In the February 24 lecture series accompanying the special Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit on display at the Laie Temple Visitors Center, BYU-Hawaii History Department Chair Jared Ludlow explained how the 2,000-plus-year-old documents help modern scholars and students learn more about the Bible, and how they were important to the ancient scribes who wrote them.
Ludlow, who started teaching at BYU-Hawaii after earning his Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley in Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity, first saw Qumran— the area near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea where most of the scrolls were found — as a seven-year-old boy living in Israel with his mother and father, Dr. Victor L. Ludlow. The senior Ludlow, an Old Testament scholar at BYU-Provo, is a visiting professor at BYU-Hawaii this semester.
The younger Ludlow described how archeologists have excavated ruins at Qumran, finding water baths, with scroll texts showing "that some of these pools were used for ritualistic immersions"; lots of pottery, in which some of the scrolls were found; and leather tefillin — the phylacteries or "prayer boxes" usually containing one of four scriptures[Deut 6:4-9, Deut. 11:13-21, Ex. 13:1-10 and Ex. 13:11-16] that devout Jews traditionally wrap around their foreheads and left arms with long leather straps. "They already had the tefillin in those days at this site, so this is one way we can see they used the Hebrew Bible," he said.
Ludlow listed other artifacts, including ink wells and benches associated with scribal writing. "At least some of the texts were copied and written there at the site, and then placed in the caves nearby," he said, acknowledging scholars don't know how many scrolls "were actually written or copied there, or how much were from other sites and had nothing to do with that site."
Many scrolls, he continued, were stored in pottery, "some of which were well preserved. Others were just thrown in" the caves and a lot of the pottery was broken over time. Ludlow explained storing the writings tied into the ancient Jewish practice of genizah or "not wanting to destroy old texts."
He repeated the well-known story of how a Bedouin boy looking for lost sheep in 1947 found the first scrolls in what is now called Cave 1 in the area of steep ridges near the Qumran ruins. He added archeologists have since found other caves, with Cave 4 of particular interest to Bible scholars and students.
"What we found inside cave 4 are over 15,000 fragments — little pieces — so scholars have this huge jigsaw puzzle and have to memorize the entire Hebrew Bible so they can piece them together."
Ludlow explained all the findings include 122 Biblical scrolls, with copies of everything except the Book of Esther, and also copies of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha— "texts about Biblical figures, which are not taken directly from biblical sources. For example, there's a story about Levi…that really wasn't written by Levi."
In answer to the question, "what do we mean by the Bible at the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls?" Ludlow replied people in the Qumran settlement — which ceased about the same time the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D., "didn't have one book. They had random scrolls; and some contained more than one Biblical book."
He explained the King James Version of the Bible, so familiar to Latter-day Saints, is an English translation based on Hebrew and Greek texts available in the sixteenth century. These include the Hebrew Bible, translated from the Masoretic Text of the 9th-11th centuries A.D.; and targum, or Hebrew texts translated into other languages including Aramaic and Syriac. "Probably the most significant one was the Septuagint, a Greek translation in 70," he said. "Some of the earliest copies of the Septuagint have been found at Qumran."
He explained the scrolls were obviously important to the people, because they took the time to recopy them. "We've found multiple copies of many of the manuscripts, "he said, including 29 of Deuteronomy and 36 of Psalms.
Ludlow added that about 25% of all the biblical texts are what scholars classify as "Qumran practice," because they were all written in the same manner. Another 40% are classified "proto-Masoretic or proto-Rabbinic, because they" have the same consonants as we find about a thousand years later in the Masoretic Text."
A third category is dubbed "Pre-Samaritan," referring to the mixed-Semitic people who "because of the tension and conflicts with the Jews…ended up forming their own scriptures. They had the Pentateuch, but they also started putting in some of their own ideology."
A fourth category, or about 5%, is related to the Septuagint, which shows that the Greek translation "also had some validity"; and the fifth category, or about25% of the texts, were "unaligned. Some of these were for liturgical purposes, so they only took parts of the Bible. That's what they would dread in the synagogue."
Ludlow also characterized some of the writings as the "rewritten Bible," such as the Genesis Apocryphon, which includes an explanation of why Abraham told Pharoah that Sarai was his sister, not his wife; and pesherim, which means interpret, "where they basically went through a book of the Bible and they would give their commentary or interpretation."
Ludlow said another intriguing document, designated 4 QMT, is "a letter from Qumran to Jerusalem, where they disagreed in purity issues: They thought the temple was becoming impure, and the priests were impure. They were writing this letter basically as a complaint."
"What is the significance of all this to us, and to Biblical studies?" he asked. "The Dead Sea Scrolls Biblical manuscripts are now the oldest manuscripts we have," Ludlow said, noting they were created almost 1,000 years earlier than the Masoretic Texts.
He added they also "give us a glimpse of how a Jewish group used the Bible at or around the time of Jesus."
BYU-Hawaii Professor of Religious Education and History, Dr. Kerry Muhlestein, will deliver the next lecture in the series — LDS Contributions To and View of Dead Sea Scrolls Scholarship— on Friday, March 10, at 10 a.m. in the Little Theater.