Part One
I
Old age carries with it a plethora of nuisances, but it possesses unique advantages too: long memories. Events and their context, about which younger generations only learn from hearsay or read in books, belong to their elders’ personal experience. Images are engraved in the mind; they can still be seen, their pristine reality perceived, felt and tasted. Incidents of years ago seem as though they had happened yesterday. Memory, it is true, often plays small tricks which tend to embellish or to distort the past. But events that made a profound impact on one’s mind frequently retain much of their original and authentic import and flavour. Having lived through them makes all the difference. For me, these considerations are especially true for my obsession with the Qumran Scrolls.
By accident or by grace, for over more than half a century I have had the good fortune to be actively involved in the saga of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I have watched the story unfold before my eyes. This is why the reader needs to be acquainted with my credentials.
In 1947, when the first scrolls were discovered at Qumran, I was an undergraduate of twenty-three, with horrible experiences of the war behind me, entailing the loss of my parents in the Holocaust. But I was also fired with curiosity and desperately longed for intellectual challenge and adventure. When I began to write this book in 2007, the sixtieth anniversary year of the first Scrolls find was being celebrated the world over: from Ljubljana in Slovenia, a rather unlikely place for the International Organization of Qumran Studies to foregather, followed by conferences in Britain and Canada, and ending with the mammoth international jamboree of the Society of Biblical Literature and the greatest ever exhibition of original Dead Sea Scrolls in the Natural History Museum in San Diego on the Pacific coast of the United States. Not to be outdone by the rest of the world, the Israeli confraternity of Qumran academics was preparing another sumptuous gala in 2008 to mark, I suppose, the start of the seventh decade of the era of the Scrolls. It was followed by another congress in Vienna and a further one was scheduled in Rome in 2009.
Between 1947 and the present day much water has flowed under the bridges of the many cities where biblical research is pursued. As a result, the Dead Sea texts have lost the novelty they enjoyed in the early days. They have become matter-of-fact reality, something that is imagined to have always been there. Indeed, they had been there before most of the people alive today were born. Also, the then stateless young man, who in 1948 dreamed of becoming one day a recognized Qumran expert, is now the author of The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English in the Penguin Classics series and an Emeritus Oxford professor, though under the ‘has been’ sounding title – ‘emeritus’ is often mistranslated as ‘former’ – continues to lurk much writing and a fair amount of lecturing activity. As for the Scrolls, they have ceased to be ‘the recently discovered manuscripts’ as we used to refer to them in the 1950s. Bit by bit, they have found their niche in the curricula of higher education on all the continents, as well as in the pigeon-hole of ‘Church conspiracy’ within the modern myth and folklore created by the international media. Even today, if the proverbial opinion pollster were to inquire in the street about the Dead Sea Scrolls, he would hear half of his clients mutter: ‘The Scrolls… Hmm… Aren’t they old manuscripts kept locked away in the Vatican?’ Readers of this book, if they persevere to the end, will surely know better. They will also learn that 2009 has marked the completion of the publication of all the Qumran texts.
1. The Portrait of the Story-teller
To provide real background for this chronicle, let me summarily introduce myself. My unusual first name (not to mention my accent, which remains undeniable even after more than fifty years of life in England) reveals that I hail from Hungary. I was born in 1924 in an assimilated Jewish family. Shortly before my seventh birthday in the – as it turned out – mistaken belief that it would secure a better future for me, my journalist father and school-teacher mother decided to convert to Roman Catholicism. The three of us were baptized in the town of Gyula in south-east Hungary by the parish priest, the Reverend William Apor, a baronet, scion of a very old aristocratic family, who is now heading towards canonization in the Catholic Church, having been beatified in 1997 by the saintmaker par excellence, Pope John Paul II. From the late 1930s the increasingly oppressive Hungarian anti-Semitic legislation, taking no notice of the family’s baptismal certificates, deprived my father of his livelihood, made my life difficult at my Catholic school and, above all, denied me access to higher education except via a Church-run theological seminary, which I entered in 1942. In March 1944, on Hitler’s order, the half-hearted Germanophile Magyar government was replaced by enthusiastic puppets of the Nazi Reich, and all hell was let loose on the Jews of Hungary. My parents were deported and joined the millions of innocent victims of the Holocaust. Protected by providence, the Church and a great deal of sheer luck, I managed to survive until the arrival of the Red Army in Budapest on Christmas day, 1944. During the previous seven months I was crossing and recrossing the country (fortunately without ever being challenged to identify myself) and ended up with the help of my former parish priest, William Apor, by then bishop of Györ in western Hungary, in the Central Theological Seminary of Budapest. My saintly protector soon had to pay with his life for his constant generosity towards people in need: he was shot dead by drunken Russian soldiers, whilst gallantly trying to shelter a group of women who had sought refuge in the episcopal residence.
Waiting for news from my parents, confused and depressed, I stuck for another eighteen months with my studies in theological college in Nagyvarad. By that time (1945–6), this city (renamed Oradea) and the whole of Transylvania were reoccupied by the Romanians. When by 1946 it became obvious that my parents had perished, I decided to turn my back on the country of my birth, which tolerated, and partly even engineered, the horrors of 1944. I migrated westwards in search of freedom, knowledge and enlightenment. To achieve my dream, I sought admission into the French religious society of the Fathers of Zion (Pères de Sion). Despite the totally unreliable postal service between Romania and the West in 1946, my application was received in Paris, but it was a near miracle that the letter informing me of my acceptance and the duty to present myself in early October at the training establishment of the order in Louvain (now Leuven in Belgium) reached me on 2 June, the date on which I planned a clandestine night-crossing from Romania to Hungary. If that precious envelope had remained in transit just for another twenty-four hours, it would probably never have caught up with me as no postal connection existed in those days between the two unfriendly countries, Romania and Hungary. I distinctly remember keeping a protective hand on the pocket which contained the letter from Louvain to ensure that this virtual passport to freedom would not be lost in the fields where I was trying to evade the Romanian frontier guards.
A few months later, in September 1946, I had again to opt for the illegal crossing of the frontier separating Hungary from Austria. I was faced with the proverbial Gordian knot or a Catch-22. To leave Hungary I needed a Russian exit permit. No such permit could be obtained without a Belgian visa in my passport, indicating that I had somewhere to go. But in the late summer of 1946, there was no Belgian diplomatic representation in Hungary. The nearest consulate was in Vienna, but for entering Austria, I needed a Russian exit stamp in my passport. So having hired a smuggler to guide me through the border forest, I simply walked out of Hungary in full daylight on 18 September 1946 and, having received in Vienna my French and Belgian visas, I embarked on 30 September on a momentous journey, which lasted three days, that took me through the Russian and French zones of occupation in Austria and across devastated southern Germany, to France. Leaving Strasbourg the following day, I reached Louvain on 2 October and I rang the doorbell of the community of the Fathers of Zion at 49 rue des Moutons, or Schaapenstraat in Flemish, as the bilingual numberplate indicated in the as yet linguistically undivided Belgium. It was in that old university town that I started my serious theological and biblical studies after four years of intellectual starvation in the Hungarian seminary.
First I followed a course of theology at the College of St Albert, run by French-speaking Belgian Jesuits, and continued three years later, having gained the licence or BA in theology, with a programme of ancient near-eastern history and philology at the Institut Orientaliste of the University, where I graduated in 1952. My first association with the Dead Sea Scrolls took place in Louvain in 1948 where I became an enthusiastic student of the Hebrew Bible.
Where did this enthusiasm spring from? One thing is certain: it cannot be credited to my family background. Neither my parents nor my other relations were practising Jews or knew any Hebrew or even Yiddish. My conscious memory preserves an anecdote about my awakening desire to learn Hebrew. The venue was my Hungarian-Romanian theological college in Nagyvarad and the date 1945. The seminary was situated in the largely unoccupied massive eighteenth-century episcopal palace where one day I entered a spacious room, previously the study of the director of the college, Geza Folmann, who was also the professor of biblical studies. He was by Hungarian standards an unusually well-trained man, having spent, shortly before the First World War, two years at the famous École Biblique (short for École Biblique et Archéologique Française) of the French Dominicans in Jerusalem. His sizeable library was filled with the large pink-covered tomes of the series Études Bibliques and he was also a subscriber to the École’s influential periodical, the still flourishing Revue Biblique. In the room I chanced to enter, all these volumes were lying scattered on the floor amid general chaos. After the liberation of the city by the Red Army at the end of 1944, the bishop’s palace served as living quarters for Russian soldiers who had no use for learned French books on advanced biblical studies. When they withdrew, they left their mess behind.
The director welcomed my offer to tidy up his office and thus I was given a chance to admire the books. They included Hebrew Bibles, and commentaries filled with Hebrew quotations. Out of intellectual curiosity or maybe atavism, I swore that I would make myself familiar with these fascinating and mysterious texts. Seven years later, on my first stay in the École Biblique in Arab Jerusalem, I met some of the teachers of my erstwhile professor. The world-famous Palestinian archaeologist L. H. Vincent and the great geographer of the Holy Land, F.-M. Abel, were still alive, but sadly neither of them remembered a former Hungarian pupil called Folmann, who never made a name for himself in the international club of biblical scholars.
To implement my vow of mastering Hebrew, I registered for a Hebrew course at the University of Budapest in the autumn semester of 1945, but had to interrupt my study when I was recalled to my provincial seminary. So I did my Hebraizing privately until finally I was given a real opportunity to delve into Hebrew on my arrival in Louvain. By the time I first had to face the Scrolls in 1948, I was competent in the language.
2. Biblical Studies in the 1940s
The course of study I was to embark on provides a good opportunity to sketch for the reader the state of biblical and post-biblical Jewish studies on the eve of the onset of the Qumran age. It is often claimed that the Dead Sea Scrolls have revolutionized our approach to the Hebrew Scriptures and to the literature of the age that witnessed the birth of the New Testament. Needless to say, my canvas will be schematic; these preliminary remarks are meant to serve only as a summary illustration of the state of play in Hebrew learning with a view to enabling the reader to grasp what was so extraordinary in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
For the general reader of the 1940s, the term ‘Bible’ designated the Holy Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity, divided in Christian parlance into Old Testament and New Testament. The Old Testament had a shorter and a longer version. The Palestinian Jewish Bible was held to consist of books written in Hebrew and Aramaic, while the Jews dispersed in the Greek-speaking countries of the ancient world translated this collection of thirty-nine books, and added to them the Apocrypha, that is, fifteen supplementary works either originally composed in, or later rendered into, Greek. The Christians further enlarged the Greek Bible they inherited from Hellenistic Judaism by twenty-seven books of the New Testament, also written in Greek. In the eyes of the non-specialist, these Holy Scriptures are the source, or one of the two sources, Church and Synagogue tradition being the other, of the Jewish and the Christian religions.
By contrast, those who adopt an academic approach envisage the Bible as a group of ancient texts which, like all other ancient texts, must be read in their original languages and understood in their appropriate historical, cultural and literary contexts. To establish what later generations made of them is the business of the theologian or of the Bible scholar acting as a theologian. By necessity the critical study of ancient texts requires an investigation of the manuscripts which have preserved them and of the relevant literary parallels that are capable of shedding light on their meaning. It was taught in the 1940s that the purpose of textual criticism or comparative study of the manuscripts was the reconstruction of the Urtext, the authentic document composed by the original author, with the help of the variants attested in the surviving copies. Before Qumran, most of these variants were identified as scribal errors or as the result of a deliberate interference with the text by copyists.
When I first started serious Hebrew studies, the best critical text of the Bible was the third edition of Biblia Hebraica, published by the German scholar Rudolf Kittel in 1938, which contained a major innovation compared to its earlier versions. Instead of the text used in the first and second editions, based on the Bible printed in Venice in 1517, and relying on late medieval Hebrew manuscripts, Kittel’s colleague, Paul Kahle, substituted the more reliable Leningrad Codex, dating to AD 1008. He would have preferred to use the Aleppo Codex (first half of the tenth century) rather than the manuscript from Leningrad, but the owners of the Aleppo manuscript were unwilling to allow their precious treasure to be photographed. The biblical text was accompanied by a critical apparatus containing the sporadic manuscript variants, mostly spelling differences, and some more meaningful discrepancies furnished by the Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Syriac translations of the Old Testament, all older than the Hebrew manuscripts, as well as some hypothetical improvements suggested by commentators, ancient and modern.
In parenthesis, for the study of the New Testament the standard edition we had in the 1940s was the twelfth edition (1937) of Eberhard and Erwin Nestle’s Novum Testamentum Graece, before it was revised by Kurt Aland and others in 1981. The critically edited New Testament differed fundamentally from the scholarly version of the Hebrew Bible. The latter confronted the student with the uniform text of a given manuscript (the Leningrad Codex), whereas owing to the much larger quantity and diversity of the Greek variants, an eclectic text was made up by scholars with the help of readings borrowed from diverse manuscripts. It may cause a shock to the uninitiated to learn that the text arrived at by the learned authors of the most advanced critical edition of the New Testament does not correspond to any existing manuscript. Both the Greek text and the translations made from it are founded on a hypothetical reconstruction.
Of incomparable historical importance in themselves, but only indirectly relevant to the study of the Hebrew Bible, are the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Syria. Scientific Egyptology started during Napoleon’s campaign in the delta of the Nile in 1798 and reached its first climax with the decipherment of the hieroglyphs by Henri de Champollion in 1822. The Egyptological finds enlightened various aspects of the Old Testament, in particular Wisdom literature. Assyriology, the study of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, took off in the middle of the nineteenth century. The pioneers were bored European diplomats, the French Paul Émile de Botta who began to dig in Nineveh in 1842, and the Englishman, Austen Henry Layard, who soon joined de Botta and competed with him on the same site. Within thirty years the cuneiform or wedge-shaped script of Mesopotamia was decoded and opened up to students of the Hebrew Bible such treasures as the Babylonian myths of the Creation and of the Flood, prefiguring the parallel stories in the Book of Genesis, and various allusions to the conquest of Samaria and Judaea by Assyrian and Babylonian kings, clarifying episodes of biblical history. In 1929, French archaeologists tumbled on the ruins of the ancient city of Ugarit at Ras Shamra in Syria, which yielded a previously unknown alphabet written with cuneiform characters and revealed the language and literature of the Canaanites, the original inhabitants of Palestine, whose religious ideas and practices were the frequent target of criticism in the law and the prophets of the Old Testament.
A final area of knowledge that a prospective Scripture specialist was expected to master was extra-biblical Jewish religious literature in the inter-Testamental period (200 BCE – 100 CE) as it was then called, now more commonly referred to as the late Second Temple era. It was considered to be an indispensable tool for the study of the Old and New Testaments. Knowledge of these works called the Apocrypha (books included in the Bible of Diaspora Jews, but rejected by the Palestinian Jewish religious authorities) and the Pseudepigrapha (religious compositions which, although influential, have never entered the canon of either Palestinian or Hellenistic Jewry) was held to be essential, and was to play a major role in the treatment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In regard to the Apocrypha, transmitted in the codices of the Greek Bible, a major breakthrough occurred in 1896 when two marvellously brave and enterprising Scottish lady travellers, the sisters Margaret Dunlop Gibson and Agnes Smith Lewis, discovered and acquired a gigantic collection of medieval Jewish texts in a genizah or manuscript depository attached to the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fustat in Old Cairo. Among them figured remains of five copies, dating to the eleventh and twelfth century CE, of the Hebrew Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira, previously known from the Greek Bible as the Book of Sirach or Ecclesiasticus. Altogether the fragments represented two thirds of the original document translated into Greek by the author’s grandson for the use of Hellenized Jews at the end of the second century BCE. They were first published in Cambridge in 1899 by Solomon Schechter and Charles Taylor under the title, The Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira: Portions of the Book of Ecclesiasticus from Hebrew Manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah Collection. On the eve of the Qumran discovery, two schools of thought were competing regarding the Ecclesiasticus from the Cairo Genizah. Important authorities held it to be the slightly distorted version of ben Sira’s Hebrew original, whereas other scholars of repute believed that it was a medieval retranslation into Hebrew of the Greek Ecclesiasticus. New evidence was needed to settle the debate.
Of the Pseudepigrapha (or literary works spuriously attributed to Old Testament personalities), only a few titles were known in their entirety prior to the nineteenth century: the Fourth Book of the Maccabees and the Psalms of Solomon were preserved in some manuscripts of the Greek Bible and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was first published in Oxford in 1698 by J. E. Grabe and reissued by J. A. Fabricius in his noted Pseudepigraphic Codex of the Old Testament (Codex pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti) in 1718. (Fabricius was the inventor of the term Pseudepigrapha.) Greek excerpts from the pseudepi-graphic Book of Jubilees and Book of Enoch also survived in quotations by Church Fathers and Byzantine writers. But the major advances were made in the nineteenth century. They resulted from the discovery of ancient Ethiopian literature, rich in Pseudepigrapha. Robert Lawrence, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, successively issued between 1818 and 1839 the Ethiopic version of the Ascension of Isaiah, the Fourth Book of Ezra and the Book of Enoch. In 1851, the renowned German Semitist, August Dillmann, published an improved version of the Ethiopic Enoch and added to it in 1859 the first edition of the Ethiopic translation of the Book of Jubilees. The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch joined the collection in 1871 thanks to the Italian scholar, A. M. Ceriani. Textual information relative to the Greek Book of Enoch was further enriched with U. Bouriant’s publication in 1892 of the Akhmim papyri and with the edition, in 1937, of the last chapters of the Greek Enoch from the Chester Beatty-Michigan papyri by Campbell Bonner. The Aramaic sayings of the wise Ahiqar, mentioned in the apocryphal Book of Tobit and known from numerous translations (Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian) unexpectedly showed up in the fifth-century BCE Aramaic papyri found at the beginning of the twentieth century at Elephantine in Egypt and published, in 1923, by Sir Arthur Cowley, Bodley’s Librarian in Oxford. The Cairo Genizah further added fairly extensive Aramaic fragments of a Testament of Levi, possibly the source of the Greek version of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.
From the same Cairo source also emerged a curious writing, attested in two medieval Hebrew manuscripts dating from the tenth to the twelfth century, that its editor, Solomon Schechter, called Fragments of a Zadokite Work when he published it in 1910. It also became known as the Damascus Document. Describing the doctrine and the laws of a Jewish sect, it caused a frisson in the scholarly world in the years immediately preceding the First World War, reminiscent, and not without good cause, of the excitement generated by the publication of the first Dead Sea Scrolls which contained several more than 2,000-year-old copies of the same work.
The new knowledge, accumulated between 1800 and 1900, was incorporated in the early twentieth century in two major fully annotated collections of the Pseudepigrapha edited by leading scholars with the help of the best specialists of the day. The first to appear in 1900 was Die Apocryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments, vols I–II, a German work under the editorship of Emil Kautzsch. It was followed in 1912–13 by R. H. Charles’s The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. The latter, more thorough and up-to-date and still indispensable today in spite of its age, made use of the relevant Cairo Genizah material: the Hebrew ben Sira, the Aramaic Testament of Levi and the Hebrew Damascus Document.
Equipped with all these outstanding tools of research and, less commonly among non-Jewish students, with sufficient competence in rabbinic writings, Hebrew scholars were obliged to face up to the totally unbelievable discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. For prior to 1947 no such finds were expected. Indeed, they were declared to be impossible. In the light of a century of archaeological search, exploring every nook and cranny of the Holy Land from Dan to Beer Sheba, the excavators’ spade had failed to turn up even a single ancient text written on skin or papyrus. Hence it was handed down from master to pupil as an axiom that no pre-Christian text recorded on perishable material could survive in the climatic conditions of Palestine. However, those who defined the axiom forgot that the area where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found lay 400 metres below sea level and that the climate of that part of the Judaean desert scarcely differed from that of Egypt where innumerable ancient papyrus documents survived.
The facts proved the axiom wrong.
Postscript: Biblical Studies in the Roman Catholic Church
In addition to the universally accepted rules governing biblical studies, Roman Catholic practitioners of scriptural or Scripture-related research were supposed to abide by the relevant directives of the Roman Catholic Church. (I remained a Catholic until the parting of the ways in 1957, when I left the church, the priesthood and France and settled in Britain, first in Newcastle then in Oxford, and slowly reverted to my Jewish roots if not to Jewish practice.)
The early years of the twentieth century were a period of gloom for Catholic exegetes. The war against ‘critics’ and ‘modernists’ was waged by the Vatican’s ‘watchdog’, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, a body made up of cardinals and aided by expert consultants. The pontificate of Pope Pius X (1903–14, canonized in 1954) represented the darkest days of tyrannical Church interference with free inquiry. The dictates assumed to be scientifically sound and self-explanatory, issued by the Commission, strike an unbiased observer of today as hardly believable. The freedom to write and teach, in some way the livelihood of Catholic Bible professors, the majority of whom happened to be priests, depended on their blind acceptance of pre-modern positions considered by their non-Catholic colleagues as wholly untenable.
In the field of the Old Testament they had to accept that the five books of the Law (the Pentateuch) were written by Moses himself, because they are so cited in the Old and the New Testament, and to reject the multiple source theory of modern scholarship. They had to accept the biblical narrative of the creation as strict historical truth and any link with ancient Mesopotamian cosmogonies had to be denied. The whole book of Isaiah had to be ascribed to the eighth-century BCE prophet. Mention of a Second and Third Isaiah, responsible for chapters 40–66 and dating to the second half of the sixth century BCE, was taboo. Likewise in regard to the New Testament, the ‘two-source’ theory (the Gospel of Mark and a hypothetical other source called Q) was anathema and was not to be used to account for the similarities and discrepancies among the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. As for the Fourth Gospel, it was firmly assigned to the apostle John and declared, contrary to the view of most critics, historically reliable.
The encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, issued by Pope Pius XII in 1943, allowed a chink to open up and a ray of light to shine through the dark clouds when it referred to ‘literary genres’ in Scripture (i.e. that everything was not to be taken strictly to the letter). Nevertheless Catholic teachers were still advised to proceed with extreme caution: if you wish to survive, beware of the Pontifical Biblical Commission!
In the subsequent years, chiefly under Paul VI and John Paul II, the Biblical Commission, the erstwhile savage Vatican guard dog, was tamed and reorganized in 1971, and the combination of cardinals and consultants was transformed into a board of twenty experts, though still under the chairmanship of the cardinal heading the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger until his elevation to the papal throne in 2005). Thanks to the presence of real specialists, the Commission became more enlightened and published liberal directives on Bible and Christology (1984) and on The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible (2002). Nevertheless, the recent book Jesus of Nazareth (2007) by Pope Benedict XVI, ex-president of the Biblical Commission, although repeatedly paying lip service to the historico-critical method of Bible interpretation, constitutes a volte-face and augurs ill for the future of Catholic scriptural exegesis. It would be interesting to know how many members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in their heart of hearts agree with the Pope.
Only time will tell.