Expert offers insight on Dead Sea Scrolls

PROVO — The authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls were a pious community living in a corrupt society while waiting for the coming of the Messiah.

That is one of the conclusions Victor L. Ludlow drew in his Campus Education Week lecture on "The Dead Sea Scrolls: 20 Questions and Answers."

"These were people of good report, although they no longer had a living prophet to guide them," he said of a people known as the Essenes. As a people they separated themselves from other Jewish religions to escape the soldiers of Alexander the Great. However, the scrolls became lost to history when the Essenes were eventually scattered or killed.

They did have scriptures, however, many of which are in the collection of scrolls found in 11 caves along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea nearly 60 years ago.

Those scrolls include books of the Torah and many Old Testament books, Jewish literature and sectarian writings. Many were translations of earlier records, he said in his overview and are the oldest versions of those Torah and biblical texts. The caves were used either as storage for worn-out texts, to protect them from outsiders or as libraries.

While the scrolls challenge many religious beliefs of today, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints face the question of what to accept and what to reject. He cautioned against attempting to prove the restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a main LDS doctrinal theme, but offered some insights that support LDS thinking.

For example, he said that when the Book of Isaiah in the King James version of the Bible differs from the Isaiah version in the Book of Mormon, that Isaiah scrolls seem to support the Book of Mormon version. Other elements point to a pre-Christ Christianity, plural gods, a "higher and lower priesthood with leadership bodies of three and 12. ... Use (the dead Sea Scrolls) but do not put too much credence in them" until the LDS Church accepts them as canon, he suggested.

First discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd in the Qumran area, discoveries continued until the mid-1960s. The known scrolls and fragments have since been translated and now are available in English. They date from 250 BCE (before the common era) to 50 BCE. Many were written on leather parchment, while a few are on papyrus and one on metal.

Many were written for personal and community study, while others were written to be sold, Ludlow said.

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More next week

Utah Valley Life staff members will continue to cover portions of 2006 Campus Education Week. Look for additional stories in the Aug. 31 issue, available in the free-standing yellow boxes in Utah County, online and included in the regular subscription copies of the Deseret Morning News.

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E-mail: rodger@desnews.com