April 9, 2004

Lecturer brings Dead Sea Scrolls to life

by Helen Ellis, assistant director of public affairs

Professor Jodi Magness' presentation on March 22, "The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls," wasn't so much about the contents of the manuscripts but rather about the community that produced them. Included in this important find is the oldest-preserved copy of the Hebrew Bible and works important in biblical scholarship and history. Other scrolls are literary documents that describe the beliefs and practices of the Jewish sect, the Essenes, to which the writers of the manuscripts belonged. Magness herself has made great contributions to knowledge about Qumran and did a masterful job, with her excellent slides, of recounting the detailed, convoluted story for her Loyola audience.

The scrolls were discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin boy in a cave near the town of Qumran, about one-half hour drive from Jerusalem. The boy found several scrolls written on leather parchment that were sold; and as soon as the rest of the archaeological world realized their worth, the excavation began. A French Dominican priest, Roland deVaux, was the chief excavator from the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise de Jerusalem. The content of the 900 scrolls eventually found in caves around Qumran was kept secret until recently, stirring up lots of controversy.

De Vaux died in 1971, before publishing the final report on his excavations. In 1994, Magness was given an advance copy of the book of de Vaux's field notes to review. Stressing the tedium in field notes, she decided to look for something she had never considered before, something new in the notes and to focus her research there. She found somethinga room where de Vaux thought he had located an indoor toilet. While sounding insignificant, Magness then used this finding to research the everyday life of these people, mostly men, who lived more than 2,000 years ago. The group living there were Essenes, a sectarian group of Jewish dissidents who broke away from mainstream Judaism over differences in interpretation of Jewish law with the priests in the Temple in Jerusalem.

Qumran was built around the second century B.C. and was finally abandoned in 68 A.D., after the Romans destroyed it. Earthquakes were evident in de Vaux's excavation as was fire. The fire eliminated much of the evidence of the village but still some interesting items were found. There were few dwelling places found but there were several large rooms assumed to have been used as communal dining rooms. Evidence of communal living was seen as hundreds of ceramic dishes were found broken but still stacked together, like they had fallen out of the cabinet during an earthquake.

Ceramic pots of animal bones butchered according to Kosher law were found in areas around the village. Magness thinks these bones were the leftovers from animal sacrifices that were served at the communal meals. These people likened eating meals together as a group to the sacrifices performed in the Jerusalem Temple so that these bones or any uneaten meat had to be disposed of in a respectful manner. They believed strongly in ritual cleansing and constructed pools to catch waters from flash floods in the nearby mountains for this purpose. They immersed themselves in the pools before eating and after using the toilet.

Magness' appearance was sponsored by the university and the New Orleans Society of The Archaeological Institute of America. She is the senior endowed chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and won the 2003 Biblical Archaeology Society award for the best book in archaeology on which the lecture was based.

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