The Dead Sea Scrolls With Kipp Davis

Dan McClellan There have been fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls that have popped up on the market in the last 20 or so years. And so how many of these fragments have surfaced and were purchased, I think, since 2002?

Kipp Davis I've counted around 80. 80? Yeah.

Dan McClellan But you and a handful of others were able to gain access to some of these and- Mm-hmm ... conduct some analysis, which resulted in a pretty attention-grabbing conclusion, which was what?

Kipp Davis We're suspicious that probably all of them are forgeries. Yeah. Wow.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How go things today, Dan? Good.

Dan Beecher I've made some plans. I've booked a trip to the Museum of the Bible to see fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I hear- ... is going to be a great... Oh, wait. Well, maybe that won't work out.

Dan McClellan We'll- Maybe it won't.

Dan Beecher We've got an expert on to help us with that.

Dan McClellan Speaking of which, let's introduce our guest for today. This is an old friend of mine. This is Kipp Davis. He is a public scholar of the Hebrew Bible with specializations in early Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thank you so much for being here, Kipp.

Kipp Davis Hey, guys. It's good to see you. Yeah. Yeah, I'm afraid to tell you, Dan, that- ... if you're going to go see Dead Sea Scroll fragments at the Museum of the Bible, you're going to be disappointed. What? You might have actually been disappointed while they were still there. Indeed.

Dan McClellan But we- Just as part of your general disappointment with the whole experience.

Kipp Davis Yeah, with the Museum of the Bible.

Dan Beecher With the whole museum, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like any show where we can start off by sort of pooping on the Green family's- ... failed attempt at a thing. Anyway.

Dan McClellan So, a little inside baseball here. I don't know if anybody gets in trouble for this, but I went to a Bible translation conference several years ago, going on probably eight or nine years ago, and I was talking with some folks, and Bible translation is significantly funded by the Greens- Mm ... through a variety of different organizations. Yeah. And what some of the consultants were telling me was that it is widely known that the Greens believe, or somebody among them, and I'm just passing on what I was told as an outsider, that the idea is as soon as the Bible is translated into every language in the world, that will catalyze the second coming. Yeah. Oh. Which is one of the reasons that that funding is- I think- Is that talked about in their book?

Kipp Davis Some of that is mentioned in here. Okay. I mean, this is a phenomenal book.

Dan Beecher Wait, what's the book? For those listeners who can't see what's happening. Oh.

Kipp Davis This is Candida Moss and Joel Baden's book on the Green family, Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby, which is just- Yeah ... the title is just wonderful.

Dan Beecher Apparently, the hobby that they're engaged in is bringing about the apocalypse. So that's a nice hobby.

Kipp Davis It's a big part of it. It is.

Dan Beecher That's a fun hobby.

Dan McClellan And I've had other folks who also work in Bible translation tell me that one of the huge concerns is that the funding is all going to just pumping out more languages. Uh-huh. And they're not- Mm-hmm ... doing all the work that goes along with it, like literacy programs, like more research for translators so that they can ensure that their translations are better, all that kind of stuff. It's just pump out more translations, go, go, go. Mm-hmm. And in the hopes that they will bring the second coming as an even faster thief in the night. So- All right.

Dan Beecher Let's get off of the Hobby Lobby Green family and- Yeah ... and get into some more interesting stuff. Kipp Davis, thank you for joining us. For sure. You did give me an opportunity to say get off the Hobby Lobby horse. Oh.

Dan McClellan Because that was- Okay ... it was right there.

Dan Beecher Opportunity missed. It's right there. I apologize. I'm excited. I want to talk about some scrolls. Yeah. I know very little. I think a lot of people, the world is kind of this place where everybody knows that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a thing, and then of that- More or less ... they don't know what it is, though. I think there's a- No ... significant portion of the population who are like, "Oh, yeah, Dead Sea Scrolls. What is it? I don't know." "I have no idea."

Kipp Davis So- And that is a step ahead, though, of my oldest son's kindergarten, or I think it was his first-grade teacher, when I had come back from the University of Manchester, where I was doing my PhD. My family was here in Canada, and I was going back and forth quite a bit. I picked him up from school, and it was the first time I had met her, and introduced myself, shook her hand. And she says to me, she goes, "Yeah," she says, "So I really just have to ask, so are they actually squirrels?"

Dan McClellan I think there's a children's or young adult book series- That's something like that ... the Dead Sea Squirrels. Yeah.

Kipp Davis I think so.

Dan Beecher I love it.

Kipp Davis I think so. Awesome.

Dan Beecher Oh, man. Yeah. All right. Bad habits. So the Dead Sea squirrels, what we're on about is- ... so Qumran had a lot of interesting rodents, I assume. And that's why we're talking about scrolls.

Kipp Davis I'm sure they did.

Dan Beecher Well, so for those people like me who don't have a lot of knowledge, can we start by just giving a background on what these are, where they were found, when they were found? Just give us the broad swath of what we're talking about here.

Kipp Davis Yeah, absolutely. So, Dan's and my former teacher, the great late Peter W. Flint, but he would tell you that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the greatest archeological discovery of all time.

Dan McClellan In a pleasant South African accent as well. Yes.

Kipp Davis Yeah, I can't do it, so I'm not even going to try, but- Nobody can do South African.

Dan Beecher That's impossible.

Kipp Davis So, they're pretty great though. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a set, a series, I suppose, of Jewish manuscripts predominantly written in Hebrew, with some Aramaic and a handful in Greek that were discovered in the Judaean Desert, which is just south and east of the city of Jerusalem. The vast majority of the scrolls, I need to say, at the outset, people get confused about this. The Dead Sea Scrolls technically refer to any discoveries of manuscripts in this region all the way from the further north in places like Wadi Seir or, yeah, let's say Wadi Seir, down south to sites like Nahhal Hever and Murabba'at, and even Masada. Scrolls from Masada, you could consider part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But when most people think about the Dead Sea Scrolls, if they think about the Dead Sea Scrolls, they're thinking about the massive collection of manuscripts that was discovered in 11 caves that are within a one and a half kilometer radius of a site called Qumran. It's a site of ruins that scholars believe was occupied by Jewish ascetics, basically. Josephus and Pliny the Younger tell us that these people were affiliated with the Essenes, a religious sect of Judaism who was basically out in the middle of the desert waiting for the end of the world, waiting for the last days when Yahweh would finally come in power and destroy the Romans and elevate- They need to talk to the Green family. Yes. Right? They were the Greens before the Greens, actually.

Dan McClellan And they were a separatist group that- Yeah ... considered the priesthood that was in control of the temple to be illegitimate, and so they were more like the Bundys, in that regard. Yes. They were like, "We're going to live by ourselves in the mountains." And, yeah.

Kipp Davis Yeah, very interestingly, somebody asked me the question this week, because I did a video about sacrifices in the Old Testament, and somebody had asked me the question about Jewish ideas regarding sacrifice in the Second Temple period and moving forward, and I had the opportunity to tell him one of the interesting things about the writers and the collectors of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they came out of the temple establishment in Jerusalem. They were disenfranchised. But their expectation was that the great eschatological temple was going to be established in the same place as the... They expected the Jerusalem Temple to basically be eliminated. But in the meantime, of course, they can't perform any sacrifices, but the people who lived in Qumran, who wrote and collected the Dead Sea Scrolls, thought that they entered into worship on a regular basis into the eschatological temple with God. Mm-hmm. And they worshiped alongside of the angels. We have a series of texts called the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifices, where they explain in some detail the procedures of what scholars tend to think they undertook on a regular basis.

Dan McClellan So, kind of a mystical stream of tradition- Yeah ... in that regard, that we're transcending this realm to commune with God and the angels in the heavenly temple. Yeah.

Kipp Davis This also helps to explain a lot of, they were also quite obsessed with ritual purity within this group, and part of the reason for that was because their expectation was that they were regularly in the company of divine beings. Hmm. So it's really, really important to make sure that you're dressed your best when- Yeah. ... you're in the presence of the gods.

Dan Beecher Well, company's coming over, you want the carpet to be clean and all that sort of thing. Absolutely.

Kipp Davis So, sorry, I got off on a bit of a tangent there. You asked about the scrolls. What's really, for me at least, what's most exciting is the scrolls themselves, the manuscripts that were discovered in these 11 caves. This was back between 1947 and 1953. Most of the discoveries were made by members of the Ta'amire Bedouin tribe, nomadic sheepherders that circulate through the region. Archeologists did discover some of the manuscripts, but most of the caves ended up getting scoured by these people ahead of time.

Dan McClellan Now, Kip, I wonder if you could clear something up for me. Yeah. I have heard before, and people hear a lot of rumors about the Dead Sea Scrolls, but I have heard that the archeologists who were kind of curating the gathering of the scrolls, they were paying these Bedouin groups by the fragments, which was a big mistake.

Kipp Davis Oh, yes. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Oh, I can immediately see some problems popping up in that.

Kipp Davis You can see what's coming.

Dan McClellan Because it incentivized them to fragment things that they found.

Kipp Davis This is a true story. Okay. So early on, the Bedouin were scouring the desert and finding these manuscripts and then bringing them to an antiquities dealer by the name of Kando. And Iskander Khalil Shahin is his name, but everybody called him Kando. Mm-hmm. And then he basically acted as the middleman between the scholars then and the people who would find the scrolls. And of course, because they're just excellent at doing business, they agreed on a price per fragment of material, and the pieces kept getting smaller and smaller as they were coming in. They soon realized what was going on. Scholars oftentimes, they're not on the ball right away with everything, so it takes a few minutes sometimes.

Dan Beecher But- Their focus is different. They have a different focus.

Kipp Davis It's a little bit, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But they eventually settled on a price per square centimeter of material- Okay ... that they brought in. And I personally think, too, this is something a bit anecdotal, but it plays into some of the stuff we'll talk about later. I tend to think as well, importantly, they set a price per square centimeter of inscribed material. So I tend to think, and we have some documentation for this, that pieces of manuscripts, pieces of leather or parchment, most of the scrolls are made of vellum, of parchment. But small pieces of these that came in that didn't have any writing on them, but were part of a handle sheet or part of a margin of the scroll, I suspect may not have even been purchased or had been carelessly discarded or put away somewhere. We have some documentation from Roland de Vaux, who was overseeing the project when it began. He talked about setting aside some of these larger uninscribed pieces because he had planned on doing an investigation with them, with regards to scribal practices or something like that. But nobody knows what happened to these uninscribed bits or where they went. And that's honestly one of the problems that plagues scrolls research today, and it's pretty consistent. One of my colleagues at the University of Achter, Or Stein Yussnus, has been running a project now for the last three or four years, I think, where one of the purposes and goals of this project is to locate missing fragments. Okay. Fragments that we have in many of the thousands of photographs that have been taken over the past 70 years, but are no longer in the inventory at the Israel Antiquities Authority or the Shrine of the Book, or any of the other places where scrolls manuscripts now reside. So, sorry, this is just tangents galore.

Dan Beecher No, this is good. One thing that we haven't... Oh, sorry, keep going with what you were saying.

Dan McClellan I was going to say, is there a worry that there might be some writing that newer technology might be able to reveal on some of these, or is it more a concern for just filling in all the gaps in our understanding? Is there a hope that maybe some of these pieces that are not inscribed on might be able to connect inscribed pieces? What might be some of the deliverables of getting as many of these fragments back as possible?

Kipp Davis Well, the uninscribed ones- Yeah ... in particular, or just any? Yeah. My real interest, my focus as a scholar tends to be on scribal practices, manuscript construction, manuscript function, something that some of us like to call material philology. Mm-hmm. And for a person like me, even the uninscribed bits of a manuscript are intensely interesting because they do provide us information about the scrolls as artifacts, as objects of study. They're valuable- Yeah ... not just for the text that they contain, but in their own right. The manuscripts themselves reveal a tremendous amount of information to us about the people who made them and the purposes behind that. Mm-hmm. So this is the kind of stuff that I'm interested in.

Dan McClellan And- The kind of stuff that it's hard to write a grant proposal for.

Kipp Davis It's true enough. I want to go looking for and studying all these- All these blank manuscripts- ... totally unused fragments and pieces of- ...

Dan McClellan that got thrown in the trash.

Dan Beecher Give me money to find blank pages, please. Yes. Exactly. So talk to us a little bit about-- Sorry, I'm still on the we're still figure- Yeah. We're- I still want to figure out what the heck these things are. So, you mentioned that some of them are talking about the practices of the people who had them at- Yeah ... at the time. But that's not what people are mostly interested in, right?

Kipp Davis I'm still trying to explain what these things are all about. Yeah. Sorry about that. All right. Okay, go on.

Dan Beecher Let's get back into it.

Kipp Davis So, we have this massive collection of manuscript fragments. The numbers are, there's not a precise number. We're talking about tens of thousands of individual fragments. Most of them are quite small, the size of a credit card, sometimes even smaller. We have a handful of complete, intact manuscripts. Things like the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is probably the most famous of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, is a completely intact copy of Isaiah that measures 27 feet long. Whoa. It's all 66 chapters, from chapter 1 through to chapter 66, in, I believe it's 58 columns of text. Is it 13? Thirteen sheets, all stitched together. But most of them don't look like that. Most of them are tiny little pieces because they've been sitting in caves for thousands of years. They've been eaten away at by small animals. And they've deteriorated. And as such, we're left with these fragments of all sorts of different sizes, all mixed up and bunched up together, that scholars have spent the better part of the last 70 years since their discovery trying to piece together and trying to figure out what's there. So, among these 10,000 fragments, we figure that there are probably somewhere around 600 individual scrolls that belonged to, most believe that they all belong to this group that lived at this site in Qumran.

Dan McClellan And- Although the data do suggest that many of these scrolls were brought in from elsewhere. Oh, yeah. Definitely. They were not produced here, but come from all around. Yeah. Exactly.

Kipp Davis And I would even say there's some question about how closely related all 11 caves are to one another. Hmm. Hmm. And there's open questions as well about whether all the 11 caves were serving the same purpose. One of my colleagues, Joan Taylor, who's out at King's College in London- Mm-hmm ... has forwarded some really good ideas, I think, about Cave 1 in particular. The caves are all numbered in the order in which they were discovered. And Cave 11, because a number of the scrolls were discovered inside of these earthen jars. She thinks that these were possibly ancient forms of a genizah. Okay. A genizah, it's like a depository for your manuscripts in a Jewish synagogue that have worn out and are no longer suitable for public usage. You can't destroy them or throw them away. They have to be carefully, respectfully deposited and retired. She thinks maybe a couple of the caves could have been something like that. Hmm. The most prominent of the caves, Cave 4, which is located literally right at the Qumran site. It's with 100 meters of the ruins themselves. Dan has been to Qumran. I'm sure he's- Mm-hmm ... been right to the wadi edge and seen the cave for himself.

Dan McClellan Usually when you see photos of Qumran, what you see is a little kind of ridge jutting out, and there's a little hole right in the middle of the ridge, and that's Cave 4. And Qumran is right across that little gully from it. And so there's a- Yeah ... lookout point where you can just sit there- Exactly ... and look into the hole in the wall.

Kipp Davis That's right. And significantly, this is a man-made cave. So, the region, the area there is just honeycombed by thousands of these natural caves. This one is man-made. And within this cave is where scholars found, or I should say the Bedouin found, the vast majority of material. It's over 500 of the manuscripts come from just this one cave. So, the thought generally is that this was probably almost like a library, this individual cave, Cave 4. There's even some elements within the cave. There's divots and holes in the wall that suggest maybe they supported shelving units where scrolls were brought in and deposited and retrieved. So, yeah, all that to say, we have open questions about a lot of what's going on here, right? We're not even sure. I think it's probably a good bet just based on proximity that the caves belong together, but there's even still some open questions about that.

Dan Beecher Were these caves-- Sorry, just to- No ... sort of paint the picture. Yeah. Were these caves big enough for a person to stand up straight in, or are they little caves that you got to kind of- So I've only been in- ... waddle your way in?

Kipp Davis I've only been in three of them. And, so yeah, like cave four, yeah, you can stand up in cave four and cave one. Cave 11 is more difficult. But, yeah. And some of these other caves look like they were places that people just in a rush. As the story goes, the theory is that in 70, in the year 70 CE, the Essenes were there for almost 200 years. And then in the year 70, the Romans sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and then started making their way down to the west, and south along the shore of the Dead Sea to go to Masada, to take care of the last of the rebels who were holed up there. And on the way down to Masada, they just took a little pit stop at Qumran, demolished and burned the place, and then went on their way. And, the people living at Qumran saw them coming undoubtedly from some distance, freaked out about the fact that the Roman army's bearing down upon our little settlement. So yeah, probably stashed bunches of these manuscripts away and ran for their lives, hoping maybe they would come back to collect them. And clearly none of them made it back. Yeah. And we actually have, I'll just say this one more thing about that. Some of the manuscripts actually have clear slices right through them that were made by a sword just hacking through and cutting the material itself. Hmm.

Dan McClellan Now, you mentioned the Essenes being in the area for around 200 years. Mm-hmm. What are the earliest, and most of these manuscripts are dated paleographically, maybe some through carbon dating, but what are some of the earliest dates and we put the cutoff right around 68 to 70 CE. Yeah. That's when the most recent ones were made. But when are our earliest ones dated?

Kipp Davis So the oldest ones potentially date back to as early as 250 BCE. That's probably a little ambitious. I would say safely 200. Okay. And we have a handful of these manuscripts. We've got copies of the Book of Jeremiah, the Book of Samuel, the Book of Exodus, that all date back this early. I think maybe even a copy of the Book of Enoch. I have to double-check that. And here's the significance, or maybe not the significance, but one of the first big significances of this discovery was that between 200 to 300 of these manuscripts are copies of books that are in our Old Testaments. And within this collection, there's at least a fragment of every single book that appears in the Old Testament except for the Book of Esther. Technically, also the Book of Nehemiah, but scholars assume it was there because as Nehemiah was collected along with Ezra, and we have Ezra there, so scholars think possibly also, probably also Nehemiah. And the other reason this is significant is because prior to this discovery in 1947, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts we had of the Old Testament came from medieval codices, the Leningrad Codex, the Aleppo Codex, which date to the 9th, 10th century- Right. Yeah ... CE.

Dan McClellan Right around 800, 850, 900. Yeah. Now, did we have fragments of other things? Because Aleppo used to be complete and now it's- Yeah, yeah ... pretty fragmentary in the Pentateuch, and then the Leningrad Codex is the oldest complete manuscript of the entire Hebrew Bible. Is there anything between the Dead Sea Scrolls and Aleppo that is just fragmentary? Or is that it?

Kipp Davis Just a handful. No, there's a couple of things. There's most prominently the Nash Papyrus- Mm-hmm ... is a papyrus sheet. No one can see my hands, or only half of you can see my... It's about 10 centimeters by 20 centimeters.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Kipp Davis It dates to probably 100, maybe 150 BCE, and it's a collection of the Ten Commandments basically- Yeah ... with some interesting variation in it. But this was importantly not a copy of a biblical book, quote unquote. This was just a single sheet of the Ten Commandments. So is that a biblical text?

Dan McClellan Just isolated.

Kipp Davis I'm not even sure, right? So the exciting thing about this was that really the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls pushed textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible back in one discovery, like 1,000 years. Yeah. And within the scrolls too, we have discovered multiple copies of individual biblical books. There's fragments from 22 individual manuscripts which contained parts of the Book of Isaiah. There's 30 I think it's 32 copies of manuscripts that contain parts of Deuteronomy. 37 that contain parts of Psalms. So, they had clearly a strong interest in the Bible.

Dan McClellan Well, and you mentioned Enoch earlier. If I recall, there were, what? 14 different manuscripts of Enoch? Yeah. I think Enoch was- And significantly ... the most, other than Genesis, Psalms, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah, wasn't it?

Kipp Davis Exactly, yeah. Yeah. It raises all sorts of interesting questions. Just, right away about the text of the Hebrew Bible, the text of the individual books, but also about ideas regarding biblical authority or scripture, the development of canon. All of this stuff is wrapped up in there.

Dan McClellan And- And the inviolability of the text, because you have- Yes ... these multiple manuscripts. People are handling multiple different manuscripts that have significant differences between them.

Kipp Davis That's really the wild thing.

Dan McClellan And they seem to be okay with this. Totally.

Kipp Davis And I'm sure you've talked about this before. The Book of Jeremiah famously differs between the Greek translation of the Book of Jeremiah in the Septuagint, and the Hebrew version that survives in the Masoretic Text, in the Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex.

Dan McClellan So that's considered the authoritative- Yeah ... version of the Hebrew Bible. Your translations are going to primarily be based off the Leningrad Codex, which is part of the Masoretic tradition. Yeah.

Kipp Davis So that one is 13% larger, longer than the Septuagint version, which is substantial when you're talking about... I've actually done the word count. I don't remember it offhand, but it's about 55,000 words. Yeah. Wow. It's a substantial difference. And then, of course, the Greek text, the Septuagint version, is also in a dramatically different arrangement. And when you do a careful comparison between the two versions, the Masoretic version that survives in the Hebrew, and the Septuagint version that survives in the Greek, you can see very obvious theological programs at work in terms of updating and changing, and altering the material. Yeah. And the amazing thing about this is that, yes, within the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are six copies of the Book of Jeremiah, and two of those follow the text and the arrangement of the Septuagint in Hebrew. Mm-hmm. I actually ran into a pastor once while I was still an MA student who asked me, when he found out that I was doing work in biblical studies, he asked me, he goes, "So tell me something." He says, "I can't figure this out. How is it the Greek translators of Jeremiah managed to get it so wrong?" That's a common thought. It's a common idea that not just the text is authoritative or inspired or inerrant, but you have to have the right version, and everybody just sort of picks their favorite.

Dan McClellan And we have a lot of differences, even in the arrangement in Samuel and Kings as well. Mm-hmm. In fact, I think some of the most significant differences are in some of the witnesses to Samuel in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which suggest- Yeah ... quite a bit of textual fluidity, but tolerated textual fluidity. They didn't seem to have an issue the way that we do today.

Kipp Davis No, it just doesn't seem to be a question that was raised on a regular basis. Yeah. And we have other... No, go ahead, Dan. Sorry.

Dan Beecher I was just going to say, can you talk a little bit about some of the difference? What kinds of differences are we talking about? Talk to me about some of the most significant things that surprise you about, first of all, as you're talking about differences between scrolls from that era, and then now differences between that and what we're used to reading in our translations or whatever. Okay. Yeah.

Kipp Davis I think in terms of specific examples, probably the most prominent one would be in one of the copies of Samuel. I believe it's in 1 Samuel chapter 11. There is a large expansion in one of the manuscripts found at Qumran in the story of Nahash, the king. It's the Ammonites, isn't it, Dan? King of the Ammonites. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Where we've got this weird story where something has happened, and suddenly a demand is being made. Yes. Something has happened.

Kipp Davis The king of the Ammonites, Nahash, has showed up at Jabesh Gilead, and basically threatening the city, and threatening to put out the eye of every man in the city. And it's a bit of a jarring interruption into the narrative there. And prior to the discovery of this manuscript, I believe it's 4Q Samuel a There was no information from any of the other manuscripts nor from the Septuagint about what's going on here. And lo and behold, we find this text which has literally an entire paragraph of material, of explanatory information about what was going on. And do you have the text there, Dan?

Dan McClellan I'm pulling it up right now. Yeah, so I'm looking at, if anybody would like to see, you can find English translations of the biblical and the non-biblical Dead Sea Scrolls. There's also a book called "The Biblical Qumran Scrolls: Transcriptions and Textual Variants" where if you're really interested in this kind of stuff, this presents the Hebrew text, and then there's a critical apparatus that presents all of the differences between the text and the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text and all that kind of stuff.

Kipp Davis Oh, here it is. All right, so it's 1 Samuel 10:27. I'll just read. This is the NRSV. I'll start here in verse 26. It says, "Saul also went to his home in Gibeah, and with him went warriors whose hearts God had touched; but some worthless fellows said, 'How can this man save us?' They despised him and brought him no present. But he held his peace." And then the text goes on to say, "About a month later, Nahash the Ammonite went up and besieged Jabesh-gilead. And all the men of Jabesh said to Nahash, 'Make a treaty with us, and we will serve you.' But Nahash the Ammonite said to them, 'On this condition I'll make the treaty with you, namely, that I gouge out everyone's right eye,' and thus put to disgrace upon all of Israel." And you're kind of looking at that and going, "Wow, this guy is triggered."

Dan Beecher Yeah, that's extreme. Yeah, right? That's not a good deal. He's not making a good deal. No.

Kipp Davis So here in 4Q51, the text doesn't break like it did in the translation I read. It goes on to say, prior to the introduction of Nahash the Ammonite, it says, "Now Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had been grievously oppressing the Gadites and the Reubenites. He would gouge out the right eye of each of them and would not grant Israel a deliverer. No one was left of the Israelites across the Jordan, whose right eye Nahash, the king of the Ammonites, had not gouged out. But there were 7,000 men who had escaped from the Ammonites and had entered Jabesh-gilead." So, there's a whole chunk of new information in there that nobody had seen in hundreds, maybe thousand years or more, before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. We had some hints about this, because I think Josephus relates this story. I can't recall for sure. I'd have to go back and look. So that's maybe one of the most prominent examples, but I'll talk about one that I quite like, and it's not an obvious one. But one of my favorite things about the Dead Sea Scrolls is in how they inform us about the development of the texts of the Hebrew Bible, about the development of scripture. And Christian apologists are very fond of pointing to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and specifically pointing to copies of the Book of Daniel that were discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls as proof of the fact that this is a book that must have been written by Daniel himself living in Babylon in the sixth century, because traditional theories. Is this something you guys have talked about before? Have you talked about Daniel before?

Dan Beecher Yeah, we did a show about the Book of Daniel. Yeah, okay. But it never hurts to give a refresher- Yeah, sure ... sort of thing.

Kipp Davis So, just very briefly, scholars are uniformly convinced that the Book of Daniel was not completed until well into the second century after the Hasmonean revolt, and that the prophecies in the Hebrew portion, beginning in chapter 8 through to 12, were all written after the fact and set in the mouth of Daniel as if they were predictions of the future. This is known. So, the date of the Book of Daniel tends to be, or at least these parts of the Book of Daniel and the completion of the Book of Daniel, tend to be around the 160s. So, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are several copies of manuscripts containing the Book of Daniel, and many Christian apologists pointed to this right away and were very excited about the fact that these manuscripts were there because they concluded it was just not possible that the Book of Daniel could be so widely circulated and so popular in such a short period of time from the time of its composition to the time of its circulation. Now, I'm not going to make any judgments about the quality of that argument. But this is how often Christian apologists will tend to talk about the Book of Daniel. But when you do some work, when you look into what's actually there From the Book of Daniel and the Dead Sea Scrolls. This paints a fascinating picture because, yes, we have eight copies of individual Daniel manuscripts in the collection, and yes, two of these copies look like they're all fragmentary. But in terms of how scholars work and the way that we can reconstruct the material, we're pretty convinced that two of them did contain the complete book. Now, those manuscripts are dated to at best the early 1st century CE, or probably closer to the middle of the 1st century CE. So right away, these manuscripts are up to 200 years already removed from the completion of the Book of Daniel. What's really fascinating is the rest of the material, I think, because the rest of the manuscripts, when you attempt to reconstruct them, you end up with manuscripts that only contain portions of the Book of Daniel. And the Book of Daniel's funny because half of it's written in Aramaic and the other half is written in Hebrew, and in terms of their content, they're quite different. The Hebrew text of Daniel are these wild apocalyptic visions. The Aramaic texts are these super fun stories about these clever Jewish exiles living in Babylon and always getting the better of that goofy King Nebuchadnezzar, or the person- Old man Nebuchadnezzar. Oh, yeah. Always getting... So, anyways, we have these two parts, and fascinatingly, what we find is a couple of these manuscripts look like they were just copies of Aramaic tales. Some of these manuscripts look like they were just copies of a Hebrew vision, or maybe two or three of these Hebrew visions in the final part. So as a scholar of the scrolls and somebody who works with the material and is interested in questions of development and authority and such, I look at that and I go, "This is so obvious." In the 1st century BC, in maybe the early 2nd century BC, we have physical examples of what the Book of Daniel looked like before it became our biblical Book of Daniel. We have examples of it in the pieces that it was probably circulated as for some time. And in addition to that, we also have other manuscripts which feature this figure, Daniel, written in Aramaic, as part of these tales of him serving in the Babylonian court, but do not appear in our Bibles. It's wild.

Dan McClellan That's fascinating. To use the documentary hypothesis as kind of an analogy, it would be like stumbling across J while it was circulating independently, and D while it was circulating independently, and then something else that may have been L, M, N, O, or Q that never got worked into the Pentateuch. And of course, because everything is so fragmentary, we can't know for sure exactly what the full manuscripts looked like. Yeah. But at least the data point in that direction, that it looks like we may have pieces of pre-Daniel traditions floating around- Yeah ... preserved at Qumran. Wow, that's incredible. Sorry.

Kipp Davis I was going to say, just maybe one of the best known of these unknown Aramaic tales is a manuscript called the Prayer of Nabonidus. Mm-hmm. And it's just a couple of fragments, and it's weird because it's written in the first person, and it's Nebuchadnezzar speaking about what a great guy he is and how amazing he is, and, "Look at this beautiful city that I've built, and there's nobody like me on Earth." And then suddenly God speaks to him and says, "You're a prideful asshole." Sorry, can I say that on the podcast?

Dan Beecher Yeah, we'll allow it just one time. Oh, all right. All right.

Kipp Davis "I'm going to put you in your place. I'm going to reduce you to a beast, and you're going to go wander out in the fields for seven years, until you learn your lesson." And of course, this happens. Very interestingly, there's a couple of fragments of this manuscript that scholars identify as the Prayer of Nabonidus, where the text of the story looks really similar to this, but with some interesting differences. It's not Nebuchadnezzar speaking in the first person, it's the last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, speaking in the first person. And he's speaking about how he was afflicted with an illness for seven years, an illness so bad that he ended up having to be removed from the city of Babylon. He couldn't even be in Babylon anymore. And then he tells us in this personal account of his, that an anonymous Jewish magician came and helped him and healed him, and praised God, the only God, the God of the Jews forever. So, scholars look at something like that and they say, "Hmm, sure looks an awful lot like this story of Nebuchadnezzar," except maybe somebody decided to update the story and swap out the wildly unpopular Nabonidus and largely unknown by this time, probably Nabonidus for a famous guy like Nebuchadnezzar. Interesting.

Dan McClellan Now, I just wanted to bring up my favorite variant reading from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Kipp Davis Yes, please.

Dan McClellan A lot of my research is on conceptualizations of deity, and particularly the early history of Adonai, the God of Israel, and their distinction from El. Deuteronomy 32:8 and 9. Very famously, we have 4Q Deuteronomy-j, one of the fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls that was discovered that's only a few words, but we can tell it is definitely Deuteronomy 32, verse 8. There's nothing else it could be. And in the Masoretic Text, if you pull out many Bibles today, these days, there are a lot that are correcting this, but it talks about how the Most High separated the peoples, divided up the nations according to the number of the sons of Israel. And then you go look in the Septuagint, and it says, "According to the number of the angels of God." And this is a head-scratcher, but some scholars were like, "The Septuagint translators like to take gods or sons of God and render it angels of God." So maybe what Deuteronomy 32:8 originally said was, "According to the number of the sons of God." So that was a hypothesis. And then we discovered 4Q Deuteronomy-j, which reads precisely that, "According to the number of the sons of God," which helps us make a lot of connections between the mythos of this time period and some earlier literature, particularly in the Ugaritic texts. But elsewhere in Deuteronomy 32, we've also got 4Q Deuteronomy-q, which is verse 43. There's this statement about, "Sing heavens," or something like that, "I'll have vengeance on my people." And the Septuagint actually has a very long verse where it kind of doubles up about saying, "Strengthen the angels of God and worship him, all you sons of God." And then we found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the reading, "Worship him, all you gods," exactly what we find in Psalm 97:7.

Kipp Davis That's right, yeah.

Dan McClellan Probably the source for the composition of Psalm 97:7. But it seems like the Septuagint probably had two variant readings of this text and was like, "Let's keep them both." And that's what ended up- Yeah ... in the Greek translation. And then the Masoretic Text was uncomfortable with whatever reading they had, or someone before them changed it, and we get this kind of milk toasty passage. Yeah. But we can restore what was most likely original, where God is telling the gods to, or somebody is telling the gods to worship the God of Israel.

Kipp Davis That's right. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Which I think just fascinating. And it's amazing- It's so amazing that we have those things, and it makes you wonder what was eaten by a mouse or what was- Wow.

Kipp Davis So much, right? ...

Dan McClellan destroyed in the process of excavation, or what just- Yep ... immediately turned to dust when it was exposed to the air or something like that.

Dan Beecher There's- Or as Bedouins were ripping up documents into smaller fragments.

Kipp Davis There is a famous black and white photograph that was snapped sometime in the '40s or the '50s of G. Lancaster Harding, who was the director of the Palestinian Authority, the Antiquities Authority at the time that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. And he is poring over some manuscript fragments, studying them very intently, and he's got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth with the ash on it, an inch and a half long. It's barely holding on there. It's just about to drop and incinerate the whole thing. Oh, my God. Yeah. It's wild. I was going to say one other thing about those two manuscripts, Dan. One of the things that I particularly like about them, and this is because I'm one of these weird manuscript scribal practices guy. These two copies of the Book of Deuteronomy are not copies of the Book of Deuteronomy. Okay. They're smaller manuscripts. So 4Q Deuteronomy-j, the first one, contains text from, see if I can get this right. It's Deuteronomy chapter 5, and then Exodus chapter 12, and then the whole Song of Moses, and that's it. Wow. Right? And then the other one, 4Q Deuteronomy-q, is just the Song of Moses, which is Deuteronomy 32. Yeah. I'm getting out of that, and I'm trying to get people out of the habit of even calling these manuscripts of Deuteronomy because they're not. They are manuscripts of, in the one case, this single poem, this single poetical composition that ended up getting plugged into the book of Deuteronomy, or maybe was the source of what became the book of Deuteronomy over time. Right. But it existed on its own, right?

Dan Beecher At this time- Oh, so you're not saying that this was the Reader's Digest version of Deuteronomy. No. You're saying that this predated Deuteronomy and was included- Perhaps ... into Deuteronomy, maybe. Perhaps. Interesting.

Kipp Davis There's a couple of theories about how this happened. Interesting. I tend to think that Deuteronomy 32 was probably the original core, and the rest developed around it. And these manuscripts are, the first one dates to I think 50. BCE, and the other one is a little bit older. It's closer to about 100 BCE. Okay. But if you think about that, this is close to the time of the Hasmoneans. Mm-hmm. This is the time of Herod, when you still have this very obviously polytheistic sort of theology- Yeah ... within the texts themselves. Now, one of the reasons for that, this is an idea that has been forwarded by Benjamin Zemer, and I quite like this. So I've adopted it and I'm telling everyone. So how is it that these manuscripts of Deuteronomy survived that long in this form, and where did the alternative reading that appears in the Masoretic Text of Deuteronomy 32:8-9 come from? Yeah. The way he answers this question is he says, well, one of the things that we see, not just in the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is certainly part of what we see in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but I would say Jewish scribal practice, by and large, on the whole, you see a tendency towards harmonization. Mm-hmm. And what I mean by that is disparate parts of the text and the theology, there's this concentrated effort to try and get everything to match- Mm-hmm ... and to align with one another. This is why the Samaritan Pentateuch has taken chunks from the Book of Numbers and inserted them in the Book of Deuteronomy and vice versa, to make sure where we have these parallel stories, that they're all the same. We can't- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan have these- The same thing happens in the New Testament, where you'll have a reading from Mark that gets inserted into Matthew so that Jesus's story is the same across the two books. Yeah. Exactly.