THE LARGER OUTLOOK: Ancient Hebrew Scrolls Exhibited

On October 22, 1949, amid a blaze of floodlights, the click of shutters, and the whir of movie cameras, visiting celebrities and their hosts of the Library of Congress opened a special loan exhibit of three of the much-publicized Dead Sea Manuscripts. These ancient sheepskin scrolls were displayed in two cabinets in the place of honor immediately facing the shrine of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The visitors were Dr. William Foxwell Albright, of Johns Hopkins University, world-renowned archaeologist and Semitist, who first confirmed the early date of the scrolls on the basis of the form of the writing; and Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, Syrian Metropolitan (archbishop) of Jerusalem and Trans-Jordan, who lent the scrolls for their first public showing. Following them, lined up for a pre view of the exhibit before it was opened to the general public on the next day, came five hundred people—representing the press, religious bodies, and educational institutions.

The occasion of this gathering in the ornate halls where the most cherished documents of the nation are housed was not merely the beginning of National Bible Week and United Nations Week, nor was it merely the arrival of three ancient manuscripts of historical interest, for we have much older ones. Rather it was the fact that one of these scrolls was announced to be the oldest existing copy of a book of the Bible, a complete manuscript of Isaiah. The scholars who have examined it say that it is hundreds of years earlier than any New Testament manuscripts we now have and a thousand years older than any Hebrew Old Testament text. This oldest Bible manuscript was the center of interest.

After the pictures were made the crowd began to file past the two display cases from right to left, in the same direction as the He brew script reads. The first scroll we approached was the Sectarian Document, a manual of discipline and ritual of an unidentified ancient Jewish sect. It looked surprisingly new. Its yellowed surface was hardly marred. The broad columns of graceful Hebrew script were still pleasing to the eye after two thousand years. The next, however, half of a commentary on Habakkuk, was dark brown, with its worm-eaten lower edge cut in scallops into the text; but its narrow columns of heavy, precise lettering were still clear and black. The faintly ruled lines show that the letters hang from the lines instead of resting on them. That-is why these manuscripts, to the modern eye, give the impression that they are upside down.

We came last to the Isaiah scroll, stretched across the full length of the second case. In color intermediate between the other two, with its ink somewhat faded but still distinct, its edges browned and scarred, its seams rough, and its opening columns, at the right-hand end, badly worn, this patriarch of Bible manuscripts nevertheless seemed to possess an ancient dignity that reduced to irrelevance the golden brocaded background against which it rested. Only one thing was lacking. Since the scroll had been rerolled with a backing of white paper, it did not, as in the published pictures, show the darkening on the back of the rolled portion—the mark of ancient hands which had wound and unwound the book countless times through long years of use, before it was hidden away in a cave many years before Christ was born.

Surviving Copies of Large Cache

How much its sublime words must have meant in those times of trouble—"Comfort ye, comfort ye my people"; "and there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch"; "unto us a son is given: . . . The Prince of Peace"—prophecies of the Messiah for whom all were waiting. How troublous those times were is attested by the very fact that a whole library of scrolls, each wrapped in linen, was sealed in pottery jars in a cave in the dry wilderness of the Dead Sea, south of Jericho, by keepers who evidently did not live to retrieve their treasures. That the eight manuscripts found by Bedouins in 1947 were the remnant of a library of perhaps two hundred scrolls in forty jars has been shown by the archaeological excavation of the cave in the spring of 1949. The experts who pieced together the jar fragments tell us that the style of the pottery indicates the first century B.C. as the date of the cache, but that someone entered the cave during the second or third century of our era, someone who left behind a lamp and a cooking pot of that period. It is tempting to imagine that possibly one of the scrolls re moved at that time fell into the hands of Ori- gen, for it was in the third century that Origen compiled his Hexapla, a six-column Bible with parallel Hebrew and Greek texts in which, says Eusebius, he used a manuscript of the Psalms which had been found in a jar near Jericho.

The account of the recent discovery of these cave scrolls reads like a thrilling story. Two Bedouins are said to have entered the cave as the result of a chase after a wandering goat, although some doubt has been thrown upon the goat story. The Arabs took their find to a dealer in Bethlehem, who sent word of it to the Syrian archbishop at Saint Mark's monastery in Jerusalem. The archbishop tells how he suspected that the scrolls were ancient, how he was hindered by delays and errors in making contact with the Bedouins before he succeeded in purchasing half of the scrolls, and then how he met with repeated rebuffs in his attempts to verify their genuineness and to find someone who could identify and date them.

Ironically, a Belgian scholar, a priest visiting the French Dominican school at Jerusalem- the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Franchise —identified the largest scroll as Isaiah, but was convinced by the school experts that it could not be genuinely ancient. Not until February of 1948, some months after the original discovery, did the four scrolls purchased by the arch bishop come to the attention of Dr. John C. Trever, then Fellow of the American School of Oriental Research at Jerusalem. Photographs sent to Dr. Albright at Johns Hopkins enabled him to confirm Dr. Trever's provisional dating of the manuscripts.

The form of the writing dates the Isaiah manuscript approximately 150-100 B.C in his opinion, said Dr. Albright in his lecture just preceding the opening of the Library of Congress exhibit. And he added that Dr. Solomon Birnbaum of England, whom he characterized as the world's foremost specialist in Hebrew paleography, has placed it even fifty years earlier in the first half of the second century B.C. Albright places the Habakkuk Commentary only a little after the Isaiah, and the Sectarian Document somewhat later, in the first century B.C. A fourth scroll in the archbishop's collection, in bad condition, and still in the hands of museum experts for unrolling, is believed to be the Aramaic apocryphal book of Lamech, or a prototype of the book of Enoch.

Meanwhile, Dr. E. L. Sukenik, of the He brew University in Jerusalem, had acquired several scrolls, apparently the other portion of the same find, including a collection of thanksgiving hymns, an unknown apocalyptic work now designated as "The War of the Children of Light Against the Children of Darkness," and the last third of another copy of Isaiah. In his preliminary survey—unfortunately for us written in Modern Hebrew—Dr. Sukenik also printed extracts from the archbishop's Isaiah scroll, for which he was then, negotiating.

But the archbishop thought it best to grant publication rights to the American School of Oriental Research, and to send the manuscripts out of the country for safekeeping on account of the Arab-Jewish war. Indeed, after the American scholars had left Jerusalem for their own safety, the Syrian convent was damaged in the fighting over the Old City, inside the walls. In February, 1949, the archbishop brought the four scrolls and a number of fragments to the United States. Meanwhile work on the preparation for publication was proceeding.

During and after the time when the discovery became known to scholars, there was such confusion in Palestine, on account of the political conditions, that access to the cave was impossible for the archaeologists. Not until the spring of 1949 was the site excavated, after trespassers had dug up the floor of the cave in search of more scrolls. G. Lankester Harding, chief of the Department of Antiquities of the Hashemite Kingdom of the Jordan (the new name of the now defunct state of Trans-Jordan), with the collaboration of Pere de Vaux, head of the Dominican Ecole Biblique, and experts from the Palestine Museum, recovered all the manuscript and pottery fragments from the cave, with the results already mentioned. When Harding took the manuscript fragments to Lon don, British Museum scholars were convinced of their antiquity. As the archaeological finds corroborated the paleographical dating, the pub lic press began to announce confidently the "greatest manuscript discovery of modern times."

This, in brief, is the history of these much- publicized ancient manuscripts, derived from reliable archaeological journals. After the texts are published it will take years for scholars to exhaust the possibilities for Biblical, historical, and language research which they will open up. Even now several very important implications are clear. The non-Biblical works will throw great light on hitherto little-known aspects of the late pre-Christian and early Christian period, said Dr. Albright in his lecture at the Library of Congress, for they give us insight into a phase of Jewish thinking which formed part of the background in which Christianity grew. And the impact of the Isaiah text on Biblical studies will be tremendous.

Why is it important to find a manuscript a thousand years older than the oldest previously known? Sentiment alone is not the reason. Rather, these manuscripts will show whether, as some critics have asserted, the contents of our books of the Bible have changed greatly from the original. Our Old Testament is translated from the Hebrew Masoretic text, of which the oldest dated manuscript now known comes from about A.D. 916. Manuscripts of that period represent, of course, much earlier texts.

Bible scholars had little doubt about changes in the text since the time when vowel points were added to form the Masoretic text, centuries after Christ (perhaps A.D. 600-800), for they knew that the copyists from that time on, and perhaps even earlier, preserved every jot and tittle of the text with scrupulous care and almost superstitious reverence. Minor differences were to be expected, of course, such as must inevitably, in spite of extreme precautions, creep eventually into any book copied and recopied by hand through many centuries; that is why textual scholars must compare many manuscript copies of the same book to deter mine the original wording. But it has always been known that Bible manuscripts are much more numerous and yet show fewer differences than other ancient texts, such as the Greek and Latin classics, and that most of the variations from one manuscript to another are simply a matter of letters, words, or phrases which do not change the meaning sufficiently to affect any important doctrine.

But some scholars have assumed that the earlier copyists were less insistent on minute verbal exactness, and may have treated the text with greater freedom. Some have thought that very early manuscripts, if ever found, might be considerably different from our Bibles.

When the news came that a very ancient book of Isaiah had been found, the question arose in the minds of Bible scholars everywhere: "How much change will it show our Hebrew text to have undergone in the ten centuries between it and our next oldest manuscripts?" The most surprising fact concerning this Isaiah scroll, said Dr. Albright, is its close correspondence with the Masoretic text of A.D. 916 and later. This shows, he added, that the text of the Bible has been preserved through the centuries much more accurately than any scholar would have dreamed.

Dr. Millar Burrows, of Yale University, who is preparing the text of the Isaiah scroll for publication, gave a lecture in the same library on October 25, in which he reported that the text is substantially the same as our Isaiah, that there are numerous but very unimportant differences in spelling (just as, for example, the spelling in the original 1611 printing of our Authorized Version differs from that in the editions printed today), and in grammatical forms and wording to a minor degree. He also said that in many cases this Isaiah manuscript confirms the Masoretic text where the latter had been considered less correct than the Septuagint; that its text is much nearer to the Masoretic than are the Septuagint, Syriac, and Vulgate translations.

More than that, the same similarity to our present text is noticed in the three fragments of Daniel (not on exhibition) which were found among those acquired by the archbishop. Two of these, from one manuscript regarded as about the same age as the Isaiah, contain part of chapter 3. The third contains portions of two columns, chapters i and 2, including the spot where the Aramaic section of Daniel begins. On these fragments are found the names Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. So far as can be judged by these excerpts, the text of Daniel in the second century B.C. was essentially the same as we have it today, the chief differences, as in the case of Isaiah, being in the spelling.

It is true that some still question the antiq uity of these Dead Sea scrolls, notably Dr. Solomon Zeitlin (professor of rabbinical literature in Dropsie College). But the fact that prominent scholars in America, England, and Palestine concur in dating the writing, and that the dating of the pottery from the cave agrees with the same conclusions, has largely allayed the early doubts. If the present estimates of the experts who have examined the manuscripts are correct, this Isaiah scroll and the fragments of Daniel and of other books of the Bible, not only give us glimpses of the Hebrew Old Testament more than two thousand years ago, but also bear testimony in these latter days to the marvelous way in which the text of the Word of God has been preserved through the ages.