The Dead Sea Scrolls

According to thestory, a Bedouin shepherd boy tossed a stone into a desert cave near the Dead Sea during the winter of 1946-47. Hearing the soundof shattered pottery, he scrambled inside to investigate. What the boydiscovered was the first of 11 caves along the cliffs near the ruins of Qumran, forgotten storehouses for the oldest survivingtexts of the Hebrew Bible. Other writings found in the caves cast new light onthe diverse beliefs of the ancient Near East that would coalesce into the threemajor monotheismsJudaism, Christianity and Islam. Mostly written on parchmentor papyrus, in Hebrew and Aramaic with a smattering of Greek, the hundreds ofdocuments known as the Dead Sea Scrolls became the most famous archaeologicaldiscovery since the opening of King Tut’s tomb.

The Milwaukee Public Museum’sexhibition “Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible: Ancient Artifacts, TimelessTreasures” is more than a display of 2,000-year-old texts. The exhibit alsosets the context for the scrollsespecially life in Jerusalemand Judea during the period when they werewrittenand their place in the evolution of the Bible and religious belief.According to many scholars, a Jewish sect that predated and briefly coexistedwith the nascent faith that became Christianity wrote the scrolls. Like theearly Christians, they split from the era’s ruling Jewish priesthood to pursuewhat Oxford University’s Geza Vermes, among theforemost scholars of the scrolls, called “the liberation of captives, thecuring of the blind, the straightening of the bent, the healing of thewounded…and the proclamation of the good news to the poor.”

Exhibitions of theDead Sea Scrolls have become popular in recent years as many of the artifactsemerged from the locked cupboards of their institutional caretakers. In 2004,the Milwaukee Public Museumplanned to book a traveling exhibituntil the museum’s mid-decade financial andadministrative crisis interrupted. Under the leadership of its new president,Dan Finley, and its veteran chair of anthropology and history, Carter Lupton,the museum returned to the idea by assembling its own exhibit drawn frominstitutions and private collections from Amman,Jordan, to Milwaukee.

 

UniqueChallenges

The fragility of thescrolls presents unique challenges for curators. “You have to rotate them. Youcan’t keep them out longer than three months,” Lupton explains. “Light can doirrevocable damage. You have to limit the level of lighting and the time ofexposure. If a fragment is on exhibit for three months, it will then have torest for a few years.”

The Milwaukee exhibition involved lots ofmetaphorical spadework, unearthing pieces that have seldom and sometimes neverbeen shown in museums. “Even if you’ve been to Jerusalem’s Shrine of the Book,” says Lupton,referring to the world’s greatest repository of the scrolls, “we have piecesyou’ve never seen before.”

The exhibit openswith artifacts discovered in the Holy Land from the period when the scrollswere produced, roughly 200 B.C.E. through 70 C.E. Along with coins bearing thelikeness of Alexander the Great and Pontius Pilate are household items, such asoil lamps and pottery, along with stone coffins and a model of Jerusalem at thetime of Christ. Another component of the exhibit shows the development of theBible into the Christian period.

 

Discoveringthe Scrolls

“Ancient Artifacts,Timeless Treasures” also follows the trail of the scrolls’ discovery. After theshepherd boy found the first cave, several artifacts made their way to aPalestinian in Bethlehem,an antique dealer and member of the Syrian Orthodox Church. He brought thescrolls to a Syrian archbishop who showed them to a Milwaukeean, John C.Trever, a Yale-educated scholar with American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. Along with aprofessor at Hebrew University, Treverrecognized the antiquity of the writing. His photographs of the Isaiah Scrollbecame the basis for the famous 24-foot-long replica housed at the Shrine ofthe Book. The British Museum loaned its copy of that replica to the Milwaukee Public Museumfor “Ancient Artifacts, Timeless Treasures.”

 

RecognizingControversies

The Milwaukee exhibition recognizes many of thescholarly controversies over the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially the authorship ofthe scrolls. Geza Vermes has long maintained that Qumranwas a center for the Essenes, a breakaway Jewish sect, but other academics haveadvanced their own hypotheses and ancient history gives up its secrets withgreat reluctance. Lupton maintains an agnostic perspective. “There are manyexplanations,” he says. “There is no direct evidence of who wrote the scrolls.It’s all circumstantial.”

That ambiguousevidence has encouraged all sorts of kooky, DaVinci Code notions, including a Vaticanconspiracy to suppress the true meaning of the scrolls. “It’s got a lot ofappeal to a wide audience, whether you are religious or not,” Lupton says.“Interpreting history always gives rise to disputes, but particularly when youbring religion into the picture, interpretation becomes food for all sorts ofcontroversies.”

“Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible: Ancient Artifacts,Timeless Treasures” opens Jan. 22 at the Milwaukee Public Museum.