As a special traveling exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls opened in the Laie Temple Visitors Center on January 19, BYU-Hawaii students, faculty, staff and visitors filled the McKay Auditorium to capacity to hear Dr. Donald W. Parry, BYU Associate Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature and a member of an international team of translators working on the 2,000-year-old records, explain their significance to Latter-day Saints.
The following Friday evening,January 20, Dr. Parry put on a similar presentation in the Laie Temple Visitors Center, where the exhibit is displayed until March 23, and then agreed to do a repeat presentation that same evening to accommodate the overflow crowd.
He explained two Bedouin shepherd boys looking for stray animals in 1947 discovered the first three of what has since become the unparalleled archeological find known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. "Of the 900 scrolls [and thousands of fragments] discovered in 11 caves near Qumran, near the Dead Sea, about 230 are books from the Old Testament. There are multiple copies of most of the texts," Dr, Parry said, pointing out for example that there are 15 copies of Genesis and 17 of Exodus. "The rest are religious, non-biblical texts and a few are business deeds or business documents."
"All books in the Old Testament have been discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls except for the Book of Esther," he continued. "The three most popular in terms of copies areDeuteronomy, Isaiah and Psalms; and, by the way, those are the three Biblical books cited the most by Christ and the Apostles in the New Testament."
"Ninety percent of the Dead Sea Scrolls are written in Hebrew…nine percent were written in Aramaic, a sister language to Hebrew [and one percent in Greek]," he continued.
Dr. Parry said most scholars believe the scrolls were written by a small group of Jews known as the Essenes, or "sons of light" as they called themselves. "They believed in amessiah ...who was going to come in their lifetime. They were a temple-loving people. They wore white all the time. They held all things in common. They believed in the Law of Moses. They believed in the scriptures and the prophets."
He added that one of their letters discovered in Cave 4 indicated "they fled Jerusalem because they felt the priests at Jerusalem were corrupt, that they were running the temple in a corrupt manner."
"The earliest scrolls date from 350 B.C. and run to 67 A.D. The Dead Sea Scrolls are 1,000 years older than the Hebrew Bible that was in existence before," said Dr. Parry, noting they contain some differences, such as additional words, a different description of Goliath, and even six psalms not contained in the current Book of Psalms. They had more scriptures than we have in our own Old Testament," he added, pointing out that some scholars "believe the 'temple scroll' was the sixth book of Moses."
To illustrate some of the differences, Dr. Parry cited Deuteronomy 8:6 in the King James Version, which reads: Therefore thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to fear him; "but the Dead Sea Scrolls bible has that you keep the commandments of the Lord by loving him [instead of 'fear']. That's a big difference, and I suspect 'loving' him is the correct word."
Of the "newly discovered psalms" he said, "You decide if it's scriptural. Remember, we have a formula found in Section 91 of the Doctrine and Covenants regarding Apocryphal-type texts."
Dr. Parry explained he was invited to join the international team of scholars in 1994 as a translator, along with several other BYU professors, who have worked on DNA studies "to help the scholars know what kind of animal skin the scrolls were written on"; underground radar scans to help find additional caves; putting all of the scrolls and images onto a database with the modern Hebrew transcriptions and translations; and multispectral imaging which enables scholars to read the text of burned scrolls.
He further explained when he works on the scrolls he is locked inside a vault in the Israeli Museum in Jerusalem, and everything he needs is brought to him by others. "The scrollsare stored flattened out. We don't keep rolling and unrolling them — they're too brittle and fragile." He added only the curators are allowed to touch most of the scrolls, while he always wears white cotton gloves. He also said no original document leaves the vault, and that samples displayed in museums — even the one in Jerusalem — and the traveling exhibit are museum-quality copies.
He explained that the 24-foot long Great Isaiah Scroll was the "type of scroll that Jesus used in Nazareth. There are no verses, no chapters, no punctuation, no capital letters, and no vowels, so when he unrolled the scroll, he must have really known the book of Isaiah well." He added it usually takes him three-to-four minutes to locate a particular verse on the scroll.
"Remember, every scroll was different, because the handwriting style was different."
Dr. Parry reminded the audience that the Book of Mormon acknowledged the efforts of the ancients to produce and preserve such scrolls: But thus saith the Lord God: O fools, they shall have a Bible; and it shall proceed forth from the Jews, mine ancient covenant people. And what thank they the Jews for the Bible which they receive from them? Yea, what do the Gentiles mean? Do they remember the travails, and the labors, and the pains of the Jews, and their diligence unto me, in bringing forth salvation unto the Gentiles? (2NE 29:4).
Dr. Parry said when he prays, "I thank Heavenly Father for the ancient prophets who lived worthily to receive the word of God; for the scribes and copyists who have transmitted theBible through the ages so that we have this magnificent Old Testament."
Earlier in one of the sessions, BYU-Hawaii professor of History and Religious Education, Dr. Kerry Muhlestein, said, "Dead Sea Scrolls research has served as common ground for different faiths. I personally have sat at a table studying Dead Sea Scrolls with a Jewish friend, a Catholic friend, a Protestant friend, and I was the Latter-day Saint there. We were very peacefully and excitedly discussing religious things and ancient texts together."
Visiting BYU Professor Dr. Victor L. Ludlow will give the next in the lecture series, The Dead Sea Scrolls: 20 Questions and Many Answers, on Friday, February 10, at 10 a.m. in the BYU-Hawaii Little Theater. Dr. Ludlow, a professor of Ancient Scripture at BYU in Provo and a scholar of Isaiah and Judaism, was previously a Danforth Fellow at Harvard and Brandeis Universities, where he received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.
The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Laie Temple Visitors Center is open every day from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.