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00:00They are widely hailed as the most important archaeological find of modern times.
00:07They are some of the founding documents of our civilization.
00:16Western civilization owes its origins to this period.
00:20This really was history's big bang.
00:23Always controversial, they're still at the center of a passionate debate.
00:28Discovered more than 60 years ago, mystery still shrouds.
00:34Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls.
00:42Archaeologist Bob Cargo devotes much of his career to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
00:48They cause so much controversy, so much division, it truly is remarkable.
00:54The biggest controversy surrounds who wrote the scrolls.
00:58Cargill is passionate about the mystery and determined to find the answer.
01:04We've answered most of the mysteries about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
01:08The last remaining question is who wrote them.
01:11Many of us will not rest until we can answer that final question.
01:15I want to know who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
01:19Sixty years ago, the man who leads the study of the scrolls claims they're all written by an obscure Jewish sect, the Essenes, who lived at a place on the Dead Sea called Qumran.
01:31But now, some critics are challenging that theory.
01:36He did a marvelous story.
01:38He was honest, but he was wrong.
01:41Here we have a different group in the north that really says it's quite a different story.
01:46And an amazing new clue.
01:49The discovery of a cryptic text.
01:52If this inscription is deciphered, it will give us information as to who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
01:58And forensic science is dramatically transforming the Dead Sea Scrolls story.
02:03I think on the end it will be that we get the final answer.
02:15This is where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls.
02:18This is where the entire controversy began.
02:26In 1947, the first of the scrolls were discovered in a remote mountain cave on the western shores of the Dead Sea.
02:32The story goes, a Bedouin shepherd was tending his herd up here in these cliffs.
02:40One of his animals wandered into a cave and he tried to scare him out.
02:44So he threw a stone and he heard something shattered.
02:47He ran up to see what he had broken and he found a jar.
02:50And he found some scrolls.
02:53Mohammed Ad-Dib finds three ancient lengths of parchment with Hebrew writing.
02:59The texts are revealed to be from the Jewish Bible.
03:11What Christians later called the Old Testament.
03:14And from other religious works.
03:16The scrolls date from the third century BCE to the first century of the Common Era.
03:21Today, these scrolls are housed here.
03:26In Jerusalem's Israel Museum.
03:29In a specifically built home.
03:31The Shrine of the Book.
03:33The centerpiece of the shrine is the Book of Isaiah.
03:37It's a thousand years older than any other previously known copy.
03:41To me, the amazing thing about the Dead Sea Scrolls is it pushes our knowledge of the Bible back a thousand years.
03:50And yet here it is.
03:52You can still read it in the Hebrew.
03:54Two thousand years old.
03:56The wolf shall dwell with the lamb.
03:59The leopard shall lie down with the kid.
04:02The calf and the lion and the fatling together.
04:05And the little child shall lead them.
04:08I mean, these are the things I was taught as a kid.
04:11It's still there.
04:13As much as I can say this is truly a religious experience.
04:17It's not just that they're biblical text.
04:20It's that they're the oldest text of the Bible.
04:24And these words have been speaking to generations of people.
04:27Literally thousands of years.
04:30The Isaiah scroll on the Shrine of the Book is a replica.
04:35The real treasure, the original scroll, is kept in these vaults.
04:41This is it.
04:42This is it.
04:44This is one out of the four segments of the Book of Isaiah, Manuscript A, discovered by the Bedouins.
04:55How old is the script?
04:56This specific one is from the end of 2nd century BCE, around 100 BCE.
05:03And this manuscript is the oldest manuscript out of the 22 copies of the Book of Isaiah discovered in the Judean desert.
05:17This is the oldest biblical manuscript of the Book of Isaiah on earth.
05:22It's near perfect. It's beautiful.
05:25Unbelievable.
05:26The Dead Sea Scrolls contain many biblical texts like the Book of Isaiah.
05:33But there are also texts, psalms, and prophecies that didn't survive to be part of the Bible we know.
05:39Their discovery transforms our knowledge of Judaism around the time of Jesus.
05:45The great majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls are religious documents.
05:50So these scrolls teach us about the spiritual experience of human beings like us who live in the land of Israel 2,000 years ago.
05:58How they saw themselves, how they saw God and the people of Israel.
06:03So, in a way, the Dead Sea Scrolls are a window through which we can have a glimpse about the spiritual experience of Jews 2,000 years ago.
06:16So this is a real archeological miracle.
06:19Incredible.
06:20This is kosher, right?
06:22Yes, of course, kosher.
06:24Wonderful. Then one kosher ribeye, please.
06:27Fifty shaker.
06:29Fifty?
06:30The writers of the scrolls were obsessed with ritual purity.
06:34And these laws were in their everyday lives, just like here today in this kosher market.
06:41The rules that were set out in the Bible thousands of years ago are still in play here today.
06:47Two thousand years ago, Judaism existed in different forms, with important religious divisions between different groups of Jews.
06:58It's important to identify the particular group of Jews who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
07:04Their scrolls give us a unique insight into the beginnings of Judeo-Christian culture.
07:10But exactly whose insights have been discovered?
07:13Who are responsible for these documents that change the way we understand Judaism?
07:20They change the way we understand the Bible.
07:22We want to know whose legacy is this.
07:25It may not change who I am as a person, but it can tell me where I came from.
07:31More than scrolls were discovered in the caves along the Dead Sea.
07:35Bob Cargill hopes the artifacts found with the scrolls will help him discover who wrote them.
07:41These items are very rare. The dry climate of the Judea desert helped us to preserve the organic materials, such as textiles, basketry items, leather.
07:55All these organic materials were kept in the caves.
08:00Finds in the caves may reveal the religious practices of the people who put the scrolls there.
08:07Let me show you an example of the phylactery cases, the tephilim.
08:12Oh, wow.
08:13And these phylacteries are made of leather.
08:16What are these used for?
08:17For praying.
08:18To praying?
08:19Yes.
08:20They had the parchment in these small houses, which you can see here.
08:27They used it for the head, and one was used to put it on the hand.
08:33Wonderful.
08:34And so they would take pieces of scroll, really tiny scroll, and place it in there, and then tie it to themselves, around their head, and then would pray?
08:43Yeah, and this practice, the Jewish Orthodox still do it today.
08:47Still do this today.
08:48And they continue to pray.
08:49These are the earliest ones in Israel, so we know this practice is around 2,000 years.
08:58The textiles found in the caves are all plain linen.
09:02Mixing linen with other textiles, like wool, is forbidden by religious purity laws of the time.
09:08But the people who own the linen are making a political statement, too.
09:12The linen is undyed.
09:14They don't want to dress like Romans or Greeks.
09:17What does that tell us about who these people were?
09:21They were different from the other population around them.
09:26So the people that produced the scrolls were not only trying to be different from the rest of society, Romans and Greeks, they were trying to be different from other Jews.
09:34Yes, they were different.
09:37The finds in the caves are a clue to the identity of the scroll writers.
09:47They aren't ordinary Jews of 2,000 years ago.
09:50They are a breakaway sect.
09:52In fact, as well as biblical texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls also include their community rules.
10:00The community rules are obviously a sectarian manuscript.
10:03Some Jewish sect with very strict rules of obedience, how to behave and how to get into the group.
10:09We know that it's a sect that wrote it.
10:11The question is, who is this sect?
10:13Who are these people?
10:15Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
10:1760 years after the discovery of the first scrolls, the identity of the authors is hotly disputed.
10:28There's something about the Dead Sea Scrolls that just sparks controversy.
10:32It really causes so much division among scholars.
10:35It truly is remarkable.
10:38The controversy goes back to 1947, when Bedouins and archaeologists go on a mass hunt after Muhammad
10:46Eddib's discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls.
10:50Within a few years, many more caves are searched, and roughly 900 manuscripts are found.
10:57In 1952, Father Roland Duvaux, an archaeologist and Catholic priest from the religious order of the Dominicans,
11:05is appointed to head an international team to study the scrolls.
11:15Only scrolls found in two of the caves are discovered largely intact.
11:19Most are in tiny fragments, like these.
11:23Today, in the conservation rooms of the Israel Antiquities Authority,
11:28you get a sense of the task faced by Duvaux and his colleagues.
11:32In order to begin their work, the scholars spread them out on long trestle tables,
11:39and they started putting them together.
11:43And what you see here in front of you is actually a sample of these plates.
11:48Oh, wow.
11:49And eventually, we ended up with over 1,260 such plates that...
11:57And what language is this?
11:58Okay, this is written in Hebrew.
12:00So some of the scrolls are written in Hebrew, and some are written in Aramaic.
12:03And some, of course, are written in Greek.
12:07While Duvaux's team slowly labors over the texts, others speculate about who wrote the scrolls.
12:13Since they're discovered just two years after other ancient texts revealed to be lost Christian gospels,
12:21a suspicion grows that the scrolls might give startling new information about the origins of Christianity.
12:29Was Father Duvaux and his predominantly Christian team suppressing inconvenient truths that challenge traditional church teaching?
12:37People love a conspiracy, and in the absence of hard facts, people's minds began to wander.
12:45They couldn't help but think there's something fishy going on here.
12:49It's not a question of conspiracies.
12:51It's a question of a massive amount of manuscripts.
12:54As we said, over 900 manuscripts.
12:57There were only eight scholars that were appointed to work on them.
13:01They can't handle such a massive amount of manuscripts.
13:04It's almost as if they're trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle, but they don't have all the pieces,
13:08and they don't have the picture on the top of the box.
13:10They don't know what it's supposed to say.
13:14The scrolls are slowly published.
13:16In a knock to the conspiracy theorists, it's revealed that early Christians did not write the scrolls after all.
13:24We now know, after having published all of the scrolls, the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls certainly were not Christians.
13:31If not early Christians, who did write the scrolls?
13:36And what can their identity tell us about the scrolls, and the crucial period of history when they were written?
13:43This period, 2,000 years ago, I would argue, gave rise to Western civilization as we know it today.
13:50And the Dead Sea Scrolls are our unique looking glass back into that moment in time.
13:56The $64 million question is, who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
14:00I mean, it's like, who shot JFK, or what happened to the dinosaurs?
14:03Everyone wants to know, who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
14:06Archaeologist Bob Cargo is determined to identify who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
14:19The Dead Sea Scrolls transported us back beyond the time of Jesus.
14:31The Dead Sea Scrolls provide a link to a part of history that, I would argue, gave rise to Western civilization.
14:38The mystery of who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls begins on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea.
14:51The scrolls are found in caves here in 1947.
14:57Father Roland DeVoe, leader of the team deciphering the scrolls, also excavates ruins of an ancient site here at Qumran.
15:12The 11 caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered literally surround the site of Qumran,
15:18starting approximately three kilometers or two miles north of Qumran,
15:23and then coming along the cliffs behind the site.
15:26Some of the caves are located in this sort of very soft, chalky,
15:30maral terrace on which the site sits,
15:32and then going around a little bit to the southern end of the maral terrace.
15:38Ancient historians identify a Jewish religious sect living on the Dead Sea at the time, the Essenes.
15:45Did they write the Dead Sea Scrolls?
15:47Descriptions of their communal lifestyle match details in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
15:52Community rules.
15:57At Qumran, DeVoe unearths what he thinks are the remains of such a community.
16:05One of the strange features noted at Qumran is the number of water pools.
16:10There are 16 on the site.
16:15Would the people living here have needed so much water as was stored in all of these pools,
16:20just for the purposes of survival, for drinking,
16:23or could it be that some of the pools were used for other purposes?
16:27The pools are identified as Jewish ritual baths.
16:33DeVoe also excavates a room large enough for the Essene community to use as a meeting room.
16:39Because this is the largest room, DeVoe identified this room as an assembly hall.
16:46And because in the room adjacent to this, he found a pantry of over 1,000 dining dishes,
16:54DeVoe identified this large room also as a communal dining room.
16:58In one room, DeVoe discovers the remains of furniture he reconstructs as scroll tables and two inkwells,
17:09a rare find in archaeological excavations in Israel.
17:12He identifies it as a scriptorium or writing room.
17:15If that's the case, we can reasonably suggest that some of the Dead Sea Scrolls might actually have been written in this room.
17:28With this evidence of a large community living next to the scroll caves,
17:32with pools for ritual bathing and scroll writing equipment,
17:36it seems like the mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is solved.
17:39The Essenes wrote and collected scrolls at Qumran and hid them in nearby caves.
17:46This view has been mainstream scholarly opinion for 50 years.
17:52In my opinion, the comparisons, the parallels between the information in the Dead Sea Scrolls
17:58and the archaeological evidence from Qumran indicate that we should in fact identify this sect as the Essenes.
18:05And I believe there can be no doubt that the people who lived at Qumran,
18:10the Essenes, deposited the scrolls in the nearby caves.
18:19Pliny, the ancient writer who first located the Essenes on the Dead Sea,
18:24describes them as living near Ein Gedi.
18:27Archaeologists are now excavating Ein Gedi.
18:29So far, they haven't found any sign of the Essenes or any religious community.
18:37Where are we here?
18:39We are in the village of Ein Gedi, the ancient village from the Roman time.
18:44This is a village of common people, probably, the people who make their living from the palm trees as you see around.
18:51The settlement here at Ein Gedi was a regular residence.
18:56I mean, people lived here, they worked here, they did agriculture.
18:59Whereas at Qumran, it was starkly different.
19:02For instance, here at Ein Gedi, we find no mikva'ot, there are no ritual baths.
19:07Whereas at Qumran, a little bit smaller of a settlement, you have many of them.
19:11So it seems that whoever was at Qumran was obsessed with ritual purity.
19:16Not so here at Ein Gedi.
19:18No trace of the Essenes is found at Ein Gedi.
19:23So nearby Qumran may well have been the place Pliny identified as their home, as Devoe believed.
19:30Archaeologists digging at Ein Gedi find one powerful similarity with Qumran.
19:35Just today we found coins at the site, dating right up to 68 CE, but nothing after that.
19:43This tells us that this site was occupied right up until the Romans destroyed it in 68 CE.
19:52Qumran is destroyed by the Romans in the Jewish revolt of 66 to 70 CE.
19:58There is evidence of this Roman destruction up and down the western shore of the Dead Sea.
20:03And it is generally believed that the Essenes living here hide their scrolls in the caves just before the Romans arrive.
20:16Was there a plan to come back and retrieve the scrolls?
20:23Nearly 2,000 years pass before the scrolls once again see the light of day.
20:28But Devoe's theories are under attack.
20:38Bob Cargill is meeting Father Jean-Baptiste Humbert, a member of the Dominican religious order like Devoe.
20:45He inherited the task of publishing Devoe's work.
20:48If anyone could be expected to support Devoe's work, it might be him.
20:54Yet after 20 years of study, Humbert has reached a radically different conclusion.
21:00I understood suddenly one morning that it was totally different of the model of Devoe.
21:06Devoe was totally honest, you know.
21:09But because he was so clever, he did a marvelous story without strong foundation for the interpretation.
21:19And he was honest, but he was wrong.
21:26Humbert thinks Devoe confused the archaeological evidence of Qumran with what he knew about monastic life in the Middle Ages.
21:34He wanted to find a religious community like his own at the site.
21:38Do you think he was projecting his own life on Qumran?
21:45Exactly, exactly.
21:47And he built in his brain a fantastic story, you know.
21:52And this brain story he found on the site.
21:57Wow, so he found it in his head and he read it into the site.
22:00He read it on the site.
22:01And you don't agree with that?
22:03It is impossible.
22:04It's impossible.
22:06Humbert believes Qumran was too small and compact for a community to live in.
22:11He believes Qumran was used intermittently by a sect, perhaps the Essenes.
22:17But the scrolls were not written there.
22:20Are they responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls?
22:23For me it is impossible.
22:25You don't think that the people there, most likely the Essenes, were responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls?
22:30No, no, no.
22:32Cargill is learning that what he knew about some of the most important historical records ever discovered must now be rethought.
22:41Roland DeVoe was convinced that the Essenes wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran.
22:45And now the very man who took over for DeVoe says the Dead Sea Scrolls did not come from Qumran and that Qumran was something totally different.
22:55Humbert's interpretation throws the gates wide open.
22:59Once again we are asking who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
23:01Archaeologist Bob Cargill is investigating who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
23:09He is on his way to the ancient site Qumran with Yuval Peleg.
23:14Peleg is the archaeologist in charge of Qumran.
23:18He excavated here for 16 years.
23:21Cargill wants to know if his work supports the idea that this is where the Essenes wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
23:28When we excavated, we found all the things that belong to the pottery production.
23:38Kills, damaged pottery, huge amount of pottery vessels.
23:44It makes us thought that maybe there is something else in the site.
23:49It is something completely different.
23:51Then Peleg began to excavate the biggest mikvah at the site.
23:57A mikvah is a pool used by observant Jews for ritual purification.
24:02Previous archaeologists saw the many mikvah pools here as evidence it was home to a large community of ultra-observant Jews.
24:10Most of the scholars are thinking that most of the pools at the site are mikvah, ritual baths.
24:18And from my archaeological opinion, this is the only ritual bath at the site.
24:23No other pools were suitable.
24:26This is the only mikvah?
24:28This is the only mikvah.
24:30No other ritual bath at the site.
24:32According to Peleg, only the westernmost pool at Qumran could be a mikvah.
24:39The water in the following pools would be impure in Jewish law.
24:43If Qumran had just one mikvah, it could not be a home to a large observant religious community.
24:49So what was this pool for?
24:53This is the last pool at the site.
24:57All the water that entered the site finally and found the way to this area.
25:03And after excavating at the bottom of the pool, we found a layer of 30 centimeters of pure clay.
25:15Without any stones, without anything.
25:17According to Peleg, all but one of the pools are designed to capture and separate clay for pottery production.
25:25Yuval argues that the scrolls have nothing to do with this site.
25:29That is, you wouldn't want your scribes, very holy men, praying, writing scrolls, here on a site that was used for common production of pots.
25:39According to Yuval Peleg, this site had nothing to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
25:44They came from somewhere else.
25:48Peleg's view that the site was a pottery factory is one of many disputed ideas that counter the traditional view of Qumran.
25:56Others have described it as a villa, a perfume factory, or tannery.
25:59It's likely that over time, different groups used the site for different purposes.
26:06There is no consensus about Qumran, and whether the Essenes lived and wrote some of the scrolls here.
26:12Now, forensic scientists are using modern technology to find clues to the ancient mystery.
26:21Here we have a box from Qumran, and what you can see over here is the animal bones that were excavated in that area.
26:31And what I'm looking for is bones that I can extract DNA out of.
26:37The Dead Sea Scrolls are parchments made from animal hides.
26:41Dr. Gila Kehillah Bargal has discovered DNA from scroll parchments and discovered that they are made from goat and ibex.
26:50Now she's testing animal bones found at the Qumran site to reveal if the scroll parchments are made from the same animals.
26:59We believe that if they had herds of sheep, goat, maybe cattle in Qumran, they would slaughter the animal, they will eat the meat,
27:08they will use the skin for either clothing or parchments.
27:14If these DNA tests show that some of the scroll parchments are made from the hides of animals found at Qumran,
27:22it will be firm evidence that some of the scrolls were made there.
27:27What we do hope at the end is to get the full profile of the goats from the parchment,
27:34the full profile of the goats from the bone, and match them together to show that we're talking about the same goats.
27:45Ink taken from one of the scrolls, known as the Thanksgiving scroll, is tested for traces of water from the Dead Sea.
27:52Traces of water found in the scrolls or in the inks can be a real clue to the place where this ink or this scroll has been produced.
28:04Water in the Dead Sea has a unique composition of the elements chlorine and bromine.
28:10We tested the ink of the Thanksgiving scroll and we found that the key elements of the Dead Sea water, chlorine and bromine, are there in characteristic relationship.
28:23Characteristic for the place of Qumran and surrounding.
28:26The test shows that the scroll is written with ink made from Dead Sea water.
28:33Its evidence indicating this scroll may have been written near the Dead Sea, possibly at Qumran.
28:39It's a tantalizing clue for Bob Cargo.
28:46He believes that archaeologists and other scientists working together will reveal who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
28:54I cannot tell you how excited I am.
28:57For me, there is this anticipation that maybe, just maybe, there is a chance that we could solve this question.
29:06Professor Jan Guneweg heads an international team of 130 scientists looking for an answer to who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
29:14This is a scroll jar, one of the many which are found at Qumran, about 100 of them.
29:23Guneweg tests the chemical composition of the clay in the scroll jars found in the caves.
29:29Clay has a distinctive fingerprint, a possible clue to where the scroll jars were made.
29:36We take a piece of ceramic, we grind it, we send it to a nuclear reactor where it is bombarded with neutrons.
29:42Then we can measure the chemical fingerprint of the clay in which the pottery was made.
29:49Since there is no clay on Earth with the exact same chemical composition, it is like DNA.
29:55You can point to a specific area and say, this pottery was made here, that pottery was made over here.
30:03Guneweg discovers that half of the scroll jars are made with distinctive Qumran clay.
30:10He once doubted there was a religious community at Qumran, but the forensic science is telling him otherwise.
30:18We have, I think, linked the Dead Sea Scrolls with a sectarian group who was located at Qumran.
30:28I think that a third of the Dead Sea Scrolls is written in Qumran itself and the rest is coming in from one or two different places.
30:38The forensic science cuts through the debate and suggests that a third of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written at Qumran.
30:45But were the writers the Essenes? And did they write all of the scrolls? And how did all the scrolls come to be in the caves of the Dead Sea?
30:55Bob Cargill is in Jerusalem with fellow archaeologist Shimon Gibson.
31:03Gibson has discovered a site linked to the Essenes.
31:07What is certain is that the Essenes were here in Jerusalem because we have a gate and we're standing here at the gate called the gate of the Essenes.
31:15So definitely the Essenes were in Jerusalem and why not at Qumran in my opinion.
31:21Shimon Gibson believes that the Essenes could have been the group that lived at Qumran and left their scrolls in the caves there.
31:29The Essenes might have been the major group depositing scrolls there. That is definitely a possibility, but we must take into consideration the possibility that other groups were putting their manuscripts there as well.
31:42Gibson has been digging at Mount Zion, an ancient part of Jerusalem, and here he unearthed what could be a vital clue in identifying other writers of the scrolls.
31:55It's an amazing discovery, a remarkable cup thousands of years old.
32:00We found this cup, which is about so high, and inscribed on the sides of this cup is a text, which turns out to be a cryptic text.
32:15The only other place where we have cryptic texts is at Qumran. So there's a link here between the cup and Qumran.
32:23The only other place this cryptic text has been found is in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
32:30Surprisingly, a tenth of the scrolls contain this unique code.
32:36To have a cup from Jerusalem, from the Mount Zion area, with this cryptic text, similar to the cryptic texts at Qumran, might provide us with information as to who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
32:49Professor Stephen Fan is analyzing the cup. If he can decipher the code, it might lead to a real breakthrough.
33:00It was a marvelous discovery. It has on it lines of an inscription that actually tells us a lot about what this cup is all about.
33:09So this new technology, where we can actually do lighting from all different sides in one image, makes it possible to be able to move the light around on the computer screen so that we can actually see all the lines.
33:27The new technology reveals the lettering and allows Fan to decipher the code.
33:32In the cryptic alphabet, we can read Aleph, Dalet, Vav, Nun, Yud, which is the divine name, Adonai, Lord.
33:44And the second word that we have here, which says Shavti, Lord, I've returned.
33:50Some priests wrote in secret code to keep their communication with God exclusively to themselves.
34:01It was understood to be a secretive script used by the priests, non-Essene priests, in order to make a set of texts which no one could read except themselves.
34:13And the fact that we have it on this mug in Jerusalem and on these texts at Qumran shows that this was something of a more secretive part of a priestly society.
34:26The use of this secret code on the priest's cup and in the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests a possible connection between priests from the Temple of Jerusalem and some of the scrolls.
34:39I think it dramatically changes our understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
34:43If we see them as documents produced by priests, gone is the Ark of the Covenant.
34:48We're never going to find Noah's Ark, the Holy Grail, these things, we're never going to see them.
34:52But we just may very well have documents from the Temple in Jerusalem.
34:58It would be the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple.
35:02In the time the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, there was great upheaval in the Jerusalem priesthood.
35:18Certain factions were dissatisfied with foreign influences, so they left the Temple.
35:23They could have gone to Qumran and dedicated themselves to a life of purity.
35:28It's very conceivable to see a group of Jews thinking, ah, the Jerusalem Temple is now corrupt,
35:34so we're going to separate ourselves and we're going to do things the way they should be.
35:38The people would have wanted to be here, but they disagreed with what was going on in the Temple,
35:43so they couldn't be here. They had to find something like this elsewhere.
35:47These dissident priests may have taken their scrolls with them as they left Jerusalem.
35:53So you have a group separating themselves from what they understand to be heresy.
35:59They're going to have their own ritual purity laws, and they're going to worship in a way that God is going to like them
36:05more than they like some other group, and they're going to sit here and wait for God to come
36:10to fight the battles for them, to win, and to vindicate them, to prove that they were right and the others were wrong.
36:17In this view, some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are the texts of dissident priests from the Jerusalem Temple.
36:26Those priests may have been the Essenes, or a different group of priests.
36:31A final answer might be found in the caves of the Dead Sea.
36:36Professor Stephen Fan believes the key to finally understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls' mystery lies in the caves around Qumran.
36:48It was an important area where people could actually walk from east to west without really being seen by the various centuries.
36:57The scrolls were found in eleven different caves, some right next to the Qumran site, others up to two miles away.
37:06There are a lot of caves, but they have different contents.
37:11Right up here you can see the massive lintel over Cave 11.
37:16Inside here there were scraps of scrolls all over the surface, with the soil coming up to our hips here.
37:25And back there is where the major 33 scrolls were found.
37:29But this is a different set of scrolls than what we found to the south.
37:33Here we have scrolls that deal with temple issues.
37:37If this cave had been discovered first, nobody would have ever believed that this was an Essene cave here.
37:45Because this doesn't describe an Essene society.
37:53Fan thinks that scrolls in this cave to the north of Qumran belong to a sect called the Zealots.
38:01His work leads him to a surprising conclusion about who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
38:08In the 1950s they came to the conclusion that all the caves along the cliffs here,
38:13including the site of Qumran, comprised one single library spread out among all these different caves.
38:19After we have looked at the content of these scrolls, we feel that no longer can be the case.
38:25What we have instead are different caves with different deposits made by different people at different times.
38:32So, who in fact wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
38:35It's not one group, but it's the various groups that existed in Judaism of the first century.
38:40And what we're seeing is, the Dead Sea Scrolls is not just one library, but actually the multiple libraries of multiple groups.
38:54So, when we ask the question, who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
38:57The answer is, the scrolls were written by Jews.
39:01Not just one specific group, but by lots of Jews.
39:04There is one event that ties the fate of all these groups with all their scrolls together.
39:14The Great Jewish Revolt.
39:20After 130 years of Roman occupation, the Jews rise up in 66 CE.
39:28The Jews were tired of being oppressed.
39:30I mean, they had been living under Roman occupation for so long, they began to fight back.
39:35And the Romans don't like this.
39:37And so they began to come in and suppress the Jewish Revolt.
39:41The Romans didn't stop with wiping out the people.
39:45They destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem.
39:48What you see here is what the Romans do.
39:53They destroy things.
39:55They literally took one of the greatest architectural masterpieces of the ancient world and knocked it down.
40:02The Temple's gone, and this, this is what's left of Jerusalem.
40:08This is the main sewer of Jerusalem, the cloaca maxima.
40:18The ancient historian Josephus wrote that at the end of the war, some Jews hid in channels under the city and finally escaped through them.
40:27Archaeologist Ronnie Reich has been excavating Jerusalem for 40 years and has recently discovered sewers from the time of the Revolt.
40:39It's an amazing find that will bring Cargill's journey to a close.
40:48Archaeologists Bob Cargill and Ronnie Reich are exploring newly excavated sewers recently found under the streets of Jerusalem.
40:58We have excavated here a narrow sample of a stone-paved stepped street going up the valley to the Temple Mount.
41:10And by the coins, by the pottery, this is clearly the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 by the Romans.
41:17Ronnie Reich believes this is one way Jews escaped from Jerusalem.
41:23This was just one way, an ingenious one, to escape.
41:29Simply take the channel to the valley, the Kidron Valley, and the distance is short.
41:34In one night, you are near the Dead Sea.
41:38The escape route took refugees in the direction of the Dead Sea.
41:43It could have been used to get scrolls out of Jerusalem.
41:47So, if you rescue yourself, you can rescue whatever fits in such a channel.
41:53If it's dear to you, if it's worth risking your life to do it, you take it out with yourself and out of town.
42:01You can imagine what it's like to be fleeing Jerusalem during the suppression of the Jewish revolt.
42:09They're running for their lives.
42:11They grabbed their valuable possessions, they grabbed their Bibles, they grabbed their scrolls, and they ran.
42:17And they hid those scrolls in caves, you know, all throughout the Judean desert.
42:23Some of them perhaps may have managed to come back and grab their scrolls and move on.
42:28Some of them didn't.
42:29The Romans chased them down and slaughtered them right out here on the north end of the Dead Sea.
42:39The same fate may have befallen all the custodians of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
42:47Whoever you believe wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, what's striking to me is that these Jews took the things closest to them, the word of God, and fled with them.
42:57And their last dying act was to hide them, to preserve them, so that they'd be safe.
43:02Thousands of Jews are killed or enslaved by the Romans in the Jewish revolt.
43:15Qumran is destroyed, as is the whole of the western shore of the Dead Sea.
43:25The last Jewish holdout is the ancient fortress at Pasada.
43:30According to legend, the Zealots hold out here for three years.
43:35Jews fled to the south, to Masada, because they knew it was a safe place to be.
43:41The Romans laid seeds to the entire mountain.
43:48They used Jewish captives of slaves to build an earthen rampart all the way to the top of the mountain.
43:57The Jews on top decided that they would rather die as free men than live as captives of the Romans.
44:02So they decided to enter into a suicide pact.
44:05Ten men were drawn by lot, and they were charged with killing all of the other Jews.
44:11Then one of those ten was chosen, and he killed the other nine.
44:15And then there was one suicide at the end.
44:18So by the time the Romans showed up the next morning, everyone was dead.
44:25The story of Masada is truly one of the greatest tragedies of all time.
44:31When archaeologists excavated Masada, they discovered scrolls just like some of those found in the caves at Qumran.
44:44The significance of Dead Sea Scrolls here at Masada is that it brings the entire story of the Dead Sea Scrolls to a close.
44:53We could have the final act of devout Jews fleeing the Roman persecution, taking these scrolls up here to the top, and then perishing.
45:02But they left behind the scrolls.
45:05We may very well have some Jews hiding scrolls in the caves, and some Jews bringing the scrolls up here to Masada.
45:13So this ties the Dead Sea Scrolls to one of the epic tragedies in history.
45:19I went from thinking that the scrolls were written by one single group, to understanding that the scrolls were perhaps written by a vast array of different Jewish groups.
45:36It really does allow me to understand the scrolls as documents that speak directly to me, not just some group that died off a long time ago, but these scrolls still have meaning for me today.
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