Religion: Home for the Scrolls

“Do you really think it’s old, sir?”

An Armenian dealer in antiquities was asking the question, standing at a barbed-wire fence in Jerusalem (it had been put up by the British to separate Jews and Arabs). As he spoke, he reached across the fence and handed a small scrap of leather to Dr. Eleazar Sukenik of Hebrew University. The fragment came from the famed Bedouin find of scrolls in a cave by the Dead Sea, and Scholar Sukenik recognized the writing on it as being similar to letters he had seen carved on coffins that were 2,000 years old. Sukenik determined, if he could, to get the scrolls for the emerging Jewish state.

That was in 1947, and Arab territory was dangerous for a Jew, but (on the day the U.N. passed the resolution favoring establishment of a Jewish state) Sukenik boarded a crowded Arab bus for Bethlehem, where the scrolls were, and brought them back for study. In the next few days, while Arab rioters surged through Jerusalem, Sukenik agreed to buy the scrolls for £50 ($170).

Want Ad in Wall Street. Then bad news arrived: the Metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark in Old Jerusalem was in possession of other scrolls from the same find. Sukenik pledged himself to buy them; he mortgaged his house and borrowed as much as he could. But the Metropolitan decided to sell the scrolls in New York. Eleazar Sukenik died in 1953, but the cause was taken up by his son Yigael Yadin,* who brilliantly combined soldiering with archaeology, served as Israel’s chief of staff. Yadin tracked down the still unsold scrolls —the Metropolitan had even advertised them in a Wall Street Journal want ad —eventually bought them for $250,000 with the backing of the Israeli government. As the scrolls were flown back to Israel by couriers, one at a time, Yadin received coded cables such as “Chaim arrived safely.” He sighed with relief when he read: “All family here now.”

Last week Israel was formally honoring father’s and son’s persistence. The seven precious scrolls from Cave I*—two Isaiah scrolls, the Thanksgiving Hymns, the War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness, the Rule of the Community, a commentary on Habakkuk, and the so-called Genesis Apocryphon—were publicly shown for the first time. Together with the jars that were found with them, the scrolls are on display—under 24-hour guard and brilliantly lit—in a glass-fronted safe set in the basement wall of the new Hebrew University. Eventually a separate wing will be built for them, called the Shrine of the Book.

New Theory. “The scrolls are the greatest discovery of our age,” proclaimed the university’s president, Benjamin Mazar, and throngs of Israelis and tourists filed past them day after day. Said one proud Israeli teenager, as he spelled out some of the lines from the Isaiah scroll: “It’s a great thing for a boy to be able to read as I can what his forefathers wrote 2,000 years ago.”

At the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem last week, General Yadin advanced a new theory relating the scrolls to Christianity. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, he suggested, was addressed to converted members of the Dead Sea sect, the Essenes. Scholars have long wondered who the “Hebrews” of the epistle were, said Yadin. The answer is to be found in the similarities between the theology of the people Paul was addressing (as it can be deduced from Paul’s arguments) and the known theology of the Dead Sea sect. The Essenes believed in the ascendancy of the priestly over the royal Messiah, and Paul emphasized Jesus’ priestly qualities. The Essenes set great store by the apocalyptic role of the angels, and Paul lays emphasis on Jesus’ superiority over angels.

Moreover, said Yadin, the epistle is full of quotations and references to Pentateuch material, mainly in connection with the sojourn in the wilderness and the tabernacle—matters especially dear to the Essenes. For “when we review all the material in the Dead Sea scrolls literature, we cannot help feeling that the Dead Sea sect organized itself in an exact as possible replica of the life of the tribes of Israel in the wilderness . . . considered the ‘period of Belial’ similar to the 40 years’ wandering, and hoped and believed that in the very near future they would ‘reenter’ the ‘new Land of Promise.’ There could be no stronger appeal to the hearts and minds of the people descending from the Dead Sea sect than in those metaphors which are so abundant and characteristic of the Epistle to the Hebrews.”

*Many Israelis have shed their European names in favor of new Hebrew ones. Yadin means “He will judge.”

*Since the Cave I discovery, ten other caves have been found containing scrolls or fragments of scrolls, are now being pieced together and deciphered at the Scrollery in the Palestine Archaeological Museum in the Jordan-occupied Old City of Jerusalem (TIME, April 15).