Word: qumran
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Dead Sea Scrolls were written, most scholars agree, by the Essenes, a mysterious, ascetic Jewish sect that was wiped out by the Romans about A.D. 70. The scrolls, slightly older than the New Testament, were hidden in some caves at Qumran, near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. They were discovered by Bedouin and sold piecemeal, beginning in 1947. Yadin's father, also an archaeologist, did the initial analysis on the first three...
...soon-to-be-published text, God generally speaks in the first person. The Temple Scroll also uses regular script to record the divine name YHWH, unlike other Qumran texts, which used a distinctive script to remind readers that the name was too sacred to be uttered. This means that the Temple Scroll must have been considered a direct revelation from God, on a level with the Bible itself...
...Temple Scroll also provides the first thorough look at the Halakhah (religious law) of the Essenes. Compared with the orthodox rabbinical thinking that was later codified in the second century Mishnah, the Qumran rules on ritual cleanliness were superstrict. Only the skins of properly slaughtered animals were to be permitted in the temple city. Blind people, as well as the ill and maimed, were barred as unclean. All sexual relations within the temple city were forbidden. One cemetery was to serve four cities since "you shall not follow the customs of the Gentiles who bury their dead everywhere...
...shall come again to their own border." At the site of this ancient citadel, giant jetliners today disgorge joyous refugees from the Soviet Union, the source of the latest aliyah. Horse-drawn carts rattle through the streets of nearby Ramla, while Phantom and Skyhawk jets scream overhead. Beneath the Qumran caves, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, picnickers romp along the shores of the Dead Sea. In Rehovoth, a sleepy little town founded by Polish Jews in 1890, the mysteries of life and death (not to mention the technicalities of heavy water) are probed by scientists at the Weizmann...
Judas Iscariot is its hero. Glimpsed in old age, he has taken refuge from the Romans in what remains of the religious community of Qumran (where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found), and pauses to put down his last testament before he is killed. Enter, 1,900 years later, a British archaeologist named Mallory, who finds the scroll and takes it back to England for translation. Judas' gospel, as might be expected, contradicts nearly everything the other four evangelists have set down. Mirroring such recent pop events as Jesus Christ Superstar, as well as more serious re cent theories...