Word: qumran
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There was much to be done: prayers, lustrations, holy meals-and the sacred scrolls must be taken to the nearby caves and hidden from the impious enemy. Then the Romans came, and in that summer A.D. 68 the Community of the New Covenant at Qumran sank beneath the surging tide of history that laid waste Jerusalem and began the great dispersion of the Jews. For nearly 19 centuries nothing remained of the covenanters but a dim tradition and a ruin in the desert like an enormous graveyard. Christianity spread from Palestine, Rome fell, Mohammed's conquering armies passed within...
Cradle of Christianity? Since a Bedouin shepherd boy named Muhammad adh-Dhib ("The Wolf") first stumbled on them just ten years ago in a cave near Qumran (he had hoped to find buried treasure), the scrolls have stirred up perhaps the most vigorous debate in Christianity since Darwin. One faction, headed by French Orientalist André Dupont-Sommer (whose views were popularized in the U.S. by Amateur Scrollman Edmund Wilson), held that the Dead Sea Community more than Bethlehem might have been the cradle of Christianity. Philologist John Allegro of Britain's University of Manchester strongly implied that...
...Cave. Since "The Wolf" found Cave 1, scrolls and fragments from ten more caves near Qumran have been recovered. Most notable are the contents of Cave 4, in which the remains of more than 400 manuscripts have been found in tens of thousands of tiny fragments; presumably this was the main library of the Qumran Community. The Suez crisis raised serious roadblocks to the scholars' work. Many were called home, and the manuscripts themselves were packed away in 36 cases and locked up in the Ottoman Bank at Amman, Jordan, from which they were returned to Jerusalem for study...
...foot layers of dust and bat dung, spoonful by spoonful, to find the tiny fragments of black and crumbly leather-often smaller than a postage stamp-that they know will make them rich. The Jordan government has given the Ta'amireh Bedouins a cave-hunting monopoly-making the Qumran area a military zone, and policing it to keep other tribes from muscling in on the scroll rush...
Shadow Land. Dean of the scholars is Pere Roland de Vaux, a French Dominican priest who has spent the last 24 of his 53 years in Palestine. Archaeologist de Vaux supervises the publication of the fragments, leads the periodic expeditions to the Qumran ruins. (Features of a typically rugged day there: Mass at 5:30 a.m., digging in the merciless heat until 3 p.m., paper work amid clouds of mosquitoes until midnight.) De Vaux's fellow priest, Polish-born Father Joseph Milik, 35, who left Warsaw when the Communists took over, is known as the Scrollery's fastest...