My Mystic Dead Sea Scrolls Experience

You may think this blog is about the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's really about connectedness and healing:

It's going on 1:30 Tuesday morning when I arrive in San Diego from the DBSA Conference in Orlando. The temperature is a perfect 70 degrees, with the right humidity. For the first time in six days, the outdoors is not the enemy. I can breathe. I am not drenched in sweat. Despite the horrors of transcontinental flying and the fact that my biological clock is telling me it will soon be five in the morning on the east coast, I am feeling restored and energized. I check into a nearby hotel and am out like a light.

My housemate comes by to collect me at 11. We grab an early lunch, then head over to the San Diego Natural History Museum. On special exhibit is the Dead Sea Scrolls. I'm expecting to see a few over-rated bits of desiccated parchment. What I behold equates to a profound religious experience.

The first round of exhibits sets the scene. In 1947, a Bedouin herder happened upon a collection of writings dating 200 years before Christ, stored in pottery hidden in a desert cave. Archaeologists subsequently came upon more Scrolls secreted in a total of 11 caves near the Dead Sea. Years of intrigue followed, as the Israeli government secretly acquired precious fragments from private collectors. Then more intrigue during the secretive and drawn-out scholarship and collation phase. It wasn't until mid 90s that the complete collection, representing assembled fragments from 900 documents, was made available to scholars and the public.

More exhibits recreate the community that may have been responsible for the Scrolls. These are assumed to be the Essenes, a monkish Jewish sect operating in competition with the ruling Temple priests and the nascent rabbinical movement. Although the Essenes did not survive intact, scholars believe that they significantly influenced both Christianity and Judaism. The discovery of inkwells in the nearby archaeological site of Qumran lends credence to the theory that the Scrolls were penned "on location" by a religious community.

Scholars also believe that the Scrolls came to be secreted in the nearby caves as a result of the failed Jewish revolt that resulted in the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple 70 years after the birth of Christ. It is around this time that Qumran was abandoned for good.

We are now in the basement of the Museum. The air is chilled. The lights are low. I behold two scraps of parchment. It is from the Book of Leviticus, part of God's instructions to Moses. These fragments form part of the oldest surviving evidence of a tradition that has survived against all odds - from Pharaoh to Hitler - a tradition that has profoundly molded how we think and feel and behave. They represent a significant part of who we are and where we came from.

In a darkened chilled room, I squint at faded ink on darkened parchment and feel a connection through time to an anonymous scribe laboring in the hot sun. Their community is doomed, living on borrowed time. Yet again, Israel is about to be dealt a blow by God, this time through the agency of the Romans.