1: preserves the same words, the same tradition, the same community
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: of ancient hymn writers whose work had been traveling through
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: the hands of copyists for centuries, arriving at an upper
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: room in Jerusalem on the night before the crucifixion, still
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: being sung. That continuity is almost impossible to hold in
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: your mind all at once. You can only hold one
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: piece of it at a time. One scribe, one jar,
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: one cave, one scroll, one set of words sung in
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: an upper room before everything changed. But the chain is real,
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 1: and the Cave eleven scroll is one of its visible links.
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 1: There is a man named William. He has been a
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: canter in a Conservative Jewish synagogue in New Jersey for
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 1: twenty two years. His voice is the primary instrument through
• 1:55:54
  Speaker 1: which his congregation hears the psalms week after week, year
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: after year, in the Hebrew that has been the language
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: of that worship for three thousand years. He spent a
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 1: Shabbat afternoon with the images of the Cave eleven scroll
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 1: on his laptop, reading the familiar texts in an unfamiliar
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: hand on ancient leather. He said to his wife that
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: evening the tradition held, all those centuries of copying and translating,
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: and arguing and losing texts and finding them again, the
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: tradition held. She said, you sound surprised. He said, I
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 1: sound grateful. There is a difference, he said, between knowing
• 1:56:35
  Speaker 1: that something has been preserved and seeing the preservation, seeing
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: it in the actual ink, on the actual leather, in
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: the actual handwriting of an actual person who was doing
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 1: the same work two thousand years ago that I am
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: doing now. The work of transmission is not glamorous work.
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: It is not the work that gets celebrated in public.
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: It does not have the drama of discovery or the
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 1: intellectual excitement of analysis. It is the work of showing
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: up day after day and doing the same thing or
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: of mone that was done yesterday and will be done tomorrow,
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: trusting that the repetition is not emptiness but accumulation, that
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: each time the words are spoken or sung or copied,
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 1: they go a little deeper into the fabric of what
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: will survive. William has been doing that work for twenty
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: two years in New Jersey. The scribe in Cave eleven
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: was doing it two thousand years ago above the Dead Sea.
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: The monks in Ethiopia were doing it in their mountain
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 1: monasteries across fifteen centuries. Dorothy has been receiving the words
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 1: at funerals and sitting with them in her car on
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 1: the side of a road in Georgia. James has been
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: writing them into letters for his children in a folder
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 1: on his desk in Nashville. The line runs through all
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: of them, and it runs through you. To night. Let
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 1: the words be new again, Let them be what they were.
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: When a scribe in the first century of the Common
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: era dipped a pen into ink and formed each character
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: carefully on a piece of prepared leather, knowing that what
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: he was copying was true, not knowing that two thousand
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: years later, some one would be hearing it in the dark.
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 1: He makes me lie down in green pastures. You are
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 1: lying down now, in whatever room you are in, in
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 1: whatever part of the night you have reached. Your body
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 1: is finding its way toward rest. He leads me. Beside
• 1:58:30
  Speaker 1: still waters. The waters are still to night. The world
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 1: outside is quiet. The ancient words are here, He restores
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: my soul. Let that be true to night. Let the
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: oldest surviving copy of this psalm do what the psalm
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: was always meant to do. Let it find the part
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 1: of you that is tired, and lead it somewhere quieter.
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 1: Let it find the part of you that is afraid,
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 1: and sit with it until the fear becomes smaller than
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 1: the peace. The scribe who wrote it is gone, The
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: community that preserved it is gone. The cave that held
• 1:59:06
  Speaker 1: it for two thousand years still stands in the cliff
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 1: above the dead Sea, empty, now visited occasionally by people
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: who lean into the low opening and try to imagine
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: what it held. But the words are here. They made
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 1: it through all of it. They made it to you
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 1: Chapter twelve. What they kept and why it matters to night?
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: We are near the end now, not the end of
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: the night. Necessarily, the night will do what it needs
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 1: to do and find its own end in its own time.
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: But we are near the end of this particular journey,
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: this walk through eleven caves and nine hundred manuscripts and
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: two thousand years of preservation and loss and recovery that
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 1: began with a teenage shepherd and a stone thrown into
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: the dark. Before we arrive at the final resting place
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: of this night, there is one more question to sit with,
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: the question that all of this has been building toward,
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 1: in the way that long journeys build toward the moment
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: when you finally stop walking and turn around and see
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: how far you have come. The question is not historical,
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: It is not scholarly. It cannot be answered by paleography
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 1: or carbon dating or multi spectral imaging, or any of
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: the other tools that have transformed the study of the
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: scrolls over seventy years. The question is this, what did
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: they keep and why does it matter to night? Let
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 1: us think about the first part carefully, because the answer
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: is not as obvious as it might seem. The community
• 2:00:42
  Speaker 1: at Cumrand kept texts the books of the Hebrew Bible,
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 1: almost all of them in multiple copies, in careful scribal
• 2:00:51
  Speaker 1: hands in jars designed to protect them from the desert
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 1: and the centuries. They kept their own community texts, the
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: rules and hymns and commentaries and apocalyptic visions that organized
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 1: their common life. They kept texts from the broader tradition
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 1: of Second Temple Judaism, the Book of Enoch, the Book
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: of Jubilees, other documents that had not made it into
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 1: the eventual Biblical canon but were clearly important to them.
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 1: They kept words. Not gold, not weapons, not the kind
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 1: of material wealth that most communities under existential threat prioritize
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: when they have to choose what to save. They kept words.
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 1: That choice tells you everything about what they believed. They
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 1: believed that the most important thing they possessed was not
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: anything that could be worn or spent or used as
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 1: leverage in the political negotiations of the moment. It was
• 2:01:49
  Speaker 1: the accumulated testimony of their tradition, the record of what
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 1: God had said and done and promised in the history
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 1: of their people, the framework of understanding within which their
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: their own lives made sense. Take that away, and they
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 1: were just people in a desert. Keep it, and they
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: were the continuation of a story that had been in
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 1: progress since the beginning of the world. So they kept it.
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 1: They wrapped it in linen, they sealed it in clay.
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: They carried it up a cliff face at the end
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: of everything they had known, and hid it in the dark.
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: And then the question becomes, why does that matter to
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: you tonight? In whatever room you are in, in whatever
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 1: circumstances have brought you to the end of this particular day,
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 1: Think about what the community at Kumrh was doing in
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: the final years before the Roman army arrived. They were
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: surrounded by a world that was falling apart. The political
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 1: structures that had organized Jewish life for generations were collapsing
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 1: under Roman pressure. The Temple establishment they had left Jerusalem
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: to protest, was itself about to be destroyed. Everything external
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 1: to them was in the process of becoming unrecognizable, and
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 1: they kept doing what they had always done. They kept copying.
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 1: They kept praying before dawn, They kept sharing the communal
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: meal in the evening. They kept following the rhythms of
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: the sacred calendar, Sabbath after Sabbath, feast day after feast day.
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 1: In the desert settlement, that was all they had left
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: of the life they had chosen. They did not abandon
• 2:03:24
  Speaker 1: their practices because the circumstances no longer supported them. They
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: did not decide that the urgency of the crisis justified
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 1: setting aside the discipline of the ordinary days. They kept
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: doing the small faithful things because they understood, at some
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 1: level that did not require articulation, that the small faithful
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 1: things were not preparation for something more important. They were
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 1: themselves the most important thing. The emmet. We encountered that
• 2:03:53
  Speaker 1: word at the very beginning of this night, in the
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 1: first chapter of this long journey, The word that means
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 1: true but reaches deeper than truth. Firmness, reliability, the quality
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: of being present in the same way, in the same place,
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: doing the same faithful thing, regardless of what the circumstances
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 1: around you are doing. The emmet of the jars that
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 1: kept the scrolls for two thousand years. The emmet of
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: Mohammed ed dB, who climbed because following was what you
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 1: did when something wandered off. The emmet of the Masoretic
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 1: scribes who counted every letter across a thousand years of
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 1: hand copying. The emmet of Caroline, who leans toward her
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 1: screen and recognizes a hand that has been waiting two
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: thousand years, the emmett of William, who sings the Hallel
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: every Shabbat morning in New Jersey. The emmette of Dorothy
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 1: who pulled over to the side of a road in
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: Georgia because she needed to finish listening to something that mattered.
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 1: The emmet of James who sealed his letters in a
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 1: folder on his desk and called it a jar, who
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 1: understood from the people of Kumran that sealing things carefully
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: is how hope moves through time. The emmet that runs
• 2:05:08
  Speaker 1: through all of it, from the lamplight room in Kumran
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 1: to this quiet room where you are resting now, is
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 1: not a grand, heroic faithfulness. It is not the faithfulness
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 1: of people who knew they were making history. It is
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 1: the faithfulness of people who simply could not find a
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: reason to stop. That is the emmet the community at
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: Kumran kept, not in the jars in themselves. The jars
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 1: were just the last act of a faithfulness that had
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 1: been going on for two hundred years, one ordinary morning
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 1: at a time. And when the jar was sealed and
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 1: the cave was dark and the Roman army was on
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: the road from Jericho, the emmet was still there, in
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 1: the clay, in the linen, in the leather, in the ink.
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: Still there. There is a woman named Anna. She is
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: thirty six years old, and she works night shifts in
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: a hospital in Minneapolis. She has worked nights for nine years,
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 1: which means she has spent nine years living in a
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: different relationship to time than most of the people she knows.
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: She finds the night's hardest not because of the work,
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: but because of the quiet. In the hours between two
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: and four in the morning, when the ward is still
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 1: and there is time to think. Those are the hours
• 2:06:25
  Speaker 1: when the accumulation of what she has seen, all the
• 2:06:28
  Speaker 1: suffering and the loss and the occasional grace that a
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 1: hospital contains, sits most heavily. She started listening to night
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 1: psalms on those shifts, walking the quiet corridor with her
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 1: phone in her pocket, the words coming through her ear
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: piece in the hours when the rest of the world
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 1: was asleep. She found something in the long, careful telling
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: of ancient stories that shorter forms of comfort could not provide.
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: Not an answer to the things she had seen, not
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 1: a resolution of the weight she carried, but a context,
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 1: a sense of being inside a story larger than the
• 2:07:03
  Speaker 1: particular story of any single night, a story that had
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 1: been going on for a very long time and would
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: continue going on after this night was over. She told
• 2:07:13
  Speaker 1: a colleague once that what she appreciated most was that
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 1: the stories did not pretend the darkness was not dark.
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 1: They sat in it honestly and found something that was
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 1: not quite comfort but was perhaps more durable. She called
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 1: it company. She is right. That is what the ancient
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 1: texts provide at their best, not escape from the darkness,
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 1: but company in it. The testimony of people who had
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 1: sat in their own darkness and found the words to
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 1: say something true about it. People who had kept the
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 1: amet when keeping it was hard, when the world around
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 1: them was doing everything it could to make keeping it impossible,
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: and who had passed the words forward to the next
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 1: person who needed them. The people of Cumran kept the
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 1: words because the words were true, because the truth of
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: the words did not depend on whether the people who
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 1: kept them were safe or successful or recognized. Because some
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 1: things are worth keeping, regardless of what keeping them costs.
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: That conviction is alive tonight. It is alive in Caroline
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 1: in Chicago, leaning toward her screen and recognizing a scribal
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 1: hand from two thousand years ago. It is alive in
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 1: William in New Jersey, singing the Hallel on Shabbat morning.
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 1: It is alive in Anna in Minneapolis, walking the Quiet
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 1: Corridor at three in the morning with ancient words in
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 1: her ear. It is alive in Dorothy in Georgia, who
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 1: pulled over to the side of a road to finish
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 1: listening to something that mattered. It is alive in James
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 1: in Nashville, who sealed a folder of letters for his
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 1: daughter and called it a jar because he understood that
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 1: sealing things carefully is how hope moves through time. And
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 1: it is alive in you tonight, in whatever way it
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 1: is alive in you, however you have arrived at this
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 1: hour and this quiet, and this willingness to follow a
• 2:09:06
  Speaker 1: long story all the way to its end. The Dead
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: Sea Scrolls are not the answer to every question. They
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 1: are not a proof of any particular theological claim. They
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 1: are not a solution to the complexity and the grief
• 2:09:18
  Speaker 1: and the ordinary difficulty of being a human being in
• 2:09:21
  Speaker 1: a world that does not always make it easy to
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 1: hold on to what matters. What they are is evidence
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 1: evidence that what matters has been considered worth keeping by
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 1: people in circumstances far more desperate than yours. Evidence that
• 2:09:36
  Speaker 1: the words that carry the deepest truths about the relationship
• 2:09:39
  Speaker 1: between God and human beings have been handled with extraordinary
• 2:09:43
  Speaker 1: care across extraordinary distances of time. Evidence that the darkness
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 1: does not get the last word, not because the darkness
• 2:09:52
  Speaker 1: is not real, but because there have always been people
• 2:09:56
  Speaker 1: willing to seal the jar and carry it up the
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 1: cliff face and trust to whatever comes next. You are
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 1: the whatever comes next. You are the person those jars
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 1: were sealed for without any one knowing it. You are
• 2:10:10
  Speaker 1: the reader the scribes were writing for, without any of
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 1: them having met you. You are the reason the words
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 1: were worth counting, and the count has not lost track
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 1: of where you are. Think about the stone one last time,
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 1: the stone that mohammeded Hib threw into a cave on
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 1: an ordinary morning in nineteen forty seven. He was not
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: looking for sacred texts. He was a fifteen year old
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 1: boy looking for a lost goat, and he threw a
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 1: stone into the dark because that is what you do
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 1: when you are not sure what is inside something. The
• 2:10:42
  Speaker 1: scrolls that answered his stone had been waiting two thousand
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 1: years for exactly that kind of ordinary, unintentional action. Not
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 1: a scholar with the right credentials, not a believer with
• 2:10:54
  Speaker 1: the right faith, not a hero with the right courage,
• 2:10:58
  Speaker 1: a boy with a stone and a lost goat and
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 1: a moment of casual curiosity about what was in the dark.
• 2:11:04
  Speaker 1: Pay attention to the thrown stones in your own life.
• 2:11:07
  Speaker 1: The offhand question that opened a door you had not
• 2:11:10
  Speaker 1: been looking for, the book you picked up because something
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 1: caught your eye, the conversation you had with someone you
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 1: were not trying to have a conversation with, the moment
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 1: of ordinary attention that became without announcing itself, the beginning
• 2:11:25
  Speaker 1: of something that mattered. The scrolls did not know when
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 1: they would be found. They only waited in the dark
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 1: in the sealed jars, trusting that the person who needed
• 2:11:36
  Speaker 1: them would eventually come, that the emmet of the jars
• 2:11:39
  Speaker 1: would hold long enough for the emet of a shepherd
• 2:11:42
  Speaker 1: boy to complete the circuit. It held for two thousand years,
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 1: and it is holding still.
• 2:11:52
  Speaker 2: Let us pray, Father, we come to the end of
• 2:11:56
  Speaker 2: a long night and a long journey. Together. We have
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 2: walked through caves and university offices and hospital corridors at
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 2: three in the morning and an elderly woman's car pulled
• 2:12:07
  Speaker 2: over on the side of a road in Georgia. We
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 2: have held fragments smaller than a thumb nail, and scrolls
• 2:12:13
  Speaker 2: seven meters long. We have heard the sound of pottery
• 2:12:17
  Speaker 2: breaking in the dark, and the sound of psalms being
• 2:12:20
  Speaker 2: sung in a desert settlement before dawn, and the sound
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 2: of a cantor's voice on a Shabbat morning, carrying words
• 2:12:27
  Speaker 2: across three thousand years of salmen, faithful repetition. And now
• 2:12:32
  Speaker 2: we are still Father. The things we have carried through
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 2: this night are things you already know. You were there
• 2:12:40
  Speaker 2: when the jars were sealed. You were there in the
• 2:12:43
  Speaker 2: cave during the two thousand years of silence. You were
• 2:12:46
  Speaker 2: there when the stone was thrown and the pottery broke,
• 2:12:50
  Speaker 2: and the linen wrapped scrolls came into the light for
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 2: the first time since the Roman army was on the
• 2:12:55
  Speaker 2: road from Jericho. You were there when Psalm twenty three
• 2:12:59
  Speaker 2: was copied on tool by a scribe who formed each
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 2: character carefully, not knowing that a woman in Georgia would
• 2:13:06
  Speaker 2: hear about it one day and pull over to the
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 2: side of the road because she needed to finish listening.
• 2:13:11
  Speaker 2: You were there when James sat at his desk in
• 2:13:14
  Speaker 2: Nashville and wrote letters to people he loved and sealed
• 2:13:18
  Speaker 2: them in a folder and called it a jar. You
• 2:13:21
  Speaker 2: were there for all of it, every cave, every fragment,
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 2: every scribe, every morning prayer before dawn in the desert,
• 2:13:31
  Speaker 2: every evening meal with bread and wine and blessing, every
• 2:13:35
  Speaker 2: ordinary act of faithfulness by people who did not know
• 2:13:38
  Speaker 2: they were making history and were only trying to keep
• 2:13:41
  Speaker 2: the Amette alive for one more day. You were there,
• 2:13:45
  Speaker 2: and you are here now in this room, in this hour,
• 2:13:50
  Speaker 2: with this particular person who has followed this long story
• 2:13:54
  Speaker 2: all the way to its end. Father, we asked to
• 2:13:57
  Speaker 2: night for the emet, not the dramatic kind, not the
• 2:14:02
  Speaker 2: heroic kind, the ordinary kind. The firmness that shows up
• 2:14:07
  Speaker 2: one more morning when showing up is hard. The reliability
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 2: that keeps the practice when the practice feels small. The
• 2:14:14
  Speaker 2: quality of being present to what we say we believe
• 2:14:17
  Speaker 2: day after day, without needing the day to be exceptional
• 2:14:21
  Speaker 2: in order to be faithful in it. We do not
• 2:14:24
  Speaker 2: know what we are preserving by living this way. We
• 2:14:27
  Speaker 2: do not know who will find what we seal up
• 2:14:30
  Speaker 2: and carry carefully and trust to whatever comes next. We
• 2:14:34
  Speaker 2: do not know whether the jars we make will hold
• 2:14:36
  Speaker 2: for two years or two thousand. We only know that
• 2:14:40
  Speaker 2: the making, and the carrying and the trusting are ours
• 2:14:43
  Speaker 2: to do. So give us that Father, Give us the
• 2:14:47
  Speaker 2: willingness to do what is ours to do, without needing
• 2:14:50
  Speaker 2: to see the full shape of what it is building toward.
• 2:14:53
  Speaker 2: Give us the dawn prayer when the dawn is cold.
• 2:14:56
  Speaker 2: Give us the communal meal when the sharing is costly.
• 2:15:00
  Speaker 2: Give us the copied letter and the kept promise, and
• 2:15:03
  Speaker 2: the daily practice that does not announce itself and does
• 2:15:06
  Speaker 2: not require an audience. Give us the courage of the
• 2:15:10
  Speaker 2: second kind, the quiet kind, the long kind, the kind
• 2:15:15
  Speaker 2: that sits with fragments and gives them years, the kind
• 2:15:19
  Speaker 2: that climbs a cliff face in the dark with a
• 2:15:22
  Speaker 2: jar full of words, and trusts the mountain to keep
• 2:15:25
  Speaker 2: what cannot be kept any other way. And when we
• 2:15:28
  Speaker 2: seal the jars and carry them up and trust them
• 2:15:31
  Speaker 2: to the dark, give us the peace of knowing that
• 2:15:33
  Speaker 2: the dark is not the end of the story. It
• 2:15:36
  Speaker 2: never was. We thank you for the boy who threw
• 2:15:39
  Speaker 2: the stone. We thank you for the desert that preserved
• 2:15:43
  Speaker 2: what the desert preserved. We thank you for Roland de
• 2:15:47
  Speaker 2: Vaux and John Strugnall and Caroline in Chicago, and every
• 2:15:51
  Speaker 2: one who has given years to fragments that could not
• 2:15:54
  Speaker 2: be rushed. We thank you for William, whose voice carries
• 2:15:58
  Speaker 2: the psalms forward every Shabbat morning in New Jersey. We
• 2:16:02
  Speaker 2: thank you for Dorothy who pulled over on the road
• 2:16:04
  Speaker 2: in Georgia and sat in her car until she had
• 2:16:07
  Speaker 2: finished listening. We thank you for James, who understood that
• 2:16:11
  Speaker 2: sealing things carefully is how hope moves through time. We
• 2:16:16
  Speaker 2: thank you for Anna walking the quiet corridor at three
• 2:16:20
  Speaker 2: in the morning with ancient words in her ear, keeping
• 2:16:23
  Speaker 2: the emmet alive in a hospital ward while the rest
• 2:16:26
  Speaker 2: of the world sleeps. We thank you that the words arrived,
• 2:16:31
  Speaker 2: that they arrived here, that they arrived in this room
• 2:16:34
  Speaker 2: at this hour, to this particular person who followed the
• 2:16:38
  Speaker 2: story all the way to the end, guard their sleep
• 2:16:41
  Speaker 2: to night, Father, Let the ancient words do in them
• 2:16:44
  Speaker 2: what ancient words do best, the quiet work that happens
• 2:16:48
  Speaker 2: below the level of attention, the settling of truth into
• 2:16:52
  Speaker 2: places too deep for the waking mind to reach on
• 2:16:55
  Speaker 2: its own. Let them wake tomorrow carrying a little more
• 2:16:59
  Speaker 2: of the emet than they carried when this day began,
• 2:17:03
  Speaker 2: a little more willing to do the daily work without
• 2:17:06
  Speaker 2: needing the daily reward, a little more at peace with
• 2:17:09
  Speaker 2: the darkness, knowing that the darkness held those jars for
• 2:17:12
  Speaker 2: two thousand years and gave them back undamaged. The Lord
• 2:17:17
  Speaker 2: is my shepherd. Let that be true to night, not
• 2:17:21
  Speaker 2: as a doctrine, not as a theological proposition, just as
• 2:17:26
  Speaker 2: a fact felt in the body, the way rest is felt,
• 2:17:30
  Speaker 2: the way the moment of putting down a weight you
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 2: have been carrying too long is felt. I shall not want.
• 2:17:37
  Speaker 2: You are provided for tonight and tomorrow, and in all
• 2:17:41
  Speaker 2: the circumstances that tomorrow contains the one who made the scrolls,
• 2:17:46
  Speaker 2: and preserved the scrolls, and opened the scrolls, and brought
• 2:17:50
  Speaker 2: the words to you. Across two thousand years of desert,
• 2:17:53
  Speaker 2: silence has not lost track of you. He leads me,
• 2:17:57
  Speaker 2: beside still waters. The waters are still, the night is quiet.
• 2:18:02
  Speaker 2: The long journey is over. For now he restores my soul. Rest.
• 2:18:07
  Speaker 2: Now the jars held, the words survived. The stone was
• 2:18:13
  Speaker 2: thrown at exactly the right moment, by exactly the right person,
• 2:18:17
  Speaker 2: into exactly the right cave. And tonight, in this room,
• 2:18:22
  Speaker 2: in this quiet after two thousand years of waiting, they
• 2:18:26
  Speaker 2: reached you. Sleep well, beloved. The cave is empty now,
• 2:18:31
  Speaker 2: and the scrolls are in the light, and you are
• 2:18:33
  Speaker 2: held in the same emmet that sealed the jars and
• 2:18:36
  Speaker 2: kept them and brought you here through all the unlikely
• 2:18:39
  Speaker 2: hands of history, through Jesus Christ, the one the ancient
• 2:18:43
  Speaker 2: longing was reaching toward before it knew his name. To
• 2:18:48
  Speaker 2: him be all glory for ever and ever. Amen, this
• 2:18:54
  Speaker 2: is night psalms. The ancient words have found you they
• 2:18:59
  Speaker 2: always do, and we will go searching together again soon