Qumran's Treasure
Sectarian band of Jews defied
Rome by hiding scrolls for
future generations
In the film Annie Hall, an exasperated
mother brings a young Alvy — a pre-pubescent
Woody Allen — to the doctor because
he is depressed and refuses to do his homework.
Alvy explains that the universe is constantly
expanding — so what is the use of
doing homework, as it will, like everything
else, go the way of the exploding universe?
His mother, apoplectic, turns to him and
pleads, “What has the universe got to do
with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn’s
not expanding!”
Brooklyn is certainly not Qumran, and New
York Bay hardly the Dead Sea, but there is a
peculiar resonance between the sentiments
of Alvy’s mother and the devotees who
bequeathed to us the treasures of the Dead
Sea Scrolls.
Qumran, a little patch of barren land in
Palestine, measured barely more than a football
field in size; it was slightly more than 100
meters long and 83 meters wide. Yet, for the
Sons of Light — a tiny Jewish community —
the desert site was an enclave of staunch
resistance to the swelling and swirling sway
of the Greco-Roman universe. There, for two
centuries, Qumran residents lived in communal
isolation, preserving what would become
one of the world’s greatest libraries of religious
manuscripts.
Although the Roman Emperor Pompey
strode uncontested into Palestine in 63 BCE ,
the Sons of Light, according to their War Rule,
believed that Rome, and all the armies of
darkness, would collapse before the magnificent
angelic armies of God. Although Herod
the Great restored the Jerusalem temple to
spectacular proportions less than 19 miles to
the northwest of Qumran, the Sons of Light
laid claim, in their Community Rule, to being
the true spiritual temple and priesthood.
Although Rome frantically replaced its procurators
and prefects, often in rapid succession,
for their mishandling of Judah, the devotees
at Qumran enjoyed the stability of an unshakable
and enduring hierarchy, unflustered by
the tussle of Judean politics.
No number of messianic pretenders or
zealot rebels, no shift in the tectonic plates
of local Roman rule, no dramatic swell in the
growth of the followers of Jesus was capable
of making this pocket of resistance along the
shores of the lifeless Dead Sea quaver. They
had not been lured away by the bright lights
of Greek festivals and games, by gymnasia
and lavish theatres; neither were they enticed
by the amenities that emerged from extraordinary
Roman engineering and architecture.
Even when an earthquake devastated their
outpost in 31 BCE , they chose to stay put
and rebuild rather than to relocate to a more
appealing and convenient site.
Had the members of this rarified band
been pressed, like Alvy’s mother, they too
would have responded, “What has the universe
got to do with it? You’re here in Qumran.
Qumran’s not expanding!”
Yet the universe they inhabited did expand;
their world of religious purity did collide with
the chilling embrace of human empire; their
hope for a cosmic battle between the Sons of
Light and the Sons of Darkness did become a
reality — though on an earthly rather than a
heavenly battlefield, and with an altogether different
outcome from what they had anticipated.
And how did this small band respond
once they were incapable of denying the
expansion of their universe, when Rome took
its fateful march through Qumran to the Dead
Sea in 68 CE ? They evidently offered armed
resistance, a tactic that proved futile, even
foolhardy. Yet they also took to the hills with
their scrolls, the true repository of their resistance
to Rome, tucking them into ceramic
pots in cliffside caves, where they would outlast
the Roman Empire by more than a millennium
and a half and reappear in the
museums of a world that even the Romans
could not have imagined.
— by john levison, SPU professor of new testament
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