The Dead Sea Scroll Revealed
Metropolitan Samuel and John Trever
The library of the Dead Sea scrolls was the greatest archeological discovery of the 20th century. American John Trever was filling in for the director at the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem February 18, 1948 when a priest from St. Mark's Assyrian Orthodox Monastary brought him several ancient scrolls. These were a sampling of what would be a cache of 1,100 manuscripts found in 11 caves in the mountains and hills beside the Dead Sea. They were initially discovered by Bedouin sheep herders who found them near the ruins of the first century village of Qumran. Trever requested permission to photograph them, and he then sent the photographs to the famed archaeologist William Albright who immediately confirmed their authenticity. The Dead Sea library is composed of many different kinds of literature, but significantly it includes copies (in many cases, multiple copies) of every book in the Old Testament canon - except the book of Esther, the only book that doesn't include mention of God. In Cave 1 (discovered in 1946-47) was a full scroll of Isaiah, and in Cave 4 (1952) that can be seen today from the overlook at the Qumran excavation site, the biggest collection of manuscripts was found. The biblical importance of this discovery cannot be overestimated.
The Old Testament that we use today is translated from what is called the Masoretic Text. The Masoretes were Jewish scholars who between A.D. 500 and 950 gave the Old Testament the form that we use today. Until the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest Hebrew text of the Old Testament was the Masoretic Aleppo Codex which dates to A.D. 935. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now have manuscripts that predated the Masoretic Text by one thousand years. The Dead Sea scrolls gives us the Old Testament 1,000 years closer to its original autograph! Scholars were obviously anxious to see how the Dead Sea documents matched with the Masoretic Text. If there were significant differences we would have to conclude that our Old Testament text had been corrupted by careless or biased scribes over the centuries. After years of careful study, scholars have concluded that the Dead Sea Scrolls are almost identical with the Masoretic text, confirming that our Old Testament has been meticulously and accurately preserved. The Director of the American Schools for Oriental Research whom John Trever was sitting in for that fateful day, Millar Burrows, wrote: "It is a matter of wonder that through something like one thousand years the text underwent so little alteration. As I said in my first article on the scroll, ‘Herein lies its chief importance, supporting the fidelity of the Masoretic tradition.’"
"My word that goes out from my mouth, it shall not return to me empty, but it will accomplish that which I purpose, and it shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it." (Isaiah 55)
“Therefore, forsaking the corrupt judgment of the fleshly, who care only for the wellbeing of their physical carcass, let us reverently hear and read holy scripture, which is the food of the soul (Matthew 4:4). Let us diligently search for the well of life in the books of the New and Old Testaments, and not run to the sinking puddles of people’s traditions, devised by human imagination, for our justification and salvation.”
(Thomas Cranmer, 1st Anglican Homily, Gatiss edition)