National Geographic: Riddles of the Bible - Second Season

For thousands of years they lay hidden in desert caves.

900 texts, most of them in fragments, creating an enduring puzzle.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest and most complete set of ancient writings

ever unearthed in modern times.

60 years after their discovery,

they are still revealing secrets about the Jewish world into which Jesus was born.

lncluding a map, with a list of spectacular treasures

and clues as to where they might be found.

What ancient secrets do the scrolls reveal?

Can we reassemble all the parts before they disintegrate

and shed new light on a time when two great religions parted ways

and changed history for ever?

Sometimes, history changes because of the smallest of things.

Like a lost goat.

lt's 1 947, the year the state of lsrael is formed,

and the errant goat belongs to a young Bedouin boy in the Judean desert.

Thinking it has disappeared into a cave, he tosses in a rock, hoping to scare it out.

lnstead, he hears something shatter.

Frightened of what might lie inside,

the boy enlists his cousin, Muhammed edh-Dhib, to explore the cave.

What they find is a disappointment.

No goat. No treasure.

Just some broken pottery and several ancient jars containing scrolls wrapped in linen.

Muhammed edh-Dhib gathers the loot and puts it in a sack.

Not knowing the value of his treasure,

he hitches the sack to his Bedouin tent pole, where it hangs for days.

Eventually, he sells pieces of the scrolls to a shoemaker in Bethlehem,

for the equivalent of around two pounds.

They would turn out to be the tip of the iceberg,

the first cash of what would swell to some nine hundred texts

of profound religious and historical significance,

practically the only surviving biblical documents written before 1 00AD.

Today, the Dead Sea Scrolls sit quietly in the lsrael Museum's Shrine of the Book.

Whispering stories of a distant past and speaking to the earliest days of Judaism

and perhaps the origins of Christianity.

Many of the scrolls contain biblical stories we already know.

Multiple copies of almost every book in the Old Testament.

Among them, 20 copies of Genesis,

1 7 copies of Exodus...

..and 37 copies of the Book of Psalms.

You've got every book of the Hebrew BibIe in there, except for the Book of Esther.

So they are reading and writing and beIieving the same things that we are today,

with aImost no detaiIs Iost in the transmission over the past two thousand years.

Once peopIe are exposed to the scroIIs, something changes.

To me, it's...

touching my roots.

I mean, you Iook at the bibIicaI scroIIs and history comes to Iife.

The Dead Sea ScroIIs are part of the greatest treasures, not onIy of the Jewish nation,

but actuaIIy of human mankind.

But the scrolls are more than a meticulous library of the ancient books of the Jewish Bible.

Many of the texts had never been seen before.

Unknown psalms, mystical writings, apocalyptic musings about the end of the world.

There was also the enigmatic Copper Scroll, which read like a treasure map.

And, most controversially,

there were texts outlining the precepts and rituals of a mysterious Jewish sect

that lived in the desert and saw life as a struggle between good and evil.

To understand the impact of the scrolls,

it's necessary to go back to the scorched landscape in which they were found.

The scrolls were discovered in the Dead Sea region of the Judean desert,

the lowest elevation on the surface of the earth.

Here, the arid environment kept the scrolls from withering away altogether over time.

After the first dramatic discovery in 1 947, other caves in the area were explored.

Fragments of ancient texts were found in each.

The caves were scattered around an ancient site called Qumran.

The closest cave is only about 1 5 metres away.

Some of the scrolls were recovered intact,

others had been badly damaged.

They were written in three different languages.

Ancient Hebrew,

Aramaic

and Greek.

Most were written on parchment, some on papyrus.

One of the caves, designated Number 1 1,

contained scrolls that Dr Hanan Eschel has been studying for over two decades.

Cave 1 1 was found by the Bedouins in January of 1 956

and, Iike in Cave 1 , in 1 947, they found compIete scroIIs.

So we know that the Leviticus ScroII was found over there

and that the PsaIm ScroII was found in the inner part of the cave.

One of them is the Iongest scroII that we have, the TempIe ScroII, which is 24 feet Iong.

The Temple scroll was unique in both its size and content.

lt records Moses'instructions from God

on how the temple at the heart of the Jewish faith should be built,

giving precise details and measurements.

Some scholars have called it a second Torah,

with God speaking to Moses directly to emphasize the authority of his words.

Historians immediately began to wonder who had written the scrolls

and decided that clues of authorship might be found in the Qumran ruins near the caves.

The settlement of Qumran was traditionally identified as the remains of a Roman fort.

Today, many scholars believe it was something very different.

lnstead of a military outpost, they say it seems to have been a kind of monastery,

built by a group of dissident Jews searching for a new kind of salvation in troubled times.

About 40 years before the birth of Jesus, Rome had annexed Judea, installed a puppet king

and taken control of the temple in Jerusalem, the holiest site in the Holy Lands.

Some scholars say the people who wrote the scrolls fled into the desert

to escape both the Roman occupation and the corruption of the temple.

Qumran is so important and so unique,

because we have here a whoIe Iibrary of a sectarian group of a group who Ieft JerusaIem

and went to the desert in order to Iive in a more pure way of Iife,

which was a way to protest against an estabIishment that was corrupt in the tempIe.

But who was this sectarian group?

The Roman historian Josephus gives us an intriguing clue.

Josephus described a group of mystics called the Essenes,

a reclusive community of Jewish monks,

who practised their faith in the first centuries before and after Jesus's birth.

According to Josephus,

the Essenes scorned what they saw as corruption of the holy temple in Jerusalem

and apparently fled to the remote deserts of Judea, where Qumran is found.

Because the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls never identified themselves,

we can't be certain that they were the Essenes,

but, whoever wrote them, the scrolls were guaranteed to strike a nerve 2,000 years later.

ln the scrolls, the faithful transcript of the old Bible mixes with some revolutionary ideas,

ideas that could be seen as foreshadowing the splinter group

that would soon form around the teachings of an obscure carpenter from Galilee

and change the course of Western history.

The scrolls also introduce us to a character called the ''teacher of righteousness'',

who fought against a wicked priest and asked his followers

to turn away from material wealth, embrace humility and live pious lives.

Historians speculate that the teacher and the wicked priest

were rivals at the temple in Jerusalem,

who engaged in a power struggle that was eventually won by the wicked priest.

So the teacher and his followers fled into the desert,

where they nursed the idea that they were the chosen ones,

the sons of light who would defeat the forces of darkness at the end of time and see salvation.

The scrolls also show a near obsession with another prominent Christian idea,

the end of the world.

The group that wrote the Dead Sea ScroIIs is waiting for Armageddon.

They are waiting for the End of Days.

Much Iike today, we have, say, David Koresh at Waco,

we've got the debacIe at Jonestown.

Every so often, you've got entire groups that commit suicide,

because they are waiting for the End of Days.

So it Iooks Iike some of the peopIe that wrote the Dead Sea ScroIIs may fit into that category.

There are other precursors of Christianity in the Dead Sea Scrolls,

especially in words that would eventually spread around the globe.

We know that the Essenes were flourishing at the time when Jesus began his ministry

and that he may have appropriated some of their language.

ls it possible Jesus was part of the community that wrote the words on the Dead Sea Scrolls?

To answer that question, we must take a closer look at the scrolls themselves.

The modern story of the scrolls is a cloak-and-dagger thriller,

filled with secret meetings and parcels passed in the dark of night,

set against a backdrop of politics and war.

lt was 1 947.

There was gunfire in the streets of Jerusalem,

because the brand-new United Nations was creating a brand-new state in the region - lsrael.

And unhappy Palestinians were fighting back.

The first scrolls were found in Palestinian territory,

just months before the state of lsrael came into being.

Over the years, other finds were made

and fragments of old writing began to show up in the lucrative antiquities black market.

Some traded them for money, others for political gain,

still others in search of eternal answers.

ln 1 954, pieces of a scroll appeared for sale in America,

in the classified ads of the Wall Street Journal.

An ad listed four of the Dead Sea Scrolls for sale as...

lt was spotted by an lsraeli archaeologist, who purchased them anonymously

for $250,000.

The world expected the museum scholars

to patch the pieces together quickly and publish the results.

lnstead, the scholars in Jerusalem took their time,

40 years worth.

The delay led to grumbling

and a suspicion the scholars had found something they wanted to hide.

Not so, say the people responsible for the complex task.

AII aIong the main concern was about why are the scroIIs being pubIished.

No-one actuaIIy was aware that physicaIIy the scroIIs were aIso in need.

The scholars calculate that they are dealing with about 900 texts, broken up into 1 5,000 pieces.

Lots of the pieces are missing

and, to make things even more complicated, many of the scrolls are copies of the same texts.

Then there is the problem of brittleness.

The fragments are disintegrating.

ln a laboratory at the lsrael Museum in Jerusalem,

a team of preservationists is battling the corrosive effects of time.

80% of the scroIIs are written on parchment, 20% are written on papyrus.

So both are organic materiaIs and, as such, they have a Iife of their own.

Preservation is a meticulous and painstaking task.

The lab workers clean the fragments,

then place them between silk sheets, which will protect them for a while.

We know that, no matter what we do, eventuaIIy, they wiII deteriorate and disintegrate.

What we are trying to do is to sIow down the process.

I aIways say that if the scroIIs waited for us for 2,000 years,

it is our duty to preserve them for at Ieast 2,000 years to go.

Every time someone touches a fragment, the risk of damaging it increases.

Half a world away, in Los Angeles, one man may have a solution to the problem.

Dr Bruce Zuckerman uses state-of-the-art techniques

to make the scrolls available without actually handling them.

Digital technology is the key.

He uses infrared light to read the letters on the scrolls that can't be seen by the naked eye.

Some of us have worked on refining the infrared imaging technique

by using a technique caIIed narrow-band infrared imaging

and I can give you an exampIe here.

Now, this is a IittIe fragment of the Dead Sea ScroII that is in visibIe Iight.

You can see it doesn't Iook too terribIy good.

You can't even be sure there is anything on it.

In fact, when we first saw it, we weren't sure if anything was on it at aII.

So we did appIy narrow-band infrared imaging to this,

and much to our pIeasure and, to some degree, to our surprise,

we discovered that the piece actuaIIy did have writing on it,

so you see that's quite an improvement.

There are Ietters here.

Zuckerman pieces the fragments together digitally,