As the bus stopped at Israel’s Parliament
building I was eager to cross the street to a nearby museum. I came to see a
document that had intrigued me for many years. I hardly noticed the throngs of
tourists headed to The Knesset, because I was there to see the Dead Sea
Scrolls. This museum’s roof looks like the circular clay pots in which the
scrolls were found. The roof, in a fountain pool, is painted white. Nearby
stands a stark dark-colored wall. A sign explained the symbolism. The Essenes,
a small ultra conservative Jewish sect at the time of Jesus, considered
themselves “sons of the Light.” They saw
the world as a great battle between the light of God’s holiness and the
darkness of sin and human wickedness.
I had visited the remains of an Essene
settlement. It was in Southern Israel at Qumran. The day was hot and the desert
rocks shimmered. They had a very austere life. As I wandered among the ruins I
pondered the gift these long gone devotees had given to the 20th
Century. My mind went to AD 70. The news then was bad – very bad. Roman General
Titus, who later became emperor, was devastating the land in reprisals for the
Jewish Rebellion that broke out a few years before. Everything Jewish was slaughtered
or burned.
The Essenes hid their library of hand-copied
scriptures in clay pots. The pots were placed in caves in the hills. The hope was
that after the trouble ended they’d all return and the settlement would be
repopulated. Rome’s swords flashed, the buildings were destroyed, the old were
butchered, the leaders were crucified and the young were dragged away in
chains. No one returned. The pots were layered in dust for 1900 years.
I wasn’t raised in a Christian home. My
early days as a believer were filled with questions. One of my struggles was to
believe that the Bible was authentic. Even if the original documents were
written by God’s own hand - the Bible claims that inspired human penmanship was
the mechanism- I couldn’t believe that copy after copy could be made during
hundreds of years without errors creeping in.
My pastor mentioned that 2 decades before,
a goat herder had flung some pebbles into a desert cave in Israel, heard some
pottery breaking and upon investigating made a discovery that shocked the
world. The manuscripts were nearly lost by bits being sold cheaply to tourists,
but another long story illustrates the zeal by which they were regathered.
Even in training for the Christian
Ministry I audited lectures that presupposed that the book we now hold as The
Bible, can, at best contain only fragments of the original documents. A Doctor
of Divinity went to great lengths to “prove” to us that its text was
untrustworthy. One of his lectures contained the case of the 3 Isaiahs. The
book in our Bible by that name was supposed by some scholars to have been three
small books and these were lumped together.
All of this is background to why I was so
keen to see a particular scroll on display at the museum. One of the pots
contained the entire book of Isaiah. The staff regards the find as sacred and
when a Jewish woman to my right tried to sneak a photograph she was escorted
out by a very stern security guard. I didn’t need a camera for I was misty-eyed
as I recorded every inch of that glass-covered scroll in my mind.
I was looking at a miracle. Mind you
perhaps the miracle was in the modern Bible back in my hotel room. Not a word
was different. The Bible verse came to mind: “The grass withers and the flowers
fall but the word of our God shall stand forever” Isaiah 40:8
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