Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

(1933-2005) Hartmut Stegemann was professor of NewTestament studies at Georg-August-University inGöttingen. He also served as Director of theDepartment for Ancient Judaism and Head of the QumranResearch Center.

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THE LIBRARY OF QUMRAN

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

1. Discoveries...................................................12. Starting Points...............................................63. The Scrolls and the Modern Public.............................124. The Excavations...............................................345. The Scroll Caves..............................................586. The Scroll Holdings of the Qumran Library.....................807. The Essenes...................................................1398. John the Baptist..............................................2119. Jesus.........................................................22810. Early Christianity...........................................25811. Rabbinic Judaism.............................................265Suggestions for Further Reading..................................269Index of Names and Subjects......................................271Index of Citations...............................................279Maps.............................................................286

Chapter One

At the northwest end of the Dead Sea, 12 kilometers south of Jericho and 32 kilometers north of the En Gedi oasis, lies a solitary set of ruins. Larger heaps of rubble, such as might represent an entire ancient city, are called tells by the Arabs, while smaller heaps, the ruins of only a few buildings, are called khirbeh.

From antiquity, the Bedouin have called this place in the vicinity of the Dead Sea Khirbet Qumran. The name Qumran may mean "moon hill," since the bright hilltop against the brownish-red countryside, as viewed from the Dead Sea, may once have reminded folk of the pale disk of the moon sinking behind the horizon. It may, however, simply mean "humpback hill," which would likewise appropriately designate the particular form of this pile of ruins. The pronunciation of the place name is koom-RAHN.

The area of the landscape on which Khirbet Qumran lies consists of one of the steep rock precipices of a low range of mountains forming a terrace on the threshold of the Judean Desert. It is a thick layer of marl that once arose from the deposits at the bottom of the Dead Sea. For scores of millennia, however, the surface of the Dead Sea has lain some 50 meters below this terrace and today is more than 400 meters below sea level. Flowing down from the western slopes, brooks, which appear in the rainy season, have eaten their way through the marl and thereby created the rugged Wadi Qumran. Ages ago the brooks had already cut through the terrace and gnawed their way into the side of the channel thus created. Like a giant's fingers, the brooks running from the terrace in the north reach down into the valley below. The Arabs call streams like these, which in the rainy season can transport roaring torrents of water into the valley but otherwise are dry, by the name of wadi. Israelis call the same natural phenomenon a nahal.

Perched atop the last ledge of the old marl terrace before it becomes a precipice plunging down to the Dead Sea, more than a kilometer from today's west bank of the Sea and high over the floor of Wadi Qumran, stands Khirbet Qumran. Nowadays Qumran is a tourist attraction, with an air-conditioned restaurant, a parking lot for buses, and even a few palm trees. Half a century ago—and for thousands of years before that—the most that would be seen here were Bedouin with their tents and their herds of goats and sheep, when winter rain had greened the desert and provided pastureland for a few weeks. The Bedouin tribe of the Ta'amireh has regarded this area as its property in every age, regardless of how political boundaries might run or what state has sovereignty here at a given moment.

Since 1850 researchers have also shown an interest in the area around Qumran from time to time. The graves there are striking, in that they are placed so that the dead lie facing north and are separated from the earth around them by clean-cut slabs of stone. Thus the departed neatly awaited their resurrection to an everlasting life in the north—the direction to which they lay turned—where the Garden of Eden was thought to have been. Such a funerary custom is not known to have been practiced elsewhere in the Holy Land of ancient times. Meanwhile, of course, such graves have been discovered near En Ghweir, some fifteen kilometers to the south of Qumran. In the arid desert by the Dead Sea, by way of exception, a number of things have remained recognizable that in the rest of the country have long since rotted away or fallen victim to the conditions of time. This special funerary practice alone, however, at first induced no one to investigate the hill of ruins of Qumran and its broader vicinity.

Everything changed after seven writing scrolls turned up in Jerusalem in the late autumn of 1947 and the beginning of 1948, discovered by Bedouin the winter before in a rock cave near the northwest end of the Dead Sea. In 1949, this cave—1.3 kilometers north of Qumran—was investigated by researchers. There they found remnants, pieces broken off, from four of these scrolls, a few other manuscript fragments, potsherds from numerous clay jugs, and rotted linen covers, which had once served to enwrap the scrolls.

The Bedouin recounted how one of their shepherd boys, Muhammad ed-Dhib, "the Wolf," had discovered the cave by accident when he had climbed up into the rocks after a runaway goat. What else happened just then can no longer be sorted out very well. Some still usable clay jugs found in the cave had been taken by the Bedouin as containers. They are said to have used a few of the scrolls for their campfires, the area being so sparsely wooded, but these probably gave off more bad smell than real heat in the cold nights. What were they to do with these rare finds?

Several months after their unexpected lucky find, the Bedouin went to Bethlehem, their market town, and called on a Christian cobbler named Khalil Iskander Shahin, known in the area as "Kando." Doubtless they hoped the shoemaker could make them cheap sandals or some other useful item out of the old leather of the scrolls. Instead, Kando bought the leather scrolls for a few coins. Later, probably at the end of July 1947, he took four of these scrolls to his spiritual superior, Syrian Metropolitan Athanasius Yeshua Samuel, in Jerusalem, who paid him the equivalent of $97.20 for them.

Three other scrolls were acquired in a similar fashion at the end of 1947 by an archaeologist of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Professor Eliezer Lipa Sukenik. He was the father of then Israeli secret police officer Yigael Yadin, who was chief of staff of the Israeli army during the war of independence in 1948-49 and later became Professor of Archaeology and then, for a time, a cabinet minister and Vice Premier of the State of Israel. On June 28, 1984, Yadin died at the age of 67. When the State of Israel became politically independent in 1948, these three scrolls, which his father had bought, were already the property of Hebrew University. Since then they have formed the basic stock of Israeli property from the Qumran finds.

These are the most important of the facts about which there is any clear understanding today. Adiscussion of what else may have played out in...