The Isaiah Scroll 1Q Isaiah

It is one of the longest biblical manuscripts ever found from antiquity. Written in Hebrew, on seventeen columns of leather, it contains every chapter of the book of Isaiah from the disputed first verse to the closing poems about the new heavens and the new earth. The leather is dark and cracked in places, the columns have worn edges where the original reader’s thumb must have passed, and one of the sheets has a tear that runs almost the full height of a column. The scroll is dated paleographically to the late second century BCE, and it was the first complete book of the Hebrew Bible to come out of the Dead Sea caves. It is called 1QIsaiaha, or 1QIsa-a, or the Great Isaiah Scroll. It is the single most important manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in existence, and it was almost lost three times before a scholar set eyes on it.

How a Shepherd, a Cobbler, and a Metropolitan Nearly Lost It

The winter of 1946 to 1947 was cold in the Judaean desert. The Bedouin of the Ta’amireh tribe, who pastured their flocks along the cliffs above the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, were watching for strays that wandered into the caves that pitted the soft chalk of the marl shelf. One of the young shepherds in the area was a boy called Muhammed edh-Dhib, then about thirteen years old, from the village of Beit Ta’amir. He was out looking for a goat that had bolted from the flock. He threw a stone into a dark opening in the cliff above Wadi Qumran. The stone clattered and he heard, after a moment, the unmistakable sound of a pot breaking. He climbed up, crawled in, and found a tall narrow cave whose floor was littered with broken jars. Inside one of the jars, wrapped in linen, was a scroll.

He brought the scroll home. His mother, unimpressed, told him it was a magic amulet and made him put it in a closet. There it sat for some weeks until his uncle, a cobbler, took it to a dealer in Bethlehem. The dealer offered a small sum. The cobbler was insulted. He took the scroll back. The boy went back to the cave and found three more scrolls in jars, then eventually a fifth, a sixth, and a seventh, in a different chamber, lower down. The seven were eventually sold, in two batches, through middlemen, to a Syrian Orthodox archbishop named Mar Samuel, who had set up a kind of one-man antiquities shop in his compound in Jerusalem to raise money for his community during the late Mandate period. Mar Samuel advertised the scrolls in the Wall Street Journal in June 1948, by which time the State of Israel was a few days old and the new government was suddenly very interested in any ancient Jewish manuscript that surfaced in the country.

Mar Samuel sold three of the seven scrolls in 1948 to Eleazar Sukenik, the elderly father of the archaeologist Yigael Yadin. Sukenik had been excavating around the country for thirty years; he had not been allowed to look at the scrolls but had smelled something like a Dead Sea jar and a Dead Sea linen in the way the bundles were described to him. He paid a sum of money, smuggled the scrolls out of the West Bank under wartime conditions, and they became part of what would be the Israel Museum’s collection after his death in 1953. The other four scrolls, including the complete Isaiah, stayed with Mar Samuel. In 1954 they were advertised in the same American newspaper column. The new State of Israel bought them, with the help of a fundraising campaign and a contribution, the story goes, raised by a shoe manufacturer who had heard the young state could not afford its own Bible. The seven scrolls were reunited in the Shrine of the Book in 1965, when the Shrine opened.

The provenance is one of the great near-miss stories of twentieth-century scholarship. There were moments when the scrolls were genuinely at risk of being lost. The mother, who put the first one in a closet, was the first bottleneck. The cobbler uncle, who came within a hair of selling the lot to a man who would have kept them in Bethlehem, was the second. Mar Samuel, who was a professional ecclesiastical middleman in a country at war, was the third. The scrolls were in private hands in a contested city during a war of partition, and had politics gone even slightly differently in the summer of 1948, they would not be in Jerusalem today.

Mar Samuel himself was an interesting figure. He was the archbishop of the Syrian Orthodox community in Jerusalem, an ancient Eastern Christian communion that had been in the city since the late antique period. He had set up a small antiquities market in his compound as a way of raising money for his community, and the appearance of seven intact biblical and parabiblical scrolls from a cave on the West Bank was, for him, a kind of providential windfall. He had no idea what the scrolls were, beyond the fact that they were old and looked Jewish. He advertised them through a Syrian Orthodox contact in New York, who placed an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal on 1 June 1948. The advertisement offered “Four Dead Sea Scrolls” for sale to a “suitable institution.” The new State of Israel, which had declared independence on 14 May 1948, was two weeks into its war of independence at that point, and the international community was still working out whether to recognise the new state. The scrolls were a small but symbolically loaded addition to the cultural patrimony of the new country.

Eleazar Sukenik, who bought the first three scrolls in 1948, was in his sixties by then, and he died in 1953 before the Shrine of the Book was even designed. He had been an archaeologist for three decades, and he had been one of the first scholars to make sense of the archaeology of the Bar Kokhba revolt from the caves of the Judaean desert. His son, Yigael Yadin, who had been a young intelligence officer in the Haganah during the 1948 war and would go on to become one of the most prominent archaeologists of the next generation, did most of the formal publication of the family collection. Yadin’s The Message of the Scrolls, published in 1957, was the first English-language popular synthesis of the find, and the first book that most general readers encountered.

What Was in the Cave, and Why It Survived

There were eventually eleven caves in the marl terrace above the Dead Sea that yielded manuscript material. Cave 1, the one Muhammed edh-Dhib threw his stone into, was the first, and it was the only one whose contents were intact when the archaeologists arrived. The other ten were excavated by Roland de Vaux’s team from the École Biblique in Jerusalem, beginning in 1952, and most of them had been looted by the Bedouin in the interval between the original find and the formal survey. Cave 4 was by far the richest, with fragments of nearly six hundred different manuscripts, but it had been picked over. Cave 1 was the only one that still had the leather in linen in the jars on the day it was surveyed in February 1949 by Gerald Lankester Harding, de Vaux, and John Trever, all of them then working for the Jordanian Department of Antiquities.

What made the preservation possible was a particular combination of geography and weather. The caves sit on a narrow terrace of soft marl about two kilometres long, about a kilometre and a half inland from the shore of the Dead Sea. They face roughly north, away from the sun, and they are high enough up the cliff to catch the dry northwesterly desert wind. The Dead Sea itself, at nearly four hundred metres below sea level, is the lowest point on the surface of the earth, and the air above it is exceptionally dry. The combination of a stable cool temperature, a very low ambient humidity, and a sealed cave entrance worked on the leather the way it would have worked on parchment: it dehydrated the collagen slowly, killed the bacteria that would have eaten it, and kept the ink bound to the surface. A manuscript in such a cave is, in effect, freeze-dried, and it can last for two thousand years if the cave is not flooded and the jar is not broken.

The jars themselves were a second line of defence. Most of the scrolls were stored in tall cylindrical jars of local pottery, sealed with bowl-shaped lids and sometimes with a plug of bitumen around the rim. The jars kept out the rodents, the foxes, the moisture, and the dust. They were, in many cases, made for the purpose. The Qumran community that copied the scrolls was a literate, organised, and theologically self-conscious group, and they packed their library as if they expected, at some point, to come back for it. They did not, in the event, come back. The jars stayed sealed through the Jewish revolt of 66 to 73 CE, through the Roman pacification under Vespasian and Titus, and through the long centuries of late antiquity, the early Islamic period, the Crusades, the Mamluk period, and the Ottoman Empire. They were still sealed when Muhammed edh-Dhib’s stone broke one of them in November 1947.

Of the seven original scrolls, six were religious texts in some form. The seventh, a copper scroll, was a list of buried treasure written in a codex of beaten copper. The great Isaiah Scroll was the only one of the seven that contained a complete book of the Hebrew Bible. The other biblical scrolls from Cave 1 were the Habakkuk Commentary, a running commentary on the first two chapters of Habakkuk that took the prophetic text as a coded reference to the community’s own circumstances; the Community Rule, a charter for the sectarian community; the War Scroll, a manual for an eschatological war; a Thanksgiving Hymns scroll; an Apocryphal Psalms scroll; and the Genesis Apocryphon, a retelling of the patriarchal narratives in Aramaic. Six of the seven were sectarian. The Isaiah was the only one that any later Jewish or Christian community would have regarded as scripture in the modern sense. It is the oldest copy of a book of the Hebrew Bible ever found that covers, in a single physical manuscript, the whole book from beginning to end.

What 1QIsaiaha Actually Says

The scroll is 7.34 metres long, twenty-five to twenty-seven centimetres high, and is composed of seventeen sheets of leather stitched end to end. The sheets were prepared from the hides of goats or ibex, dehaired, scraped, washed, and rubbed with salt and lime. The scribe wrote in columns of between fourteen and seventeen lines. The text begins, in the right-hand column of the first sheet, with the now familiar opening of Isaiah, “The vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.” It ends, in the left-hand column of the seventeenth sheet, with the last verses of Isaiah 66, the prophecy of the new heavens and the new earth, the rejoicing of the servants of the Lord, the going forth of the flesh of the slain to look upon their enemies.

The book of Isaiah is unusual among the prophetic books in that it is internally composite. The first thirty-nine chapters, scholars generally agree, are the work of an eighth-century prophet who lived through the Syro-Ephraimite crisis and the Assyrian invasion of 701 BCE, and who spoke to a Judean audience. The last twenty-seven chapters, beginning with the words “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God,” are a body of material addressed to a much later Judean community, probably in Babylon in the sixth century BCE, and the final chapters are even later. The Great Isaiah Scroll contains both halves, in their canonical order, without any visible internal division. There is no marker, no colophon, no catchword, that would tell the reader that the prophet of the first part is not the same as the prophetic voice of the second. The text reads as one continuous book. Theologically, the two halves sit in a continuous tradition; literarily, they are not, and the scholar who has read 1QIsaiaha from end to end is reading both halves in a single physical form that was already over four hundred years old when the latest material in the book was composed.

The Hebrew of the scroll is not the Hebrew of the Masoretic tradition. The scribe used a script that is recognisably the late Second Temple Jewish hand, with features that would disappear in the first centuries of the Common Era. The letters are larger than the medieval hand, the line-spacing is generous, the columns are narrow, and the parchment is of a quality that suggests an expensive commission. The orthography is what scholars call a “plene” orthography, with the matres lectionis (the letters aleph, he, waw, and yod) used to mark long vowels more often than in the later Masoretic tradition. There are no vowel points. The text is written in consonants only, as every Hebrew biblical manuscript would be for the next eight hundred years, until the Tiberian Masoretes of the seventh to tenth centuries developed the pointing system that survives in the printed Hebrew Bible today. The reader in the late second century BCE was therefore expected to know the text well enough to read it aloud without vowels, and the Masoretes were the people who eventually made explicit what had been implicit for a millennium.

There are several small but well-known textual peculiarities. The first verse of Isaiah, in the standard Masoretic text, reads, in the opening clause, “In the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah,” without any object for the verb of vision. 1QIsaiaha, in its first column, adds an object. The phrase is not so different from the Septuagint, the Greek translation made in Alexandria perhaps two centuries before the scroll was copied, which renders the same passage as “the vision which Isaiah saw, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.” The addition is a small gloss, possibly intended to clarify the text for a reader who was not deeply familiar with the prophetic corpus. There are seventeen such substantive variants in the first chapter alone, by one count, and several hundred across the book. Most are minor. A few are not. Isaiah 53, the famous suffering-servant poem, has small differences of word order and the like; nothing that changes the meaning, and certainly nothing that supports either the Jewish or the Christian traditional reading against the other. The textual tradition is recognisable, in other words. The line runs from the second century BCE scroll through the Masoretic codices of the tenth century CE without a break.

A Text a Thousand Years Before the Masoretic Standard

The comparison that changed biblical scholarship was the comparison between 1QIsaiaha and the standard printed Hebrew Bible. The standard printed Hebrew Bible, before 1947, was based primarily on a single late manuscript, the Leningrad Codex, dated 1008 CE. The Leningrad Codex is a complete Bible, written in a Tiberian Masoretic hand with the full pointing system, the cantillation marks, and the marginal Masorah. The Tiberian Masoretes, the Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali families of Tiberias, were the people who fixed the pointing and the orthography in the seventh to tenth centuries, and the Leningrad Codex is the closest we have to the text they were trying to preserve. The Aleppo Codex, slightly older, was stolen from its synagogue in Aleppo in 1958 and has been only partially recovered, but what survives of it agrees closely with Leningrad. Together, these two codices are the textual backbone of every printed Hebrew Bible in the modern era.

1QIsaiaha predates both codices by more than a thousand years. The paleographic dating places the copy in the second half of the second century BCE, and the carbon-14 work published in the 1990s, on a small fragment of the linen wrapping, was consistent with that date. The text of the scroll, in other words, was copied in a scriptorium that was operating in the generation of Judas Maccabaeus, the generation in which the Hasmonean revolt restored the Jerusalem Temple, and the generation in which the text of the Hebrew Bible was being standardised by the priestly class. It is older, by a factor of eleven, than the oldest complete Masoretic Bible we have. It is, in many of its readings, recognisably the same text. This was the discovery. The chain of transmission, from the late Second Temple period to the Tiberian Masoretes, was not broken.

The differences between 1QIsaiaha and the Masoretic text, where they exist, fall into a small number of categories. Some are orthographic: the scribe of the second century BCE uses a fuller spelling of certain words than the later Masoretic tradition. Some are linguistic: a particle is used, or omitted, where the Masoretic text has the opposite. Some are harmonisations: a phrase from one part of Isaiah is inserted into another in the later text, perhaps in error, perhaps as a deliberate cross-reference. And some are more interesting still. There are passages in 1QIsaiaha that agree with the Septuagint against the Masoretic text, which suggests that the Septuagint translators were working from a Hebrew Vorlage that was not identical to the proto-Masoretic text and that the proto-Masoretic text was, in the late Second Temple period, one of several recensions in circulation. There are also passages in 1QIsaiaha that agree with the Masoretic text against the Septuagint, which suggests that the Masoretic tradition was already a coherent tradition by the late Second Temple period and that the divergence of the Septuagint was not a free translation but a different copy of the Hebrew.

The upshot of the comparison was a quiet shift in the field. Before 1947, scholars had worked with the assumption that the Masoretic text was the only reliable Hebrew text and that the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Peshitta, and the Targumim were derivative translations. After 1947, the field had to accept that the Masoretic text was the descendant of a family of texts, that the Septuagint was the translation of a different member of the same family, and that the proto-Masoretic text was a particular edition that had been preserved with great care by a particular group of scribes. The Masoretes were not inventing the tradition. They were codifying one branch of it. The other branches had existed and had been used. The scrolls gave the field a baseline, and the baseline showed that the chain was much longer than anyone had thought.

For the student of the Masoretic text in particular, 1QIsaiaha is a kind of pre-Masoretic witness. The Tiberian Masoretes were working, in the seventh to tenth centuries, on a written tradition whose roots ran back into the late Second Temple period. The Qumran scribes were part of that tradition, even though they were not in the direct lineage of the Tiberian scribes. The Ben Asher family, in particular, claimed a chain of tradition going back to the early medieval period, and their work culminated in the Aleppo Codex. The 1QIsaiaha scroll, by contrast, was the work of a community that died out in the late first century CE. The chain from 1QIsaiaha to the Tiberian Masoretes is not a single line. It is, rather, a family of lines, of which the Ben Asher line is the most carefully preserved and the Qumran line is the oldest surviving witness.

The Qumran scribes themselves, in their practice, were already part of the scribal culture that would eventually produce the Masoretes. The leather was prepared according to a strict protocol. The text was written in columns, the columns were sewn together, the seams were reinforced, and the finished scroll was wrapped in linen and stored in a jar. The scribe who copied 1QIsaiaha was a professional, working to a standard that the community required. The text, as a physical object, is a work of craftsmanship. The reader, turning the leather over, feels the care that went into the production. The Masoretes, a thousand years later, would have had a slightly different technology (they wrote on parchment, not leather; they used quills, not reed pens; and they added the vowel points that the Qumran scribes had no need for) but the same care, and the same sense that the text was a thing of value, to be transmitted, not edited.

One of the more interesting technical results of the comparison between 1QIsaiaha and the Masoretic text is the question of who was right, in the late Second Temple period, about the spelling of Hebrew. The Qumran scribes used a fuller orthography. They wrote “YHWH” with the matres lectionis that the later Masoretes would, in many cases, drop. They wrote the divine name in the special form that would eventually become the basis of the qere and ketiv system of the Masoretic tradition. The Masoretic tradition, by contrast, has many places where the consonantal text is preserved but the pointing is ambiguous, and the Qumran scrolls sometimes show which of the ambiguous readings was the older one. The scrolls, in other words, are not just evidence of what the text said. They are evidence of how the text was read aloud, and they help in the difficult cases where the Masoretic pointing is uncertain.

The Shrine of the Book and the Modern Era

The seven scrolls, all of them now in the Israel Museum, are housed in the Shrine of the Book, a wing of the museum in the Givat Ram campus in Jerusalem. The Shrine was designed by the American architects Armand Bartos and Frederic J. Kiesler, and it was opened in 1965. The building is a white dome, half above ground and half below, with a long reflecting pool in front of it and a wall of text running around the entrance. The wall is inscribed with a passage from the Isaiah scroll itself, the famous passage about beating swords into ploughshares, in modern Hebrew letters but in the line of the original. The shrine is meant to evoke the jars in which the scrolls were stored. The dome is white, the entrance is dark, the scrolls are in the cool interior. The building is one of the most striking small museum structures in the world, and it is built around the seven scrolls that the young shepherd found in the desert and that the State of Israel acquired by a combination of fundraising, official purchase, and a last-minute donation from a shoe manufacturer.

Inside, the Great Isaiah Scroll is displayed in a sealed, climate-controlled case, in dim light, on a rotating schedule. It is not always visible. The scroll is too fragile to be on permanent display, and the museum rotates it with other important manuscripts, in a way that limits the total light exposure over the centuries to come. The conservation work, for the last thirty years, has been led by the Israel Antiquities Authority, in cooperation with the museum. The scrolls have been photographed in high resolution, scanned in multispectral light, and the results are now available through the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. The full text of the Great Isaiah Scroll, including a transcription and a translation, was published in 2015 by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Google, in cooperation with the museum.

The Shrine of the Book’s architecture is itself a statement. The building was designed to evoke the shape of the jars in which the scrolls were stored, with the white dome above and the dark entrance below, and a long reflecting pool that runs from the entrance to the edge of the campus. The wall that runs around the entrance is inscribed with a passage from Isaiah 2, the passage about beating swords into ploughshares, in modern Hebrew characters, in the same line as the original. The passage is not the oldest in the book and not the most famous, but it is one of the most quoted, and the choice of the passage is part of the museum’s message. The Shrine is a museum, but it is also a kind of memorial, and the message of the memorial is that the ancient text and the modern state are part of the same conversation.

The original publication of the Great Isaiah Scroll was a long and, at the start, a slow process. The first photographs of the scroll appeared in 1950 and 1951, in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research and in the early fascicles of the Dead Sea Scrolls series. The full critical edition of 1QIsaiaha, by the Dominican scholar Joseph Ziegler and others, took another twenty years, and the facsimile edition by the Shrine of the Book in 1974 was the first time that the full scroll was available to scholars in a publishable form. The publication delay was a feature of the wider controversy over the scrolls in the 1950s and 1960s, when a small circle of editors controlled access to the material and were criticised for not publishing it more quickly. By the 1990s, after the resolution of the so-called “scrolls war” and the transfer of editorial responsibility to the Israel Antiquities Authority, the publication programme accelerated, and the full text of the Great Isaiah Scroll is now freely available online.

The wider significance of the scroll is now part of the standard apparatus of biblical scholarship. Every critical edition of the Hebrew Bible that has appeared since the 1970s, including the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Hebrew University Bible Project, has incorporated readings from 1QIsaiaha into its critical apparatus. The scroll is consulted on the question of whether a particular Masoretic reading is the older form, on the question of whether the Septuagint’s Hebrew Vorlage is preserved, and on the question of whether the biblical text was, in the late Second Temple period, the kind of stable, well-handled text that the scribes themselves were trying to preserve. The answer to all three of these questions is, on the whole, yes. The text of 1QIsaiaha is the same text, with the same orthography, the same line divisions, and the same essential readings, as the text that the Tiberian Masoretes would fix a thousand years later.

The Qumran community, whoever they were, were not the direct ancestors of the medieval Masoretes. The community died out, the scrolls were hidden, and the tradition was carried on by other hands, in other places. But the 1QIsaiaha scroll, in its jars in Cave 1, is the oldest surviving witness to the work that the Masoretes were eventually going to do. It is a kind of pre-Masoretic manuscript, even though it does not have the pointing and the cantillation that the Masoretes would later add. It is a proof of the chain. It is the link that the field had been missing, from the late Second Temple period into the early medieval, and the link is now, in a sealed case in Jerusalem, where the young shepherd’s stone and the cobbler uncle’s pride and the archbishop’s advertisement and the shoe manufacturer’s donation and the museum architect’s dome have all, in the end, put it.

The caves are quiet. The community is gone. The reader who unrolls the scroll today, if any reader still does, sees a text that was being copied when the Hasmoneans were still on the throne, in a script that would die out in a few centuries, in a leather that has held its shape for two thousand years because the desert is dry and the jars were sealed. The Masoretes, working a millennium later in Tiberias, would have recognised the text. They would have argued about its readings, and they would have committed their decisions to the margin. The text, by then, was theirs. But it had been, before it was theirs, someone else’s. And the someone else had been careful with it.

The care shows. The leather, where the original reader’s thumb went, is darkened. The columns, where the original reader turned the roll, are slightly curved. The tear in the second sheet, near the bottom of the third column, runs from the top of the sheet to almost the bottom, and the original scribe or someone shortly after him sewed it. The repair is visible. The reader sees the repair and infers the life of the object: it was a real book, used in a real community, by real hands. The Masoretes, had they ever had it in their hands, would have recognised that immediately. A book that has been cared for is recognisable. The Great Isaiah Scroll, in the sealed case in the Shrine of the Book, is one of the most cared-for books in the world.

References

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By Mavis · Reading time: about 22 minutes · Filed in Text & Transmission.