A Historical Link To Faith

Pictured is a fragment of the “Calendar Scroll” from the first century BC, which was discovered in 1952 as part of what is now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scribed in Hebrew, it is a record of the Sabbaths, first days of the months and the community’s festivals.

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I think I had an inkling, yesterday, when visiting the Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit in Seattle, of how the righteous man Simeon felt, who, as promised, lived to see the Christ child in the Jerusalem Temple some two millennia ago.

To paraphrase his exclamation, “my eyes have seen my salvation.”

Admittedly a metaphorical stretch, my life, nevertheless, has been forever impacted by actually seeing writings that later became part of our canon and are recognizable today.

I realize these scrolls in and of themselves do not prove the validity of my faith. But they sure go a long way toward establishing a degree of authenticity.

About this season of the year in early 1947, a Bedouin shepherd boy discovered an obscure cave on the northwest corner of the Dead Sea near some ancient ruins known as Qumran. What he found has rocked the archaeological, scientific and religious worlds.

Inside the cave were 10 tall pottery jars, worn and weakened, along with a lot of other shattered earthenware. The boy and his cousin gathered up what appeared to be pieces of leather and parchment scrolls, not having any idea either what they were or what their significance was.

What young Muhammad Ahmed el-Hamed found that day were biblical manuscripts that date from 250 BC to 68 AD and were parts of the oldest record of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament of the Christian Bible). The previous oldest manuscripts dated from about 900 AD, so the scrolls found here turned out to be 1,000 years older than anything previously known.

We have come to know them as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Their significance has been immeasurable. But not without some disquieting revelations.

For instance, they show that there were probably three different versions of Scripture at the time. Perhaps the most surprising disclosure was the fact that some 670 of the nearly 900 documents are “non-biblical” (like the photo sample above) and have to do with cultural commentary and rules for Jewish living.

It is thought that the scrolls were written and compiled by the Essenes, an ancient spin-off sect from rabbinic Jews in Jerusalem around the time of Christ, who inhabited the city of Qumran, now in ruins.

The most fascinating thing to me was to be able to view the Hebrew manuscripts from Psalms (many not even in our Bible), Genesis (“and God created humankind”), Exodus and Ezekiel. The experience provided, for me, a link to “the roots” of my faith.

I cannot begin to cover, in a short blog post, the depth of meaning in the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But what I saw with my own eyes, and what I learned from the exhibit, has fashioned a strong substantiation for what I believe.