Judaism Demystified Podcast with Professor Schiffman: The Dead Sea Scrolls

[Music] [Applause] thank you for joining the Judaism demystified podcast professor schiffman it's an honor and pleasure to have you on thank you so for our viewers who may be unfamiliar can you provide us with an overview of what the Dead Sea Scrolls are the historical context It Was Written in and how their Discovery in the mid 20th century transformed our understanding of Jewish history and second temple Judaism okay of course the question itself could be a 45 minute lecture but we'll try to get it down into a uh a shorter answer for this evening so what we have to understand is that in the caves at an area called kumran and that is not the ancient name that's an Arab name for the area on the shore of the Dead Sea beginning in 1947 and running through the 19 mid-50s approximately 900 I shouldn't say manuscripts but we should say better the remnants of what were 900 manuscripts from the second temple period were found specifically these documents were copied between 225 BCE and around the turn of the era we sometimes say the year zero there is no year zero right but okay the turn of the era now these documents were collected in the library of some people who had a group of buildings on the shore of the Dead Sea and these individuals represent a sect of Judaism from second temple times now most Scholars think that they are the Asen who are described by Josephus although what that word means but there are many similarities between Josephus at description and what we see with the uh Scrolls themselves now these documents as I mentioned are very fragmentary and after they were discovered they had to be reassembled into a of partial jigsaw puzzle now I have to say that this is not the case with the first seven Scrolls that were found by the famous bin boy who first wandered into what we call cave 1 in 1947 because those Scrolls were closer to being complete and in fact in the case of what we call the great Isaiah scroll it's the entire book of yeshayahu of Isaiah from beginning to end so those texts were in much better shape but then all those discovered afterwards which are about 900 are in this fragmentary form now we generally believe that these Scrolls were gathered by the sectarian group but not that all of them were composed by them because there were three types of literature in the collection the first is all books of Tanakh except for Esther now that isn't exactly true because Ezra and neya were considered one book book there is no neya so he could say except Esther and neya but also that's group one group two are texts that were generally read by Jews in the second temple period they're what the rabbis in the to would call external books that group included some works we knew before but not in the original Hebrew or Aramaic and some works that we did know partially in Hebrew are an Aramaic and some other works that we never heard of before and uh that's the second group of text the third group of texts are documents pertaining to a sectarian group the one that gathered the library and they are replete with the particular views of the group on all kinds of subjects regarding second temple Judaism now I want to say as a summary comment that we have to be very careful in making the false assumption that all you learn about when you study these texts are some strange Jews that went to the Dead Sea area because they didn't want to live with their fellow Jews whether in jerus or some other place we have to avoid that because since the first part of it is Bible the second part of it is material that Jews are reading all over the reading all over there's so much we can learn about second temple Judaism in general about virtually every topic and even from the sectarian documents they will for example criticize others for what they're doing so we learn all kinds of things about second temple Judaism from these texts now I should say a word about what the scrolls are not before so to speak concluding the answer to this rather wide question and that is they're not Christian they don't mention any Christian figures they're pre-christian they may be they are a value in understanding the background of Christianity because that's in second temple Judaism they're also not medieval a claim that was once made for the medieval Kites and the final false claim they are not the library of Jerusalem or the Jerusalem Temple some kind of official Jewish Library they are gathered by a sectarian group fascinating and um I'm just curious to know what got you interested in this topic and did that ever affect your religious beliefs or observance well to start with the question of what got me interested it's funny I was looking for a topic I was studying with a very famous bible scholar at brandise University and as an undergraduate I was looking for a topic for an honors thesis and he was an expert on tahim professor nakuma and he suggested to me the possibility of comparing some of the poetry and the Scrolls to safer to heal in the Book of Psalms and that was my first research on the Dead Sea Scrolls and then it I somehow or another after taking a few courses in graduate school seemed to mind find myself most interested in this stuff because you were reading texts and analyzing texts that no one was working on but then there was one extra feature I realized very early that there was a lack of we should say background on the part of many of the scholars studying this stuff in terms of understanding the texts of early Judaism that we already had the rinic texts were the most of the material M talwood Etc and so I because I knew that material or at least knew how to study that material you can really never know all of that material unless you're the building own or Raj your safe or somebody with that kind of of of way of seeing it all at once but but but knew how to study it that I could make a very particular contribution to the field that would be helpful and and uh I never was sure at the beginning that it would become such a big area of interest and so then you started to have Market forces operating people constantly asking me to do things like what we're doing right now and so I have done a lot of other research I'll tell you I actually just recently sent to press a volume in which I collected together over 40 articles scholarly articles that I wrote on non-dead SE scroll topics and I've written books that are not dead SE scroll topics I don't think too many people know about that you get a certain reputation as far as I would not say it affected religious observance where it really affects you in a certain way and especially when you are so close to this the actual material as opposed to the discussion is you really see the continuities of Judaism physically in front of you when you for example see the excavated uh Mikvah o or you looking the ritual bath or you're looking at fill in from that period or actual manuscripts of tanak from that period you realize the continuity of everything that we're doing so I think that that's a very big area in which it it affects you so I think that's a fair answer to that question fantastic okay um and SEC and another question is among the diverse texts found within the Dead Sea Scrolls which do you find most compelling or significant for understanding the religious social dynamics of the Jewish community of the K yeah this is a kind of uh funny question because there's a tendency we all have to answer by the material that we work on now I have published a couple of years ago after working for 20 years on it with a former student and now colleague Professor Andrew Gross of Catholic University of America in in Washington DC a whole new addition of the temple scroll now I've been in love with the temple scroll since the day came out that's actually let me see the uh the third book that I published on this scroll and so I would certainly want to say that this is a very important text but you can't fall into that trap of thinking whatever you work on is the most important the truth is that every time I turn to another text and begin to work at it in in depth I see that there's tremendous amount of really interesting stuff in virtually every one of these texts but um I as I say in a certain sense the temple Scrolls attracted me the most there's a reason for that because in 1967 when I was still a student I had the great opportunity of meeting yiga yadin because he came to brandise to lecture on the scroll they had recovered during the 67 War what happened was that in in 1960 someone came to uh to uh Yin and offered to sell him this scroll and gave him a few fragments as a sample yadin gave the guy a $10,000 deposit the guy disappeared never came back so at any rate the when 1967 war came you didn't by that time realize where the scroll was it's possible that it was also tipped off by Professor Frank Cross of Harvard because Frank cross was taken you think there's no excitement in this field was taken to some type of a dark area under a bridge in Beirut and uh this fellow named we call Condo khil iscandar who during the days when kran was under Jordanian control from 48 to 67 he served as the one who bought Tech from the bin then sold them to the Palestine archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem now the Rockefeller so anyhow cross was taken under some Bridge somewhere in Beirut and hustled into a car and a guy under a BL blanket try to sell him a text and he said to the guy under the blanket condo get out from under that silly blanket and condo then offered to sell in the manuscript in 19 this this took place approximately in May of 67 so he may have tipped off Ross may have tipped off yadin when the war started and yadin arranged as a result of this for Israeli security agents to go to the home of condo in Bethlehem and to get the scroll they eventually paid him now you didn't came to brandise to lecture about this role I mean this was some exciting story and I was asked to accompany him back to Providence in the car and we were really in luck cuz he didn't didn't know how to get to his house he was a visiting professor and his daughter drove they didn't let him drive because in the Army he was the commander of the 48 War of the entire Israeli armed forces and he couldn't drive he kept on cracking up army cars so he never drove thereafter and he didn't know how to get to his house remember there was a time before not only before your phone but before GPS right no ways nothing right he didn't know how to go so we drove around for two hours and I got to meet so this really excited me this scow I thought maybe I do it for my dissertation but he dragged on publishing it and it didn't come out until the early 70s so I didn't do my dissertation on it I did my dissertation on other halakic texts texts of Jewish law from the dead SE Scrolls and the minute this text was available I started working on it and uh interestingly some of the things that I still write are about that text even though the the new edition is out so it never it never somehow that text never stops interesting me and one of the things that that text sort of gave birth to indirectly in my work is that there's another text text which came to light only at a conference in 1984 in Yim and that text is the one we call mmt abbreviated m t some decisions or laws of the Torah because in thei means AIC decision so anyway this text is a is is a group of 22 laws in the form of a letter from the founders of the Dead Scrolls sect to the Jerusalem High priests telling them why they seceded and why they are not going to agree with them as to 22 laws and these laws are all about sacrifices and tumara Purity and impurity and when you examine them you find out that they take the view that in the mishna is that of theim the Sadducees remember the Sadducees were the sect of high priests in second temp times and uh some of the arist aristocracy that competed with the Pharisees the pusim were the forerunners and the Tomic rabbis so I jumped into working on this text also like crazy it's another one of my favorites and ended up publishing quite a bit but what's really interesting is that this text agreed a lot with this other one the temple scroll called the Hebrew M mikdash and together we're able to put together tremendous amount of M material pertaining to the halic Jewish law views of the Sadducees and that is an amazing Discovery for second temple Judaism in general Way Beyond talking about some characters who assembled some manuscripts at the Dead Sea so that's what I said we don't want to study the characters we want to study second temple Judaism and these guys have been a great help in learning about it what do we know about the Sadducees what do we know about their beliefs their ideas their we too much because Josephus talks a little about it and the Gomorrah has some so first of all on the what Josephus tells us he tells us you see we have to understand something there's a problem here before we even go on a lot of Sadducees were very H onized but other Sadducees were really Pious coim and so it seems that some Pious coim founded the Dead Sea scroll sect after the maban Revolt now therefore we have to differentiate between them and the ones that were hellenized Josephus talks a lot about the heniz he talks about how they believe basically the epicurian idea that God isn't involved in the world once he created it they he talks about the fact that they basically take literalist interpretations of the Torah apparently more literalist he says they don't believe in a world to come now when we take a look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and we compare them to some of the material in Rabbi literature we start to understand a little bit more about the pious Sadducees were very strict on laws of Pur and impurity who disagreed with the practices of the pusim the Pharisees about some minor what looked like minor elements of how to do the ritual but they even disagree on some more important questions on how to do the ritual in the bet mikdash the temple so at any rate we start to understand that we don't know that much from Josephus we know some H opinions in Rabbi literature just for example in Rabbi literature we know that they observed CH on Sunday only on Sunday because they began to count theat from the day after the Sabbath which was understood by them to mean Shabbat Shabbat whereas the pusim and this is the counting of the OM by all Jews who count the OM counted the OM from the day after the first day of PES which they to be the quote Shabbat meaning like a festival at any rate when we go to the den Scrolls and this is in the temple scroll and it's in this mmt text and it's in about 25 other texts we have calendar texts that give their calendar and believe it or not how do you have Shabbat always on a Sunday you have a calendar which uses solar months and if you have a calendar of 364 days I know know this is hard to follow quickly and you have days of 30 30 31 30 30 30 31 and you have four of them a calendar of 364 91 Time 4 you end up with a situation in which you can have Shabbat have uh have shabot come out every single year on a on a Sunday but by the way they start the counting of the Omare not on the first Saturday night of P they started on the first Saturday night after the last day of PES and it looks from looking at this that this sectarian calendar was a second temple competing calendar which uh the Sadducees held to so this is how we start to learn more and more about the Sadducees by looking at some of the Jewish law type and practices of the Dead Sea scroll sect but there are some people who mistakenly think that oh if that's the case they must be the sades no what emerges is there were two trends of Hal of Jewish law in second temple times the one of the Pharisees the one of the Sadducees the Pharisees is the one that the rabbis follow the one we follow the Sadducees went out of use eventually but I can tell you it was followed by the Dead Sea sectarians as well it was followed by the medieval Kites and until to this day there are Kites and they follow certain of these laws and it's followed was followed in some level is by the Samaritans who are the ctim known from the gamor and who still exist until today Samaritans there are two major communities of Samaritans one one uh near harim in and the other one in till today in Israel I'm just curious to know why people let's say equate um they kind of consider the kites to be the spiritual Heirs of the Sadducees when I I see the Sadducees as as you mentioned they're literalists and kites seem to be metaphoric about certain yeah you see this is one of the things we learned from the Scrolls because if it's true that the sad youi method is shared by the Scrolls when you look at the way the Scrolls interpret the tanak you see especially the Torah that it's closer to literal but not really literal and I'm going to give you a kind of laav deal comparison so people say that Evangelical Christians are fundamentalists which means that they interpret the Bible literally do you think there's any fund any Evangelical who thinks God has an arm so what do we mean they interpret the Bible literally it's an overstatement what made by about evangelicals an overstatement made about this about about the the the uh Sadducees but the reason why Sadducees and karaites are considered to perhaps have some continuity comes from several things number one there are some dsy Scrolls texts especially the one originally called fragments of its site work now known as the Damascus document that somehow found its way in two manuscripts into the kyoga and the only way to explain that is if somebody was reading this text the kites seem to be a logical group for it the second reason is that the kites themselves make the CLA that they go back to the Sadducees and have many things that are parallel to either sadu or Dead Sea Scrolls so one of the possibilities is that certain of these practices survived underground they weren't observable but in the end they came out of ground when the karite movement began to coales and the history of the kide movement itself is very complicated but when it began to coales that absorbed some of these Traditions that had been underground That You Don't See in rinic literature but that existed a among some groups of Jews and the other possibility that's been suggested is that there are some claims of discovery of Scrolls in ancient times and early medieval time that maybe some documents that had been hidden somewhere kran or elsewhere may have found their way to some of these groups but when you also take the fact that the Samaritans are in this thing too it does look like the Samaritans and the Sadducees they do share a lot of things which are found also in the Scrolls a lot of ideas of specific let me ask you when you look at um the Pharisees back then what do you glean when in regards to tradition how do you understand based on all the research that you've been doing on it what how how would you understand rabbi tradition well you see the thing is like this what happens when you study the whole second temple period and in fact the history of ritic material as a historical set of of documents you come to realize that the story is more complex than the way it's usually told let me put it that way and one very good example is this we learned from the sectarian material that in second temple times when the beginnings of the mission are taking place there was a competing group about whom we knew only some nasty remarks about them why they were wrong now we start to understand not just by the Dead Sea scroll sect itself but some of the material in the Scrolls we start to have a much wider understanding of the intellectual religious ferment that was going on in second temple times and we therefore start to realize that there wasn't just one group and a couple of schleppers that were being excommunicated but that there really was a competition in this in this period and then if you go back and you reread even many RBI texts you'll realize that this is just we didn't understand that but it's it's clear from the text that that was the case so that's a big difference between let's call it the simplistic way of seeing the tradition as if it's the only way and assuming that it just continuously goes with no competition to realizing that there was competition which essentially was you could say defeated by what we consider to be the authoritative tradition but the other views did exist and you start to understand much more what was going on in the period as I say from an intellectual and religious point of view now I think it would be difficult to maintain an academic approach as an orthodox Jew if you didn't believe that the approach that won was the right one that's a very important point and and what what things have you seen that supports that for you you mean that that the right one yeah okay so first of all in many of these arguments that are going back and forth you can see sometimes that the evidence of the tanak is in favor of the rabbi view now this will get into some very small technicalities about some of these things that are being discussed but you sometimes can tell that that's the case then there's another thing if you step back and think about it why is it the why is it that the point of view of the pusim and the rabbis survived and the other point of view did not so part of that answer is in the inability to use the combination of interpretation and the notion of Tor shabal to allow Judaism to deal with all the ongoing challenges that had fced in different times and places and if you take a look for example at the history of kism you see that sometimes they had no choice but to Simply back down from major positions because their system does not allow them to deal with these things and part of the greatness of the system that emerges from the gamorra and then from as it goes on through the years until today is the ability to deal with these situations and to know how to handle a whole variety of things that come up that no one ever could have imagined in those days so when I say it it looks like it's correct both from an interpretive point of view and also from the fact that it's a successful way for Judaism to develop over the ages and to maintain it self in ways that could not have been done with uh the other systems as you see when you watch what that system did in terms of the Samaritans and the and the kites right interestingly the the rambam um in his in his understanding of T palal to my limited understanding um interestingly uh he he sees the adaptability of T Bal as Central right to its core right this is stated more clearly by R yoseph albo in the saarim but that's right that is right now there are some people who turn around and say well that proves that you you know you can just decide whatever you want but no there's this tremendous idea of a balance kind of conservative along with the ability to adapt to new circumstances and and and there are certain like you could call them rules of the game of how this proceeds in a way that it maintains itself essentially you know in an unending way and that is really an amazing fact so to some extent the what you could call the the victory or the winner or whatever it is is because the system is right it was a system that allows Judaism to continue with its basic principles and its basic ideas in in a permanent way while at the same time dealing with the new circumstances and by the way an interesting thing is but you're not supposed to come around and say let's change this let's change this that we don't do yeah so this is the interesting thing even though we know that if you look at things we are doing they're not the same as they used to be done and some of these are almost unimportant things but nonetheless you see things being different than they were there's um it's almost like like you said there's a there's like a a balance that's that's right that's coming through that's right and we maintain that balance and we know how to maintain that balance by appealing to our textual traditions and and making use of them to assure that fantastic thank you by the way is there um in terms of uh do we see anything in these texts or show that the show anything specific um that shows like how uh the rabbis did draw from existing Traditions no because you see we have to remember these people oppose our tradition now this is the thing that's part of us maybe almost partly humorous I say they oppose our tradition but they agree with it all over the place what do I mean this is an opposing group that leaves Jerusalem leaves the main stay where they leave these people to separate because they believe that no one else is properly observing the Torah they have had Affiliates in other places but this is where their main Center apparently was so what happens is that they give us information about things that pertain to the continuity of the rabbis but they're they're constantly criticizing the Pharisees now while they criticize the Pharisees they do a lot of the same stuff because one of the things that we forget very often in Judaism is that there's certain basic fundamentals that are going to say fundamental no matter what so you get you know just I'll give you a funny example so they they criticize the Pim all the time the first law of Shabbat they have is that Shabbat starts when the sun is distant from the Horizon by its own diameter now that's about 45 minutes before Shabbat now how do they know that law because they quote the right now keep the Sabbath to San ify it if you look up that PUK and see how it's treated by kazal you'll see guess what all the people who think that we're obligated in Torah to add time at the beginning of Shabbat that will give us a little extra of what we call to shabbat addition to shabbat they quote the same thing now I that's an example of the exact same Shabbat law but if you'll keep going in Shabbat laws you'll find Shabbat laws where this group is stricter and you'll see that in in a number of places to put it in a funny example you're not allowed to make a salad on Shabbat and I'm not talking about chopping little pieces like the discussion of Israeli salad you know like it all got to be done before not just that you have to cook before everything has to be prepared before so in some cases they're stricter and yet at the same time some things are basically the same interesting okay and you f to the next question do you also find that I've heard some people theorize that like when when the saguan movement kind of collapsed you see remnants of their or sympathetic rabbis that say in the in the rinic tradition that's shot there's one Rabbi that is identified in the gamorra as having been right not a sadu but a shite right now the better question is where are the shites come with this so I would like to suggest that if you take a look at the whole history here what you can see is that there is a set of you could almost call it a process of elimination because if you go back into the second temple period and we're really talking about the period post the maban Revolt which was 168 to 164 bcee and we're really talking about the period after 152 because in 152 that's when yonatan the Hasan establishes the haonan uh basically rule because people don't realize this but after the mban Revolt Yehuda and his followers were kicked out of the beta mikdash kicked out of Jerusalem he was killed in battle in 160 so it's only in 152 when yonathan is able to take control that the period of the konian Empire begins now once you hit that period That's where Josephus says there are three sects and he mentions the Pharisees the Sadducees and the ases again a lot of people think the ases are the dead sect now basically at that point there are two general Trends in Jewish law and practice the one that we later call pharisaic and we call sadan now what happens is that when you get to the destruction of the temple the sad youan loses its power base the temple and basically stops functioning but the question is among the pusim there then takes place an inner debate beill B Shi now now be Shi takes the position of the strictor ones that is to say that even though there was a fundamental difference because the Sadducees don't really accept the idea of Torah or a law and that doesn't exist with the shames they do accept it nonetheless the shames end up arguing for stricter view than the one of the of the B Hill winds out well the shites basically die out and the view of B Hillel goes forward as the normative more lenient VI so it happens twice that the system knocks out the stricter people because the stook in many cases was stricter those who were faithful TOA not the heniz ones who weren't it knocks that out and then still again has to knock out what you could call not really a survival of the sad es but a group that ends up taking what we we would call the distric View and when that gets knocked out because we follow B Shai in very few things the view of B Hillel becomes the normative view that underlies the mishna even when the other view is continuing to be cited and even when of course there always are stricter views rendered than the ones that get accepted but that's another matter because of the inner debate which is just a debate of people who are running with the hilel view and and the shabai view is mostly finished off so that process takes plac in the inner history of of Judaism in this period brilliant um so I want to actually discuss the variance in the text between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the mtic tradition um what does this tell us let's say about the uh development of the biblical Canon so we have to go back take a step before the uh answering your direct question to explain that there were approximately 250 biblical manuscripts in the Dead Sea Scrolls as we mentioned before there's some pieces of everything in the Bible EX in the in the tanak except for Esther and except for uh neia now when we look and this is especially the case with the Torah we look at these manuscripts we see that the manuscripts come in different types and there is one type which occupies quite a number of manuscripts probably something like 30% which are very very much almost exactly like ours there is a for example a manuscript of VRA which is written in the old script which is almost letter forl rra a few vs and yud spelling issues and stuff like that is basically the same text there is what we call Isaiah B from the original Seven found by the BET and boy with his famous goat in cave one of Kuman now not Isaiah a which is in the middle of the Shrine of the book of the Israel Museum Isaiah B Isaiah B is a protomeric text almost the same as ours so many many ones are like that then there were a couple of other types of texts there were a small number of texts that look they have variations that look like Vari in the Greek bible they prove that the variations in the Greek Bible come from a using a Biblical text that was a little different from ours or that some of those variations come from that we call those septu AAL texts because the septu aent is the name of the Greek bible derived from the idea that 70 Scholars wrote the translation now then we have a few texts that we call Proto uh Samaritan because like the later Samaritan Torah they have what we call harmonistic variance that's where when you're let's say relating something inot but they're psim about it inim you slep those PIM in and copy them here and then the second time youle theim into into and it's we call those harmonistic TXS now so far I accounted for the 30% Proto faric and maybe between the two things I just mentioned another 30 another 30% but there's 40% of something else 40% are texts about 40% are texts that we call the mixed texts meaning they don't follow anyone particularly their loose texts when compared to the the uh the mtic text now the question comes how do these texts relate one to another so now I'm going to tell you what I think about this I'm not claiming everyone thinks this if you examine the majority of these what we call the mix text or you examine the Proto Saran type text what you find out in all these texts is that they're ultimately based on a text that's very much like the mtic text so it seems that at some point as the text was being handed down two things were happening one was that the protom mastic text we call it Proto because there's no vowels and there's no uh TR there's no tame MRA no cancellation marks so that's what we call protomeric in the protomeric text when it was being passed down it was going through a standardization process and at the same time there were other texts floating around and it seems that there was tendency of some scribes or or passers down of the text to to expand texts or to in some cases write texts and this is another matter in a different dialect of Hebrew because Isaiah a is in a different dialect of Hebrew and these coexisted with the authoritative type text and to some extent they're based on it and represent adaptations of it now when we go from Quan where this situation attains to Mada and the barok caves where we have texts of the Bible less manuscripts but we have texts of the Bible guess what they're all Proto mastic so what is apparent is that between the period in which the Dead Sea Scrolls materials were gathered admittedly by a group of sectarian Jews where they at least were tolerating a variety of versions besides what we would consider to be the authoritative massic tax besides that right they had these other ones but the minute we get to the period a little later Mada remember kumran is destroyed in the year 68 CE but the text are gathered earlier Mada is destroyed in 73 CA both of course destroyed by the Romans now when we get to the VMA caves 132 to5 again bad the VMA caves only protomeric Tex and this indeed is the period in which it seems that the leaders of the tanim teach of the mishna perhaps on uh in cooperation with kohanim in the beta mikdash managed to standardize that the protomeric is the authoritative correct text now one other point I want to make I mentioned the beta mik because there are some texts in the gamor that hint at the fact that there were official correctors of Bible texts in the B mikash mag farim as they called and that they made sure that the Bible text gradually got St standardized to the authoritative protomeric once we hit the period of boka 132 to5 now we're still before the editing of the bishna there's only one kind of text and it is the authoritative one and that is uh what seems to have happened now the argument I'm making though is that the protomeric is the earliest form of the text and let me explain that argument for a second if you take a look at the he Hebrew of the mastic text and even if you Jewish do it for get a kumran manuscript you can open up your regular T and do it and you compare that to ancient inscriptions that we have from the first temple period you will find out that the first temple Hebrew in the Tanakh is the first temple Hebrew of the inscriptions with just a bit more standardization of of spelling and when we look at the highly expansive use of v and yud in some of these other types of Bible manuscripts we excess excess vowel letters we can see that what's happened is that those are expanded texts and that the protomeric represents the earlier form of first temple Hebrew of course there are some books written in second temple Hebrew and they tend to be moving away from the the nature of the of the way in which the the style is when compared to first temple style but uh the they were also protom mastic what about like um texts for example in neia there's you know kind of a switching off between Hebrew and Aramaic yes so what do they make what do you make of that well that's because almost everything in Aramaic in the biblical books Ezra deia is documents they copy documents and Aramaic was the language on which all those documents were written so that's what's mostly going on there of course Aramaic replaces Hebrew as the main language of the Jews in the Persian period that is to say after the uh conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus the Great 540 BCE right it used to be if you talked about this in great Nick everybody knew it from high school but now everybody went to high school Great Neck they don't know it anymore but it used to be get an audience and the people all knew the history of Iran from ancient times on but okay now so at any rate right uh once that happens Aramaic becomes the standard international language and the language of most of the Jews it become the spoken language and then when the mban Revolt CL we have a big Revival of Hebrew and that Revival of Hebrew is unfortunately pushed away by the time you get to the time of the mishna already everyone's talking Aramaic you know that the the students of uh rabi Yuda who edited the mishna there was a a woman who was a housekeeper in his home who came came from the south of the country from the area of Judea as opposed to the Galilee and the students of rabi yudi asked her what certain Hebrew words meant because they didn't know as much Hebrew as she knew because she came from the south because Aramaic in the Galilee came the language so there's an up and down between Hebrew and Aramaic over a number of periods of time I'm curious about um the you know it seems to be that the Samaritan texts kind of like fill in the blanks that's why people considered to be later um some people but um the fact that they maintain the Paleo Hebrew script vers yeah well there's some paleo Hebrew used what the gor calls kav in in the Dead Sea Scrolls too there are I don't know maybe 1520 there's a beautiful manuscript of Schmo that's again almost complete in paleo Hebrew but uh the Samaritans maintained it because the Samaritans try to maintain first temple Tradition now we the the gor tells us and it seems to be true that the the script we call today kav is really AR Aramaic script and it was acquired by the Jews during the Persian period and especially by those who lived in Mesopotamia that is today's Iraq and they brought it back to ER Israel with them with the period of the return and that was the end of the old Hebrew script that no longer got used and one of the reasons for this is is that the old Hebrew script is made to Chisel into stone if you just picture you know if anybody saw the movie The Ten Commandments which is actually rather funny if you see it now yeah it's humorous to watch it but at any rate right if you see the Ten Commandments you see Joshua chiseling in stone that's what he apparently did in Egypt before he became uh Moses's assistant so anyhow you see the the the image there of chisel in stone and the Hebrew letters of the old Hebrew are made for that the Aramaic language is made to be written with a brush or a pen on whatever writing material you're using and not on Stone on skin or Papyrus and that's why it it beat out the old Hebrew you know very very quickly really enlightening stuff um yeah and um one thing that I feel like people probably very interested in is uh the next question beny you want to get into number six sure the Scrolls contain apocalyptic and Messianic texts that seem to reflect the beliefs and expectations of The Kuman Community how do these beliefs compare with other Jewish and early Christian Messianic expectations of the time okay so what we have to do to understand this question is to realize that there are two systems of messianism in the kumran sectarian materials and then there's another one more in the some of the nonsectarian texts now the one that's in some of the nonsectarian textt we can deal with very quickly I call it non- Messianic messianism it talks about a period of redemption it talks about a period of perfection of the world of Peace Etc but there is no Messiah figure that's a a an approach which did not get accepted in uh in in Jud ISM or Christianity although to some extent it's maintained in Modern Times by some liberal Protestants and some reformed Jews but it's there's no continuity it it died in Antiquity it came back for obvious reasons because it's easy to believe in as a kind of an ideal but it it gets away from Divine involvement but the points of view that The Kuman sectarian hold and then other non- sectarian documents hold for in in in basically there there were two types you have shared by kumran and everybody else Under the Sun including Christianity and every group of Jews that existed with the possible exception of those sades that were highly heniz is the regular old davidic Messiah that's the common one it's held in numerous Kuman script the text where there's one Messiah and it's a son of David it is the base of the Christian attempt to tie Jesus to the davidic house in providing a a genealogy for him and it is the view that ended up in Rabin Judaism as the main point of view of Jewish messianism now the other point of view is that there are twoim one mashia one Messiah of Aaron of Aaron a Priestly Messiah and one a messiah of Israel according to this scheme the most important thing is the temple whereas according to the David alone scheme the most important thing is the Kingdom so if the most important thing is the temple there's a Messianic Cohen who is the main mashiach and that main mashiach has along with him a kind of you could call a Messianic executive director the person handles all of the non ritual religious parts of running the society that would be the Messiah of Israel now this point of you may be on the coins of bar because the Bara coins many of them have on one side Shimon Isel even though his real name was Barosa as we now know but Shima the son of the star the prince of Israel and then I see in yzel Book of Ezekiel is a king and on the other side you flip over elazar hen the name of a high priest so that is a symbol with the two Messiah concept now Christianity to them what you're saying that he was expected to be a Messianic figure I'm not saying it was accepted by anybody what I'm saying is whoever put him on the coin may have considered that Jewish messianism requires two figures they're going along the lines going along the lines of this specific understanding of Messiah yeah the two Messiah two Messiah idea by the way if you look at the introduction in the ashkenazic sedor I don't remember whether this far also say this the introduction there's a whole poem begin it looks like you don't say it okay and if you look at that it has a Ben David and a Cohen who is a uh who who who who is Messianic in character the cohain will come back to the end of days as opposed to the Cohen who just had cohain it's it's an eschatological idea of the Cohen so this idea of a Coan is an eschatological figure it has a little bit of a place here or there in Judy but now we have to get the Christianity so I mentioned before Christianity is basically based on the idea that Jesus would be from the House of David and therefore would be entitled to be a messiah of course every Jewish kid hears wait a minute how could this be if Joseph right was not his father then how can you trace through Joseph I don't have an answer to that okay that's what they did they traced through Joseph who's not supposed to be his natural biological father they traced through him the claim that yesu Jesus is in reality a davidic descendant to legitimate him now when we go further with this if you actually read all of the Christian texts you'll find that the Priestly Messiah idea comes in there also because in the epistle to Hebrews Jesus is both the priest and the sacrifice and there's a whole description there of Temple practice according to that view so what turns out in Christianity is that there are sort of Echoes of the two Messiah concept also in the way in which he's pictured now I have to take you back to another manner pertaining to messianism there are two Trends in Judaism regarding the Messianic era there is one which we call utopian and the other catastrophic now the utopian messianism is the one that became almost normative in the after math of the period of cabala in spat because that's the one that takes the concept of tikon of improvement and turns it into the basic basis of how to achieve uh uh how how to achieve Redemption now that concept existed in Antiquity too it means the following it's utopian because we build a perfect society and the further and further we get in that process eventually mashia comes to lead us in completing it that's the utop idea the catastrophic idea we could also call it by the way the naturalistic idea the catastrophic idea is that the world gets so bad that God has there's an explosion and everything is going to be destroyed so God sends a figure to redeem us but in the process there's a massive war and in that massive war the evildoers eventually get destroyed that's the norm in the densy Scrolls that's why you have the Scroll of the war of the sons of Light against the sons of darkness and that scroll has been mentioned several times by Netanyahu in some of his speeches and that particular type of approach the the catastrophe leading to the ultimate Redemption is the basically the main one of the sectarians in Quan even though it's the main one of the sectarians at Quan it's very obvious that some of the other texts that they preserve that are from what I call group two texts that are just general Jewish texts preserve the other idea that there will be a better and better time and eventually uh Redemption will come because we will deserve it in certain way this is the argument of the rabbis whether the Redemption will come to a world that is completely innocent and Guiltless or one that is completely guilty because if you're completely guilty you better have a quick Redemption before the whole world explodes and if you're completely righteous you get a Redemption because you deserve it so those two concepts exist in the Scrolls but the sectarians themselves adhere to the catastrophic one now by the way this is compromised in the rambam because the rambam assumes that there would still be a war at the end of days because of the need to obliterate a minority of bad people in order to have the naturalistic type of event of Messianic era that he expected so I I have a question about the uh sons of Darkness versus the sons of Light yeah who did they believe do we know who they believed were the oh yeah just read the text they tell you it's everybody but us this is the problem with the Dead Sea Scrolls as an example for contemporary Judaism there are some things they believe that are opposite one thing they believe is absolute predestination absolute predestination God makes every decision for you now that is not a normal Jewish belief normal Jewish belief is that God forn knows what we will do but we have choice we make free choice now the other thing though that they believe that is not uh sort of like in character of Judaism is to believe that everybody but them is an evildoer and to be destroyed so if you look at the text it describes Wars with all the nations around until they are finally Victorious against all of them and then it includes the fact that all Jews who don't join them will be destroyed and then at the end they're going to March up to jush and run the temple according to their views so this gets the sort of what you might call the dark side of the Suns of light because there are parts of their approach in as a result of their extreme sectarianism which are not ones that Judaism wants to uh you know put into practice in any way in any way at all so I mean the no matter what Messianic point of view you take in Judaism the idea is that the the non-jews who are good people are all going to still be around in the end of day so they can come up to the temple as it's right the nice people stay us right so here the idea everybody but us is no good that's what you see there fasinating yeah that's a negative type of messianism you might say almost an angry messianism yeah yeah but you see what's interesting is if you go through that very same text I just have to tell you it doesn't happen what they say this is very funny they make it out in the text that all the night nations are going to be destroyed whoever wrote this text compiled it from some other documents and one of the things that he put into this this uh Scroll of the war of the sons against the sons of Darkness are apparently pre-existing beautiful poems and he has the most beautiful poem about all the nations coming up to worship God in the end of days what do you mean you just told me they're supposed to be killed because there r no good and he got them coming up to worship God what's going on so apparently either they weren't happy with that idea themselves or they compromis I don't know but you see poems have the other type of vision the more you talk about it the more I understand what you mean by the development part of Judaism how things things develop you know and it's it's extremely necessary because as you see so many strange ideas and things and that just just creep in and well very interesting fact is that if you look in the in the talmud in Sanhedrin you see that sometime in the second or third Century you you start to get there the discussion of the Messianic era and you see that a lot of these kind of apocalyptic ideas start to be mentioned by kazal that weren't mentioned earlier and we don't know why they're mentioned at that time but many of them seem to be aspects of the heritage of second temple times a famous example that we can't solve is the mashiach Ben yose it looks like something that must be a second temple idea but we don't have any text mentioning mashiach B Yos the idea that there's a predecessor mashiach who gets killed in battle and then again we also know that the very same ideas in the end of the Byzantine period before the Muslim Conquest so we're talking now really about the 500s and early 600s quite a number of texts were composed some of which continue to be composed after the Muslim Conquest which talk about catastrophic war and which assume a great war in which somebody is going to defeat the Romans now the Romans were the main enemy that the war scroll thought it would have to fight because apparently the scroll was written sometime either around or before the Romans came to ER Israel in 63 BC they conquered it we can't mix that up with the destruction destruction is in CE right 70 CE the Temple's destroyed 63 BCE the Romans first conquered ER Israel so at any rate the uh it seems the dead SE Arians in the war scroll expected the Romans to be the main protagonists the enemy and uh they have a term for them ktim because the Kon is on is an island on cre so a part of creed a city in Creed I'm sorry City in Creed and they assumed that the Romans would be coming from the aan somehow but uh at any rate what is really interesting uh to see is that the very same ideas of major battles involving Roman armies Roman now being Byzantium against somebody in this case being the Arabs was understood to perhaps be a harbinger of the end of days and so texts that look like the war scroll were being written in that era in the the 500s and early 600s of uh CE W eye openening stuff and um I actually wanted to mention that um and you you've discussed this on on other uh podcasts that every is that besides obviously what we learned about messianism at the time and and even Christianity one thing that that people don't know or at least Jewish people don't know usually is that um you know by studying certain Christian texts we discover a lot of practices of of Jews at the time like for example the first time a mafer is mentioned is it right correct me if I'm wrong Jesus M yeah it's mentioned it doesn't mean it's the first ma here it the first mention or another example they always give which is a funny example is you ask the question who is the first Jew that we know was named that is breit Mila it doesn't mean he's the first one to be named as bre Mila but John the Baptist and and the reality is that to to the New Testament in general is a very important source for certain things about the history of Judaism and just as give one example beyond the kind of things we're talking about right now when you get to the book of Acts and they describe the apostles going all over the area of turkey and Greece and eventually reaching Rome and some of the Isles this is some of the earliest evidence we have for the Jewish communities because they always go to the synagogues and it's the earliest information we have of synagogues in those places and then uh there's a lot a lot a lot of other things are not understood about the manner in which these texts provide information about Jewish history and uh as say some some religious practices but some other things as well so before we go um I just want to know um what you think do you think that these texts today are relevant to the modern uh read the modern tell you there's some very interesting ways in which they're relevant first of all I mean you can compare ideas like uh Messianic ideas with well what are we should we believe today as Jews but remember one important thing the Dead Sea Scrolls don't have religious Authority for us they're historical texts they don't have religious Authority for anyone because they're not part of the direct line of tradition of Jewish text now this is not the only type of text that has this problem but it's stronger than you know the the katam S excuse me the K the Kish did not want people to use tractates of the Mei that weren't known in earlier times on the grounds that they're not a direct part of the tradition but it's fairly obvious that the meiri fits right into the tradition of the rabbis of the Middle Ages it's obvious that these texts do not fit into the straight M of the pusim and the rabbis of the tal so that being the case these are are really for us historical text so the relevance is a we can learn a tremendous amount about our complex history and some of the things that we learn about our complex history will be relevant today because we need to consider some of the same same issues sometimes and I don't mean you know we're not going to reconsider our calendar what I mean to say by that is that we can take lessons from these texts about what happens when certain extreme positions are allowed to overcome other position i s we can see in these texts there are some texts have very beautiful ideas poetry that's inspiring and things like this that we can gain by studying these texts but they don't have a place in the authoritative Authority system now there's one other really interesting fact about these texts and actually I gave for the second time a lecture about this only uh yesterday yeah and uh it wasn't yesterday it was day before sorry and uh it was uh the the role that they've played in Jewish Christian relations and this is because these Scrolls have reminded many Christians about the extent to which Christianity is rooted in early Judaism and that notion has been a help in the history of Jewish Christian relations and the Improvement that started after the Holocaust partly because of the Holocaust but the scrolls are quoted every once in a while in works that are arguing for Christians to give up anti-Semitism and to take more positive views of Jews and Jew of of Jews and Judaism and uh this has happened there is some uh particular places it's quite prominent for example in a work that the Catholic Church issued regarding Jewish interpretation of the Bible and how it should be respected and the Dead Sea Scrolls are mentioned explicitly there so what's happened is that the Scrolls have had certain positive effect effects on the Christian move away from anti-Semitism among those who have made that move and that's been a very positive thing do they do they feel the same way about let's say the um Book of Enoch and books in the Apocrypha um is that is that something of well this is very now you're opening up a big question here's why because those books are actually first of all there is Enoch in the Scrolls okay second of all 12 books that are the Apocrypha are in the Catholic Bible this is a uberous fact every Catholic has the books of mccabes telling the khah story in their Bible you imagine if we had the Christmas story in our Bible right they have in the Bible now the question when we talk about these changes in Christianity moving away from positions that were anti-semitic which has certainly been done officially by the Catholic church it's certainly obviously been done unofficially in the Evangelical groups that love Israel and love Jews and it's been done in certain ways even by the liberal Protestants that are not our greatest fans but of course the Catholic Church did it officially in the 60s now the point I want to make is that this was part of a trend that starts already much earlier to see the history of Judaism and therefore the background of Christian chisanity as available in documents like Apocrypha and some of these other documents then that was starting before the Dey Scrolls were found then came the Holocaust which is a very big reason to do this because many Christians realized that the the Holocaust did have a background in Christian anti-Semitism even if it wasn't the direct course course and then the Scrolls came and waved the gigantic flag about the significance of placing Christianity's origins in the context of inner Jewish debate and Jewish discussion and then one of the big conclusions of that was that classical Christian anti-Semitism was not a very good idea and it began to be rejected by church after church in official documents and the Scrolls have a role there I don't want to overestimate that role but they have a role in making that happen although sadly the Holocaust is probably the biggest Factor here in and certainly for the Vatican in in wanting to make sure that they could not Harbor Concepts that could lead to violence of that and destruction of that nature and and you know physical annihilation of Jews so they they moved squarely away from it but the scrolls are there in that story in a uh I don't know what we want to say what we want to call it not the leading role but a role but the whole rediscovery of second tempal Judaism starts in a Renaissance runs through the Reformation for the non-jews Jews it starts in in Renaissance for them it starts in the reformation and it the Scrolls and what's going on today and archaeology and all this have completely you know uh brought this to the surface so is that why the um I forget which pope it was in the previous Century um tried to kind of backtrack and say that we made a mistake when when it came to scapegoating the Jews and Juds as the this is from the 60s when this started Pope John Paul the 23d followed by he passed away in the middle and the job was finished by uh Pope Paul the the 6th and uh these positions you know have been taken very formally by the Catholic church and other churches followed in many ways either formally or informally now I mean we still have problems with certain groups much of those problems are about Israel and and those problems remain but the classical anti-Semitism has for the most part been removed yeah I mean I think to me the biggest um maybe I'm wrong but I feel like the biggest source of anti-Semitism is the dide right the uh yeah but no one believes that anymore right that's the point because the New Testament actually doesn't say it the crazy part the New Testament says that the Romans killed him exactly exactly it's strange the whole thing was strange amazing well we really want to thank you this was so okay eye openening and uh thank you for making the time it was really okay so we'll say good night and thank you gentlemen thank you know let me know when it's posted Etc of course of course okay thank you very much good night very much we appreciate your time thank you sure okay good night [Music] he

[Music] [Applause] thank you for joining the Judaism demystified podcast professor schiffman it&#39;s an honor and pleasure to have you on thank you so for our viewers who may be unfamiliar can you provide us with an overview of what the Dead Sea Scrolls are the historical context It Was Written in and how their Discovery in the mid 20th century transformed our understanding of Jewish history and second temple Judaism okay of course the question itself could be a 45 minute lecture but we&#39;ll try to get it down into a uh a shorter answer for this evening so what we have to understand is that in the caves at an area called kumran and that is not the ancient name that&#39;s an Arab name for the area on the shore of the Dead Sea beginning in 1947 and running through the 19 mid-50s approximately 900 I shouldn&#39;t say manuscripts but we should say better the remnants of what were 900 manuscripts from the second temple period were found specifically these documents were copied between 225 BCE and around the turn of the era we sometimes say the year zero there is no year zero right but okay the turn of the era now these documents were collected in the library of some people who had a group of buildings on the shore of the Dead Sea and these individuals represent a sect of Judaism from second temple times now most Scholars think that they are the Asen who are described by Josephus although what that word means but there are many similarities between Josephus at description and what we see with the uh Scrolls themselves now these documents as I mentioned are very fragmentary and after they were discovered they had to be reassembled into a of partial jigsaw puzzle now I have to say that this is not the case with the first seven Scrolls that were found by the famous bin boy who first wandered into what we call cave 1 in 1947 because those Scrolls were closer to being complete and in fact in the case of what we call the great Isaiah scroll it&#39;s the entire book of yeshayahu of Isaiah from beginning to end so those texts were in much better shape but then all those discovered afterwards which are about 900 are in this fragmentary form now we generally believe that these Scrolls were gathered by the sectarian group but not that all of them were composed by them because there were three types of literature in the collection the first is all books of Tanakh except for Esther now that isn&#39;t exactly true because Ezra and neya were considered one book book there is no neya so he could say except Esther and neya but also that&#39;s group one group two are texts that were generally read by Jews in the second temple period they&#39;re what the rabbis in the to would call external books that group included some works we knew before but not in the original Hebrew or Aramaic and some works that we did know partially in Hebrew are an Aramaic and some other works that we never heard of before and uh that&#39;s the second group of text the third group of texts are documents pertaining to a sectarian group the one that gathered the library and they are replete with the particular views of the group on all kinds of subjects regarding second temple Judaism now I want to say as a summary comment that we have to be very careful in making the false assumption that all you learn about when you study these texts are some strange Jews that went to the Dead Sea area because they didn&#39;t want to live with their fellow Jews whether in jerus or some other place we have to avoid that because since the first part of it is Bible the second part of it is material that Jews are reading all over the reading all over there&#39;s so much we can learn about second temple Judaism in general about virtually every topic and even from the sectarian documents they will for example criticize others for what they&#39;re doing so we learn all kinds of things about second temple Judaism from these texts now I should say a word about what the scrolls are not before so to speak concluding the answer to this rather wide question and that is they&#39;re not Christian they don&#39;t mention any Christian figures they&#39;re pre-christian they may be they are a value in understanding the background of Christianity because that&#39;s in second temple Judaism they&#39;re also not medieval a claim that was once made for the medieval Kites and the final false claim they are not the library of Jerusalem or the Jerusalem Temple some kind of official Jewish Library they are gathered by a sectarian group fascinating and um I&#39;m just curious to know what got you interested in this topic and did that ever affect your religious beliefs or observance well to start with the question of what got me interested it&#39;s funny I was looking for a topic I was studying with a very famous bible scholar at brandise University and as an undergraduate I was looking for a topic for an honors thesis and he was an expert on tahim professor nakuma and he suggested to me the possibility of comparing some of the poetry and the Scrolls to safer to heal in the Book of Psalms and that was my first research on the Dead Sea Scrolls and then it I somehow or another after taking a few courses in graduate school seemed to mind find myself most interested in this stuff because you were reading texts and analyzing texts that no one was working on but then there was one extra feature I realized very early that there was a lack of we should say background on the part of many of the scholars studying this stuff in terms of understanding the texts of early Judaism that we already had the rinic texts were the most of the material M talwood Etc and so I because I knew that material or at least knew how to study that material you can really never know all of that material unless you&#39;re the building own or Raj your safe or somebody with that kind of of of way of seeing it all at once but but but knew how to study it that I could make a very particular contribution to the field that would be helpful and and uh I never was sure at the beginning that it would become such a big area of interest and so then you started to have Market forces operating people constantly asking me to do things like what we&#39;re doing right now and so I have done a lot of other research I&#39;ll tell you I actually just recently sent to press a volume in which I collected together over 40 articles scholarly articles that I wrote on non-dead SE scroll topics and I&#39;ve written books that are not dead SE scroll topics I don&#39;t think too many people know about that you get a certain reputation as far as I would not say it affected religious observance where it really affects you in a certain way and especially when you are so close to this the actual material as opposed to the discussion is you really see the continuities of Judaism physically in front of you when you for example see the excavated uh Mikvah o or you looking the ritual bath or you&#39;re looking at fill in from that period or actual manuscripts of tanak from that period you realize the continuity of everything that we&#39;re doing so I think that that&#39;s a very big area in which it it affects you so I think that&#39;s a fair answer to that question fantastic okay um and SEC and another question is among the diverse texts found within the Dead Sea Scrolls which do you find most compelling or significant for understanding the religious social dynamics of the Jewish community of the K yeah this is a kind of uh funny question because there&#39;s a tendency we all have to answer by the material that we work on now I have published a couple of years ago after working for 20 years on it with a former student and now colleague Professor Andrew Gross of Catholic University of America in in Washington DC a whole new addition of the temple scroll now I&#39;ve been in love with the temple scroll since the day came out that&#39;s actually let me see the uh the third book that I published on this scroll and so I would certainly want to say that this is a very important text but you can&#39;t fall into that trap of thinking whatever you work on is the most important the truth is that every time I turn to another text and begin to work at it in in depth I see that there&#39;s tremendous amount of really interesting stuff in virtually every one of these texts but um I as I say in a certain sense the temple Scrolls attracted me the most there&#39;s a reason for that because in 1967 when I was still a student I had the great opportunity of meeting yiga yadin because he came to brandise to lecture on the scroll they had recovered during the 67 War what happened was that in in 1960 someone came to uh to uh Yin and offered to sell him this scroll and gave him a few fragments as a sample yadin gave the guy a $10,000 deposit the guy disappeared never came back so at any rate the when 1967 war came you didn&#39;t by that time realize where the scroll was it&#39;s possible that it was also tipped off by Professor Frank Cross of Harvard because Frank cross was taken you think there&#39;s no excitement in this field was taken to some type of a dark area under a bridge in Beirut and uh this fellow named we call Condo khil iscandar who during the days when kran was under Jordanian control from 48 to 67 he served as the one who bought Tech from the bin then sold them to the Palestine archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem now the Rockefeller so anyhow cross was taken under some Bridge somewhere in Beirut and hustled into a car and a guy under a BL blanket try to sell him a text and he said to the guy under the blanket condo get out from under that silly blanket and condo then offered to sell in the manuscript in 19 this this took place approximately in May of 67 so he may have tipped off Ross may have tipped off yadin when the war started and yadin arranged as a result of this for Israeli security agents to go to the home of condo in Bethlehem and to get the scroll they eventually paid him now you didn&#39;t came to brandise to lecture about this role I mean this was some exciting story and I was asked to accompany him back to Providence in the car and we were really in luck cuz he didn&#39;t didn&#39;t know how to get to his house he was a visiting professor and his daughter drove they didn&#39;t let him drive because in the Army he was the commander of the 48 War of the entire Israeli armed forces and he couldn&#39;t drive he kept on cracking up army cars so he never drove thereafter and he didn&#39;t know how to get to his house remember there was a time before not only before your phone but before GPS right no ways nothing right he didn&#39;t know how to go so we drove around for two hours and I got to meet so this really excited me this scow I thought maybe I do it for my dissertation but he dragged on publishing it and it didn&#39;t come out until the early 70s so I didn&#39;t do my dissertation on it I did my dissertation on other halakic texts texts of Jewish law from the dead SE Scrolls and the minute this text was available I started working on it and uh interestingly some of the things that I still write are about that text even though the the new edition is out so it never it never somehow that text never stops interesting me and one of the things that that text sort of gave birth to indirectly in my work is that there&#39;s another text text which came to light only at a conference in 1984 in Yim and that text is the one we call mmt abbreviated m t some decisions or laws of the Torah because in thei means AIC decision so anyway this text is a is is a group of 22 laws in the form of a letter from the founders of the Dead Scrolls sect to the Jerusalem High priests telling them why they seceded and why they are not going to agree with them as to 22 laws and these laws are all about sacrifices and tumara Purity and impurity and when you examine them you find out that they take the view that in the mishna is that of theim the Sadducees remember the Sadducees were the sect of high priests in second temp times and uh some of the arist aristocracy that competed with the Pharisees the pusim were the forerunners and the Tomic rabbis so I jumped into working on this text also like crazy it&#39;s another one of my favorites and ended up publishing quite a bit but what&#39;s really interesting is that this text agreed a lot with this other one the temple scroll called the Hebrew M mikdash and together we&#39;re able to put together tremendous amount of M material pertaining to the halic Jewish law views of the Sadducees and that is an amazing Discovery for second temple Judaism in general Way Beyond talking about some characters who assembled some manuscripts at the Dead Sea so that&#39;s what I said we don&#39;t want to study the characters we want to study second temple Judaism and these guys have been a great help in learning about it what do we know about the Sadducees what do we know about their beliefs their ideas their we too much because Josephus talks a little about it and the Gomorrah has some so first of all on the what Josephus tells us he tells us you see we have to understand something there&#39;s a problem here before we even go on a lot of Sadducees were very H onized but other Sadducees were really Pious coim and so it seems that some Pious coim founded the Dead Sea scroll sect after the maban Revolt now therefore we have to differentiate between them and the ones that were hellenized Josephus talks a lot about the heniz he talks about how they believe basically the epicurian idea that God isn&#39;t involved in the world once he created it they he talks about the fact that they basically take literalist interpretations of the Torah apparently more literalist he says they don&#39;t believe in a world to come now when we take a look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and we compare them to some of the material in Rabbi literature we start to understand a little bit more about the pious Sadducees were very strict on laws of Pur and impurity who disagreed with the practices of the pusim the Pharisees about some minor what looked like minor elements of how to do the ritual but they even disagree on some more important questions on how to do the ritual in the bet mikdash the temple so at any rate we start to understand that we don&#39;t know that much from Josephus we know some H opinions in Rabbi literature just for example in Rabbi literature we know that they observed CH on Sunday only on Sunday because they began to count theat from the day after the Sabbath which was understood by them to mean Shabbat Shabbat whereas the pusim and this is the counting of the OM by all Jews who count the OM counted the OM from the day after the first day of PES which they to be the quote Shabbat meaning like a festival at any rate when we go to the den Scrolls and this is in the temple scroll and it&#39;s in this mmt text and it&#39;s in about 25 other texts we have calendar texts that give their calendar and believe it or not how do you have Shabbat always on a Sunday you have a calendar which uses solar months and if you have a calendar of 364 days I know know this is hard to follow quickly and you have days of 30 30 31 30 30 30 31 and you have four of them a calendar of 364 91 Time 4 you end up with a situation in which you can have Shabbat have uh have shabot come out every single year on a on a Sunday but by the way they start the counting of the Omare not on the first Saturday night of P they started on the first Saturday night after the last day of PES and it looks from looking at this that this sectarian calendar was a second temple competing calendar which uh the Sadducees held to so this is how we start to learn more and more about the Sadducees by looking at some of the Jewish law type and practices of the Dead Sea scroll sect but there are some people who mistakenly think that oh if that&#39;s the case they must be the sades no what emerges is there were two trends of Hal of Jewish law in second temple times the one of the Pharisees the one of the Sadducees the Pharisees is the one that the rabbis follow the one we follow the Sadducees went out of use eventually but I can tell you it was followed by the Dead Sea sectarians as well it was followed by the medieval Kites and until to this day there are Kites and they follow certain of these laws and it&#39;s followed was followed in some level is by the Samaritans who are the ctim known from the gamor and who still exist until today Samaritans there are two major communities of Samaritans one one uh near harim in and the other one in till today in Israel I&#39;m just curious to know why people let&#39;s say equate um they kind of consider the kites to be the spiritual Heirs of the Sadducees when I I see the Sadducees as as you mentioned they&#39;re literalists and kites seem to be metaphoric about certain yeah you see this is one of the things we learned from the Scrolls because if it&#39;s true that the sad youi method is shared by the Scrolls when you look at the way the Scrolls interpret the tanak you see especially the Torah that it&#39;s closer to literal but not really literal and I&#39;m going to give you a kind of laav deal comparison so people say that Evangelical Christians are fundamentalists which means that they interpret the Bible literally do you think there&#39;s any fund any Evangelical who thinks God has an arm so what do we mean they interpret the Bible literally it&#39;s an overstatement what made by about evangelicals an overstatement made about this about about the the the uh Sadducees but the reason why Sadducees and karaites are considered to perhaps have some continuity comes from several things number one there are some dsy Scrolls texts especially the one originally called fragments of its site work now known as the Damascus document that somehow found its way in two manuscripts into the kyoga and the only way to explain that is if somebody was reading this text the kites seem to be a logical group for it the second reason is that the kites themselves make the CLA that they go back to the Sadducees and have many things that are parallel to either sadu or Dead Sea Scrolls so one of the possibilities is that certain of these practices survived underground they weren&#39;t observable but in the end they came out of ground when the karite movement began to coales and the history of the kide movement itself is very complicated but when it began to coales that absorbed some of these Traditions that had been underground That You Don&#39;t See in rinic literature but that existed a among some groups of Jews and the other possibility that&#39;s been suggested is that there are some claims of discovery of Scrolls in ancient times and early medieval time that maybe some documents that had been hidden somewhere kran or elsewhere may have found their way to some of these groups but when you also take the fact that the Samaritans are in this thing too it does look like the Samaritans and the Sadducees they do share a lot of things which are found also in the Scrolls a lot of ideas of specific let me ask you when you look at um the Pharisees back then what do you glean when in regards to tradition how do you understand based on all the research that you&#39;ve been doing on it what how how would you understand rabbi tradition well you see the thing is like this what happens when you study the whole second temple period and in fact the history of ritic material as a historical set of of documents you come to realize that the story is more complex than the way it&#39;s usually told let me put it that way and one very good example is this we learned from the sectarian material that in second temple times when the beginnings of the mission are taking place there was a competing group about whom we knew only some nasty remarks about them why they were wrong now we start to understand not just by the Dead Sea scroll sect itself but some of the material in the Scrolls we start to have a much wider understanding of the intellectual religious ferment that was going on in second temple times and we therefore start to realize that there wasn&#39;t just one group and a couple of schleppers that were being excommunicated but that there really was a competition in this in this period and then if you go back and you reread even many RBI texts you&#39;ll realize that this is just we didn&#39;t understand that but it&#39;s it&#39;s clear from the text that that was the case so that&#39;s a big difference between let&#39;s call it the simplistic way of seeing the tradition as if it&#39;s the only way and assuming that it just continuously goes with no competition to realizing that there was competition which essentially was you could say defeated by what we consider to be the authoritative tradition but the other views did exist and you start to understand much more what was going on in the period as I say from an intellectual and religious point of view now I think it would be difficult to maintain an academic approach as an orthodox Jew if you didn&#39;t believe that the approach that won was the right one that&#39;s a very important point and and what what things have you seen that supports that for you you mean that that the right one yeah okay so first of all in many of these arguments that are going back and forth you can see sometimes that the evidence of the tanak is in favor of the rabbi view now this will get into some very small technicalities about some of these things that are being discussed but you sometimes can tell that that&#39;s the case then there&#39;s another thing if you step back and think about it why is it the why is it that the point of view of the pusim and the rabbis survived and the other point of view did not so part of that answer is in the inability to use the combination of interpretation and the notion of Tor shabal to allow Judaism to deal with all the ongoing challenges that had fced in different times and places and if you take a look for example at the history of kism you see that sometimes they had no choice but to Simply back down from major positions because their system does not allow them to deal with these things and part of the greatness of the system that emerges from the gamorra and then from as it goes on through the years until today is the ability to deal with these situations and to know how to handle a whole variety of things that come up that no one ever could have imagined in those days so when I say it it looks like it&#39;s correct both from an interpretive point of view and also from the fact that it&#39;s a successful way for Judaism to develop over the ages and to maintain it self in ways that could not have been done with uh the other systems as you see when you watch what that system did in terms of the Samaritans and the and the kites right interestingly the the rambam um in his in his understanding of T palal to my limited understanding um interestingly uh he he sees the adaptability of T Bal as Central right to its core right this is stated more clearly by R yoseph albo in the saarim but that&#39;s right that is right now there are some people who turn around and say well that proves that you you know you can just decide whatever you want but no there&#39;s this tremendous idea of a balance kind of conservative along with the ability to adapt to new circumstances and and and there are certain like you could call them rules of the game of how this proceeds in a way that it maintains itself essentially you know in an unending way and that is really an amazing fact so to some extent the what you could call the the victory or the winner or whatever it is is because the system is right it was a system that allows Judaism to continue with its basic principles and its basic ideas in in a permanent way while at the same time dealing with the new circumstances and by the way an interesting thing is but you&#39;re not supposed to come around and say let&#39;s change this let&#39;s change this that we don&#39;t do yeah so this is the interesting thing even though we know that if you look at things we are doing they&#39;re not the same as they used to be done and some of these are almost unimportant things but nonetheless you see things being different than they were there&#39;s um it&#39;s almost like like you said there&#39;s a there&#39;s like a a balance that&#39;s that&#39;s right that&#39;s coming through that&#39;s right and we maintain that balance and we know how to maintain that balance by appealing to our textual traditions and and making use of them to assure that fantastic thank you by the way is there um in terms of uh do we see anything in these texts or show that the show anything specific um that shows like how uh the rabbis did draw from existing Traditions no because you see we have to remember these people oppose our tradition now this is the thing that&#39;s part of us maybe almost partly humorous I say they oppose our tradition but they agree with it all over the place what do I mean this is an opposing group that leaves Jerusalem leaves the main stay where they leave these people to separate because they believe that no one else is properly observing the Torah they have had Affiliates in other places but this is where their main Center apparently was so what happens is that they give us information about things that pertain to the continuity of the rabbis but they&#39;re they&#39;re constantly criticizing the Pharisees now while they criticize the Pharisees they do a lot of the same stuff because one of the things that we forget very often in Judaism is that there&#39;s certain basic fundamentals that are going to say fundamental no matter what so you get you know just I&#39;ll give you a funny example so they they criticize the Pim all the time the first law of Shabbat they have is that Shabbat starts when the sun is distant from the Horizon by its own diameter now that&#39;s about 45 minutes before Shabbat now how do they know that law because they quote the right now keep the Sabbath to San ify it if you look up that PUK and see how it&#39;s treated by kazal you&#39;ll see guess what all the people who think that we&#39;re obligated in Torah to add time at the beginning of Shabbat that will give us a little extra of what we call to shabbat addition to shabbat they quote the same thing now I that&#39;s an example of the exact same Shabbat law but if you&#39;ll keep going in Shabbat laws you&#39;ll find Shabbat laws where this group is stricter and you&#39;ll see that in in a number of places to put it in a funny example you&#39;re not allowed to make a salad on Shabbat and I&#39;m not talking about chopping little pieces like the discussion of Israeli salad you know like it all got to be done before not just that you have to cook before everything has to be prepared before so in some cases they&#39;re stricter and yet at the same time some things are basically the same interesting okay and you f to the next question do you also find that I&#39;ve heard some people theorize that like when when the saguan movement kind of collapsed you see remnants of their or sympathetic rabbis that say in the in the rinic tradition that&#39;s shot there&#39;s one Rabbi that is identified in the gamorra as having been right not a sadu but a shite right now the better question is where are the shites come with this so I would like to suggest that if you take a look at the whole history here what you can see is that there is a set of you could almost call it a process of elimination because if you go back into the second temple period and we&#39;re really talking about the period post the maban Revolt which was 168 to 164 bcee and we&#39;re really talking about the period after 152 because in 152 that&#39;s when yonatan the Hasan establishes the haonan uh basically rule because people don&#39;t realize this but after the mban Revolt Yehuda and his followers were kicked out of the beta mikdash kicked out of Jerusalem he was killed in battle in 160 so it&#39;s only in 152 when yonathan is able to take control that the period of the konian Empire begins now once you hit that period That&#39;s where Josephus says there are three sects and he mentions the Pharisees the Sadducees and the ases again a lot of people think the ases are the dead sect now basically at that point there are two general Trends in Jewish law and practice the one that we later call pharisaic and we call sadan now what happens is that when you get to the destruction of the temple the sad youan loses its power base the temple and basically stops functioning but the question is among the pusim there then takes place an inner debate beill B Shi now now be Shi takes the position of the strictor ones that is to say that even though there was a fundamental difference because the Sadducees don&#39;t really accept the idea of Torah or a law and that doesn&#39;t exist with the shames they do accept it nonetheless the shames end up arguing for stricter view than the one of the of the B Hill winds out well the shites basically die out and the view of B Hillel goes forward as the normative more lenient VI so it happens twice that the system knocks out the stricter people because the stook in many cases was stricter those who were faithful TOA not the heniz ones who weren&#39;t it knocks that out and then still again has to knock out what you could call not really a survival of the sad es but a group that ends up taking what we we would call the distric View and when that gets knocked out because we follow B Shai in very few things the view of B Hillel becomes the normative view that underlies the mishna even when the other view is continuing to be cited and even when of course there always are stricter views rendered than the ones that get accepted but that&#39;s another matter because of the inner debate which is just a debate of people who are running with the hilel view and and the shabai view is mostly finished off so that process takes plac in the inner history of of Judaism in this period brilliant um so I want to actually discuss the variance in the text between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the mtic tradition um what does this tell us let&#39;s say about the uh development of the biblical Canon so we have to go back take a step before the uh answering your direct question to explain that there were approximately 250 biblical manuscripts in the Dead Sea Scrolls as we mentioned before there&#39;s some pieces of everything in the Bible EX in the in the tanak except for Esther and except for uh neia now when we look and this is especially the case with the Torah we look at these manuscripts we see that the manuscripts come in different types and there is one type which occupies quite a number of manuscripts probably something like 30% which are very very much almost exactly like ours there is a for example a manuscript of VRA which is written in the old script which is almost letter forl rra a few vs and yud spelling issues and stuff like that is basically the same text there is what we call Isaiah B from the original Seven found by the BET and boy with his famous goat in cave one of Kuman now not Isaiah a which is in the middle of the Shrine of the book of the Israel Museum Isaiah B Isaiah B is a protomeric text almost the same as ours so many many ones are like that then there were a couple of other types of texts there were a small number of texts that look they have variations that look like Vari in the Greek bible they prove that the variations in the Greek Bible come from a using a Biblical text that was a little different from ours or that some of those variations come from that we call those septu AAL texts because the septu aent is the name of the Greek bible derived from the idea that 70 Scholars wrote the translation now then we have a few texts that we call Proto uh Samaritan because like the later Samaritan Torah they have what we call harmonistic variance that&#39;s where when you&#39;re let&#39;s say relating something inot but they&#39;re psim about it inim you slep those PIM in and copy them here and then the second time youle theim into into and it&#39;s we call those harmonistic TXS now so far I accounted for the 30% Proto faric and maybe between the two things I just mentioned another 30 another 30% but there&#39;s 40% of something else 40% are texts about 40% are texts that we call the mixed texts meaning they don&#39;t follow anyone particularly their loose texts when compared to the the uh the mtic text now the question comes how do these texts relate one to another so now I&#39;m going to tell you what I think about this I&#39;m not claiming everyone thinks this if you examine the majority of these what we call the mix text or you examine the Proto Saran type text what you find out in all these texts is that they&#39;re ultimately based on a text that&#39;s very much like the mtic text so it seems that at some point as the text was being handed down two things were happening one was that the protom mastic text we call it Proto because there&#39;s no vowels and there&#39;s no uh TR there&#39;s no tame MRA no cancellation marks so that&#39;s what we call protomeric in the protomeric text when it was being passed down it was going through a standardization process and at the same time there were other texts floating around and it seems that there was tendency of some scribes or or passers down of the text to to expand texts or to in some cases write texts and this is another matter in a different dialect of Hebrew because Isaiah a is in a different dialect of Hebrew and these coexisted with the authoritative type text and to some extent they&#39;re based on it and represent adaptations of it now when we go from Quan where this situation attains to Mada and the barok caves where we have texts of the Bible less manuscripts but we have texts of the Bible guess what they&#39;re all Proto mastic so what is apparent is that between the period in which the Dead Sea Scrolls materials were gathered admittedly by a group of sectarian Jews where they at least were tolerating a variety of versions besides what we would consider to be the authoritative massic tax besides that right they had these other ones but the minute we get to the period a little later Mada remember kumran is destroyed in the year 68 CE but the text are gathered earlier Mada is destroyed in 73 CA both of course destroyed by the Romans now when we get to the VMA caves 132 to5 again bad the VMA caves only protomeric Tex and this indeed is the period in which it seems that the leaders of the tanim teach of the mishna perhaps on uh in cooperation with kohanim in the beta mikdash managed to standardize that the protomeric is the authoritative correct text now one other point I want to make I mentioned the beta mik because there are some texts in the gamor that hint at the fact that there were official correctors of Bible texts in the B mikash mag farim as they called and that they made sure that the Bible text gradually got St standardized to the authoritative protomeric once we hit the period of boka 132 to5 now we&#39;re still before the editing of the bishna there&#39;s only one kind of text and it is the authoritative one and that is uh what seems to have happened now the argument I&#39;m making though is that the protomeric is the earliest form of the text and let me explain that argument for a second if you take a look at the he Hebrew of the mastic text and even if you Jewish do it for get a kumran manuscript you can open up your regular T and do it and you compare that to ancient inscriptions that we have from the first temple period you will find out that the first temple Hebrew in the Tanakh is the first temple Hebrew of the inscriptions with just a bit more standardization of of spelling and when we look at the highly expansive use of v and yud in some of these other types of Bible manuscripts we excess excess vowel letters we can see that what&#39;s happened is that those are expanded texts and that the protomeric represents the earlier form of first temple Hebrew of course there are some books written in second temple Hebrew and they tend to be moving away from the the nature of the of the way in which the the style is when compared to first temple style but uh the they were also protom mastic what about like um texts for example in neia there&#39;s you know kind of a switching off between Hebrew and Aramaic yes so what do they make what do you make of that well that&#39;s because almost everything in Aramaic in the biblical books Ezra deia is documents they copy documents and Aramaic was the language on which all those documents were written so that&#39;s what&#39;s mostly going on there of course Aramaic replaces Hebrew as the main language of the Jews in the Persian period that is to say after the uh conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus the Great 540 BCE right it used to be if you talked about this in great Nick everybody knew it from high school but now everybody went to high school Great Neck they don&#39;t know it anymore but it used to be get an audience and the people all knew the history of Iran from ancient times on but okay now so at any rate right uh once that happens Aramaic becomes the standard international language and the language of most of the Jews it become the spoken language and then when the mban Revolt CL we have a big Revival of Hebrew and that Revival of Hebrew is unfortunately pushed away by the time you get to the time of the mishna already everyone&#39;s talking Aramaic you know that the the students of uh rabi Yuda who edited the mishna there was a a woman who was a housekeeper in his home who came came from the south of the country from the area of Judea as opposed to the Galilee and the students of rabi yudi asked her what certain Hebrew words meant because they didn&#39;t know as much Hebrew as she knew because she came from the south because Aramaic in the Galilee came the language so there&#39;s an up and down between Hebrew and Aramaic over a number of periods of time I&#39;m curious about um the you know it seems to be that the Samaritan texts kind of like fill in the blanks that&#39;s why people considered to be later um some people but um the fact that they maintain the Paleo Hebrew script vers yeah well there&#39;s some paleo Hebrew used what the gor calls kav in in the Dead Sea Scrolls too there are I don&#39;t know maybe 1520 there&#39;s a beautiful manuscript of Schmo that&#39;s again almost complete in paleo Hebrew but uh the Samaritans maintained it because the Samaritans try to maintain first temple Tradition now we the the gor tells us and it seems to be true that the the script we call today kav is really AR Aramaic script and it was acquired by the Jews during the Persian period and especially by those who lived in Mesopotamia that is today&#39;s Iraq and they brought it back to ER Israel with them with the period of the return and that was the end of the old Hebrew script that no longer got used and one of the reasons for this is is that the old Hebrew script is made to Chisel into stone if you just picture you know if anybody saw the movie The Ten Commandments which is actually rather funny if you see it now yeah it&#39;s humorous to watch it but at any rate right if you see the Ten Commandments you see Joshua chiseling in stone that&#39;s what he apparently did in Egypt before he became uh Moses&#39;s assistant so anyhow you see the the the image there of chisel in stone and the Hebrew letters of the old Hebrew are made for that the Aramaic language is made to be written with a brush or a pen on whatever writing material you&#39;re using and not on Stone on skin or Papyrus and that&#39;s why it it beat out the old Hebrew you know very very quickly really enlightening stuff um yeah and um one thing that I feel like people probably very interested in is uh the next question beny you want to get into number six sure the Scrolls contain apocalyptic and Messianic texts that seem to reflect the beliefs and expectations of The Kuman Community how do these beliefs compare with other Jewish and early Christian Messianic expectations of the time okay so what we have to do to understand this question is to realize that there are two systems of messianism in the kumran sectarian materials and then there&#39;s another one more in the some of the nonsectarian texts now the one that&#39;s in some of the nonsectarian textt we can deal with very quickly I call it non- Messianic messianism it talks about a period of redemption it talks about a period of perfection of the world of Peace Etc but there is no Messiah figure that&#39;s a a an approach which did not get accepted in uh in in Jud ISM or Christianity although to some extent it&#39;s maintained in Modern Times by some liberal Protestants and some reformed Jews but it&#39;s there&#39;s no continuity it it died in Antiquity it came back for obvious reasons because it&#39;s easy to believe in as a kind of an ideal but it it gets away from Divine involvement but the points of view that The Kuman sectarian hold and then other non- sectarian documents hold for in in in basically there there were two types you have shared by kumran and everybody else Under the Sun including Christianity and every group of Jews that existed with the possible exception of those sades that were highly heniz is the regular old davidic Messiah that&#39;s the common one it&#39;s held in numerous Kuman script the text where there&#39;s one Messiah and it&#39;s a son of David it is the base of the Christian attempt to tie Jesus to the davidic house in providing a a genealogy for him and it is the view that ended up in Rabin Judaism as the main point of view of Jewish messianism now the other point of view is that there are twoim one mashia one Messiah of Aaron of Aaron a Priestly Messiah and one a messiah of Israel according to this scheme the most important thing is the temple whereas according to the David alone scheme the most important thing is the Kingdom so if the most important thing is the temple there&#39;s a Messianic Cohen who is the main mashiach and that main mashiach has along with him a kind of you could call a Messianic executive director the person handles all of the non ritual religious parts of running the society that would be the Messiah of Israel now this point of you may be on the coins of bar because the Bara coins many of them have on one side Shimon Isel even though his real name was Barosa as we now know but Shima the son of the star the prince of Israel and then I see in yzel Book of Ezekiel is a king and on the other side you flip over elazar hen the name of a high priest so that is a symbol with the two Messiah concept now Christianity to them what you&#39;re saying that he was expected to be a Messianic figure I&#39;m not saying it was accepted by anybody what I&#39;m saying is whoever put him on the coin may have considered that Jewish messianism requires two figures they&#39;re going along the lines going along the lines of this specific understanding of Messiah yeah the two Messiah two Messiah idea by the way if you look at the introduction in the ashkenazic sedor I don&#39;t remember whether this far also say this the introduction there&#39;s a whole poem begin it looks like you don&#39;t say it okay and if you look at that it has a Ben David and a Cohen who is a uh who who who who is Messianic in character the cohain will come back to the end of days as opposed to the Cohen who just had cohain it&#39;s it&#39;s an eschatological idea of the Cohen so this idea of a Coan is an eschatological figure it has a little bit of a place here or there in Judy but now we have to get the Christianity so I mentioned before Christianity is basically based on the idea that Jesus would be from the House of David and therefore would be entitled to be a messiah of course every Jewish kid hears wait a minute how could this be if Joseph right was not his father then how can you trace through Joseph I don&#39;t have an answer to that okay that&#39;s what they did they traced through Joseph who&#39;s not supposed to be his natural biological father they traced through him the claim that yesu Jesus is in reality a davidic descendant to legitimate him now when we go further with this if you actually read all of the Christian texts you&#39;ll find that the Priestly Messiah idea comes in there also because in the epistle to Hebrews Jesus is both the priest and the sacrifice and there&#39;s a whole description there of Temple practice according to that view so what turns out in Christianity is that there are sort of Echoes of the two Messiah concept also in the way in which he&#39;s pictured now I have to take you back to another manner pertaining to messianism there are two Trends in Judaism regarding the Messianic era there is one which we call utopian and the other catastrophic now the utopian messianism is the one that became almost normative in the after math of the period of cabala in spat because that&#39;s the one that takes the concept of tikon of improvement and turns it into the basic basis of how to achieve uh uh how how to achieve Redemption now that concept existed in Antiquity too it means the following it&#39;s utopian because we build a perfect society and the further and further we get in that process eventually mashia comes to lead us in completing it that&#39;s the utop idea the catastrophic idea we could also call it by the way the naturalistic idea the catastrophic idea is that the world gets so bad that God has there&#39;s an explosion and everything is going to be destroyed so God sends a figure to redeem us but in the process there&#39;s a massive war and in that massive war the evildoers eventually get destroyed that&#39;s the norm in the densy Scrolls that&#39;s why you have the Scroll of the war of the sons of Light against the sons of darkness and that scroll has been mentioned several times by Netanyahu in some of his speeches and that particular type of approach the the catastrophe leading to the ultimate Redemption is the basically the main one of the sectarians in Quan even though it&#39;s the main one of the sectarians at Quan it&#39;s very obvious that some of the other texts that they preserve that are from what I call group two texts that are just general Jewish texts preserve the other idea that there will be a better and better time and eventually uh Redemption will come because we will deserve it in certain way this is the argument of the rabbis whether the Redemption will come to a world that is completely innocent and Guiltless or one that is completely guilty because if you&#39;re completely guilty you better have a quick Redemption before the whole world explodes and if you&#39;re completely righteous you get a Redemption because you deserve it so those two concepts exist in the Scrolls but the sectarians themselves adhere to the catastrophic one now by the way this is compromised in the rambam because the rambam assumes that there would still be a war at the end of days because of the need to obliterate a minority of bad people in order to have the naturalistic type of event of Messianic era that he expected so I I have a question about the uh sons of Darkness versus the sons of Light yeah who did they believe do we know who they believed were the oh yeah just read the text they tell you it&#39;s everybody but us this is the problem with the Dead Sea Scrolls as an example for contemporary Judaism there are some things they believe that are opposite one thing they believe is absolute predestination absolute predestination God makes every decision for you now that is not a normal Jewish belief normal Jewish belief is that God forn knows what we will do but we have choice we make free choice now the other thing though that they believe that is not uh sort of like in character of Judaism is to believe that everybody but them is an evildoer and to be destroyed so if you look at the text it describes Wars with all the nations around until they are finally Victorious against all of them and then it includes the fact that all Jews who don&#39;t join them will be destroyed and then at the end they&#39;re going to March up to jush and run the temple according to their views so this gets the sort of what you might call the dark side of the Suns of light because there are parts of their approach in as a result of their extreme sectarianism which are not ones that Judaism wants to uh you know put into practice in any way in any way at all so I mean the no matter what Messianic point of view you take in Judaism the idea is that the the non-jews who are good people are all going to still be around in the end of day so they can come up to the temple as it&#39;s right the nice people stay us right so here the idea everybody but us is no good that&#39;s what you see there fasinating yeah that&#39;s a negative type of messianism you might say almost an angry messianism yeah yeah but you see what&#39;s interesting is if you go through that very same text I just have to tell you it doesn&#39;t happen what they say this is very funny they make it out in the text that all the night nations are going to be destroyed whoever wrote this text compiled it from some other documents and one of the things that he put into this this uh Scroll of the war of the sons against the sons of Darkness are apparently pre-existing beautiful poems and he has the most beautiful poem about all the nations coming up to worship God in the end of days what do you mean you just told me they&#39;re supposed to be killed because there r no good and he got them coming up to worship God what&#39;s going on so apparently either they weren&#39;t happy with that idea themselves or they compromis I don&#39;t know but you see poems have the other type of vision the more you talk about it the more I understand what you mean by the development part of Judaism how things things develop you know and it&#39;s it&#39;s extremely necessary because as you see so many strange ideas and things and that just just creep in and well very interesting fact is that if you look in the in the talmud in Sanhedrin you see that sometime in the second or third Century you you start to get there the discussion of the Messianic era and you see that a lot of these kind of apocalyptic ideas start to be mentioned by kazal that weren&#39;t mentioned earlier and we don&#39;t know why they&#39;re mentioned at that time but many of them seem to be aspects of the heritage of second temple times a famous example that we can&#39;t solve is the mashiach Ben yose it looks like something that must be a second temple idea but we don&#39;t have any text mentioning mashiach B Yos the idea that there&#39;s a predecessor mashiach who gets killed in battle and then again we also know that the very same ideas in the end of the Byzantine period before the Muslim Conquest so we&#39;re talking now really about the 500s and early 600s quite a number of texts were composed some of which continue to be composed after the Muslim Conquest which talk about catastrophic war and which assume a great war in which somebody is going to defeat the Romans now the Romans were the main enemy that the war scroll thought it would have to fight because apparently the scroll was written sometime either around or before the Romans came to ER Israel in 63 BC they conquered it we can&#39;t mix that up with the destruction destruction is in CE right 70 CE the Temple&#39;s destroyed 63 BCE the Romans first conquered ER Israel so at any rate the uh it seems the dead SE Arians in the war scroll expected the Romans to be the main protagonists the enemy and uh they have a term for them ktim because the Kon is on is an island on cre so a part of creed a city in Creed I&#39;m sorry City in Creed and they assumed that the Romans would be coming from the aan somehow but uh at any rate what is really interesting uh to see is that the very same ideas of major battles involving Roman armies Roman now being Byzantium against somebody in this case being the Arabs was understood to perhaps be a harbinger of the end of days and so texts that look like the war scroll were being written in that era in the the 500s and early 600s of uh CE W eye openening stuff and um I actually wanted to mention that um and you you&#39;ve discussed this on on other uh podcasts that every is that besides obviously what we learned about messianism at the time and and even Christianity one thing that that people don&#39;t know or at least Jewish people don&#39;t know usually is that um you know by studying certain Christian texts we discover a lot of practices of of Jews at the time like for example the first time a mafer is mentioned is it right correct me if I&#39;m wrong Jesus M yeah it&#39;s mentioned it doesn&#39;t mean it&#39;s the first ma here it the first mention or another example they always give which is a funny example is you ask the question who is the first Jew that we know was named that is breit Mila it doesn&#39;t mean he&#39;s the first one to be named as bre Mila but John the Baptist and and the reality is that to to the New Testament in general is a very important source for certain things about the history of Judaism and just as give one example beyond the kind of things we&#39;re talking about right now when you get to the book of Acts and they describe the apostles going all over the area of turkey and Greece and eventually reaching Rome and some of the Isles this is some of the earliest evidence we have for the Jewish communities because they always go to the synagogues and it&#39;s the earliest information we have of synagogues in those places and then uh there&#39;s a lot a lot a lot of other things are not understood about the manner in which these texts provide information about Jewish history and uh as say some some religious practices but some other things as well so before we go um I just want to know um what you think do you think that these texts today are relevant to the modern uh read the modern tell you there&#39;s some very interesting ways in which they&#39;re relevant first of all I mean you can compare ideas like uh Messianic ideas with well what are we should we believe today as Jews but remember one important thing the Dead Sea Scrolls don&#39;t have religious Authority for us they&#39;re historical texts they don&#39;t have religious Authority for anyone because they&#39;re not part of the direct line of tradition of Jewish text now this is not the only type of text that has this problem but it&#39;s stronger than you know the the katam S excuse me the K the Kish did not want people to use tractates of the Mei that weren&#39;t known in earlier times on the grounds that they&#39;re not a direct part of the tradition but it&#39;s fairly obvious that the meiri fits right into the tradition of the rabbis of the Middle Ages it&#39;s obvious that these texts do not fit into the straight M of the pusim and the rabbis of the tal so that being the case these are are really for us historical text so the relevance is a we can learn a tremendous amount about our complex history and some of the things that we learn about our complex history will be relevant today because we need to consider some of the same same issues sometimes and I don&#39;t mean you know we&#39;re not going to reconsider our calendar what I mean to say by that is that we can take lessons from these texts about what happens when certain extreme positions are allowed to overcome other position i s we can see in these texts there are some texts have very beautiful ideas poetry that&#39;s inspiring and things like this that we can gain by studying these texts but they don&#39;t have a place in the authoritative Authority system now there&#39;s one other really interesting fact about these texts and actually I gave for the second time a lecture about this only uh yesterday yeah and uh it wasn&#39;t yesterday it was day before sorry and uh it was uh the the role that they&#39;ve played in Jewish Christian relations and this is because these Scrolls have reminded many Christians about the extent to which Christianity is rooted in early Judaism and that notion has been a help in the history of Jewish Christian relations and the Improvement that started after the Holocaust partly because of the Holocaust but the scrolls are quoted every once in a while in works that are arguing for Christians to give up anti-Semitism and to take more positive views of Jews and Jew of of Jews and Judaism and uh this has happened there is some uh particular places it&#39;s quite prominent for example in a work that the Catholic Church issued regarding Jewish interpretation of the Bible and how it should be respected and the Dead Sea Scrolls are mentioned explicitly there so what&#39;s happened is that the Scrolls have had certain positive effect effects on the Christian move away from anti-Semitism among those who have made that move and that&#39;s been a very positive thing do they do they feel the same way about let&#39;s say the um Book of Enoch and books in the Apocrypha um is that is that something of well this is very now you&#39;re opening up a big question here&#39;s why because those books are actually first of all there is Enoch in the Scrolls okay second of all 12 books that are the Apocrypha are in the Catholic Bible this is a uberous fact every Catholic has the books of mccabes telling the khah story in their Bible you imagine if we had the Christmas story in our Bible right they have in the Bible now the question when we talk about these changes in Christianity moving away from positions that were anti-semitic which has certainly been done officially by the Catholic church it&#39;s certainly obviously been done unofficially in the Evangelical groups that love Israel and love Jews and it&#39;s been done in certain ways even by the liberal Protestants that are not our greatest fans but of course the Catholic Church did it officially in the 60s now the point I want to make is that this was part of a trend that starts already much earlier to see the history of Judaism and therefore the background of Christian chisanity as available in documents like Apocrypha and some of these other documents then that was starting before the Dey Scrolls were found then came the Holocaust which is a very big reason to do this because many Christians realized that the the Holocaust did have a background in Christian anti-Semitism even if it wasn&#39;t the direct course course and then the Scrolls came and waved the gigantic flag about the significance of placing Christianity&#39;s origins in the context of inner Jewish debate and Jewish discussion and then one of the big conclusions of that was that classical Christian anti-Semitism was not a very good idea and it began to be rejected by church after church in official documents and the Scrolls have a role there I don&#39;t want to overestimate that role but they have a role in making that happen although sadly the Holocaust is probably the biggest Factor here in and certainly for the Vatican in in wanting to make sure that they could not Harbor Concepts that could lead to violence of that and destruction of that nature and and you know physical annihilation of Jews so they they moved squarely away from it but the scrolls are there in that story in a uh I don&#39;t know what we want to say what we want to call it not the leading role but a role but the whole rediscovery of second tempal Judaism starts in a Renaissance runs through the Reformation for the non-jews Jews it starts in in Renaissance for them it starts in the reformation and it the Scrolls and what&#39;s going on today and archaeology and all this have completely you know uh brought this to the surface so is that why the um I forget which pope it was in the previous Century um tried to kind of backtrack and say that we made a mistake when when it came to scapegoating the Jews and Juds as the this is from the 60s when this started Pope John Paul the 23d followed by he passed away in the middle and the job was finished by uh Pope Paul the the 6th and uh these positions you know have been taken very formally by the Catholic church and other churches followed in many ways either formally or informally now I mean we still have problems with certain groups much of those problems are about Israel and and those problems remain but the classical anti-Semitism has for the most part been removed yeah I mean I think to me the biggest um maybe I&#39;m wrong but I feel like the biggest source of anti-Semitism is the dide right the uh yeah but no one believes that anymore right that&#39;s the point because the New Testament actually doesn&#39;t say it the crazy part the New Testament says that the Romans killed him exactly exactly it&#39;s strange the whole thing was strange amazing well we really want to thank you this was so okay eye openening and uh thank you for making the time it was really okay so we&#39;ll say good night and thank you gentlemen thank you know let me know when it&#39;s posted Etc of course of course okay thank you very much good night very much we appreciate your time thank you sure okay good night [Music] he

Transcript for:Judaism Demystified Podcast with Professor Schiffman: The Dead Sea Scrolls

Transcript for:
Judaism Demystified Podcast with Professor Schiffman: The Dead Sea Scrolls