The scrolls

This week I will be looking at the nature of the scrolls. Throughout my research I will be trying to answer the following questions:

What were the scrolls made out of?
What language(s) are the scrolls written in?
When were the scrolls written?
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Again I didn't have a lot of trouble with this week's research. The ebooks so far have been very usefull. Besides the ebooks I was impressed with the crystalinks website because not only was there quite a lot of information about the Dead Sea Scrolls but the pictures were also very interesting.
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The number of scrolls that were found vary between 800-900 documents. It is difficult to determine the exact number because the scrolls have suffered extensive deterioration which has left many of the scrolls incomplete. Some of the scrolls include large portions of the original undamaged text, some include one or more columns of writings and at worst some include only a tiny piece of text. There are about 25,000 fragments altogether.

The closest scroll to being complete is the Great Isaiah Scroll which contains all 66 chapters of the prophecy of Isaiah. The Habakkuk Pesher and the Rule of the Community also come close to being complete. The picture on the left shows one of best preserved scrolls in the collection.

The scrolls were written by a group of Jews who lived apart from the rest of the society because they believed that they were ‘pure’ and that the others were corrupt. The scrolls were written on papyrus between the third Century BC -68 CE in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. At the time the site was regularly used as a garrison site by the Romans in preparations for their conquest of Masada. The current theory is that the Qumran community hid the scrolls probably as a result of Roman threats during the time of the two great teachers Hillel and Jesus.



Photo of a papyrus plant.

The scrolls can be dated to three periods: archaic (250-150BCE), Hasmonaean (150-30BCE) and Herodian (30BCE -70CE).

Resources:

Lim, T 2005, The dead Sea scrolls, a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, viewed 2 April 2010.

Charlesworth, JH 2006, The bible and the dead sea scrolls, vol 1, scripture and the scrolls, Baylor University Press, Waco, viewed 2 April 2010.

Dead sea scrolls, crystalinks, 2 April 2010, http://www.crystalinks.com/dss.html

Cyprus papyrus, wikipedia, viewed Friday 28 2010,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyperus_papyrus