In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd named Mohamed ed-Dhib was searching for a lost goat and came across a cave filled with manuscripts. That is what the first legend says. In the second legend, there is no longer a shepherd, but three—Khalil, Jum‘a, and Mohamed—who emerge from the cave shouting and carrying jars full of scrolls. The treasure ends up in the hands of two improvised antique dealers from Bethlehem, Jalil Iskandar Shalim and Faidi Salahi, and then a Syrian Orthodox archimandrite from Jerusalem, Athanasius. From there, the story takes on ramifications that are impossible to recreate. To summarize, suffice it to say one word: Qumran.
Qumran is synonymous with ancient documents, endless hours spent trying to decipher a symbol on papyrus, sacred and apocalyptic writing, the creation and destruction of the cosmos, angels, archangels, and devils, children of light and children of darkness, although, strictly speaking, Qumran is only the name of a region of Judea, littered with manuscripts that a dissident Jewish community hid before disappearing in 70 AD.
After almost eight decades of work on these texts—the Bedouins and researchers have unearthed almost a thousand manuscripts—also known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, a little more is known about this sect, which separated from official Judaism to live according to a rule very similar to that later adopted by Christian monks.
In Spanish, the best edition of these manuscripts is that of Florentino García Martínez, published by Trotta as Textos del Qumrán. Written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the documents in this anthology—which excludes the biblical books found in the caves—give a measure of the rigor and desire for total purification that prevailed in Qumran. García Martínez classifies them into several categories, from proto-monastic rules to exegetical and apocalyptic literature. Also included are the calendars that regulated community life, horoscopes and ritual instructions, and the group’s poetry.
In the different versions of the rule, the author hints at what led the group to distance themselves from the official religious currents in Jerusalem and retreat to the desert. For them, the temple had been desecrated, the priests lived like pagans, and hope for the coming of the Messiah had been lost. Its parallels with early Christianity and other “pure” groups of believers, such as the Essenes, have been commented on ad nauseam.
The Qumran language is blunt and aggressive. It refers to “men of the pit” to describe those who live outside the community, in the domain of Belial—the devil—and far from God. Enoch, the sect’s favorite biblical patriarch, exclaims in one of the manuscripts: “I will not speak to this generation, but to a future generation.” They warn that “the Great Abyss is extremely dark.” Another says that “no one understands the ancient things anymore.”
The texts that recreate or complete the Bible are some of the most seductive in the collection. In the Apocryphal Genesis, Lamech, one of Cain’s descendants, loses sleep because he does not know whether his wife slept with a giant. Another fragment explains that Adam and Eve conceived nine other children after Abel and Cain, and although they were originally vegetarians, they began to eat meat because violence corrupted them.
In one passage, angels complain to God that other angels (called Watchers) taught men “the eternal mysteries,” that is, knowledge of botany and crafts, writing and language, sword making and jewelry, astronomy and the best time for each crop, the secrets of makeup, as well as “witchcraft, magic, and skills.” For bringing to man—or more precisely, to the women they took—what only God should know, these angels were chained until the end of the world.
The most enigmatic text in the collection is the so-called Copper Scroll. It consists of two rolled-up metal plates that had to be carefully dissected in order to read their contents: a series of instructions for locating large amounts of money in the caves of Judea. If the reader understands the instructions, they will first find another book explaining the coded inscriptions written on the Copper Scroll, and then the treasure.
Today, most of the manuscripts are in the Shrine of the Book, a futuristic dome built near Jerusalem. Its architecture plays with the ideas of Qumran, which is why the dome is white and stands in front of a black basalt wall. No scroll is displayed for long, and there is a rotation system to protect them from light. After the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, the Dead Sea Scrolls were quickly protected, as they were two thousand years ago, and placed in another “cave” until the danger passed.
Image: Fragment of the Habakkuk scroll. Shrine of the Book, Jerusalem.
