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You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This episode has been edited for clarity and space.
Andrew Perrin
My name is Andrew Perrin, and I’m professor of humanities at Athabasca University.
David Capes
Dr. Andrew Perrin, welcome back to “The Stone Chapel Podcast.” It’s your second time to be with us.
Andrew Perrin
Yes, the second time and hopefully not the last time. I love being back and it’s good to connect with you always, in person and even virtually. So glad to be here today. Thanks for having me back.
David Capes
Today we are discussing your book. It’s a fine book. I’ve been reading it the last couple of weeks. I love the way you’ve done the chapters. It reads well. To be frank, a lot of books about the Dead Sea Scrolls, are a bit technical and they’re a little bit scary for people who don’t know the scrolls. It’s a good book for scholars, but it’s also a good book for students as well. I don’t know who you had in mind. Let’s ask at the very beginning, what’s the big idea behind this particular book?
Andrew Perrin
I’m glad to hear it was landing in those spaces where you felt a bit like you could read it as a scholar and also like a student and not have too many barriers. The big idea from this book is that the Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient texts. They only turned up in our modern world, about 75 years ago. That’s very recent history, and it’s taken decades to publish them, to understand what the texts say.
Now we’re asking, what do these texts mean. What’s their impact? What are their implications? And a lot is changing because scrolls research is ongoing. So, this book is meant to be an invitation, hopefully. Like a low barrier invitation in this exciting world of the scrolls, looking at them as texts. But also, I talk a lot about their context for how we think about these writings as they relate to scribal culture, ancient Jewish thought, identity and practice.
Even the early Christian movement, writing the New Testament, biblical texts, the scrolls are brought into conversation in so many different areas. And frankly, as a student of the scrolls myself, it was hard to cut myself off. I thought these are enough topics. It could keep going. I tried to find a dozen or so big-bucket kind of topics that make this book a great introduction into this exciting world for the Dead Sea Scrolls.
David Capes
When thinking about the scrolls, a lot of folks don’t know that the scrolls were found in the 1940s and 50s. And as you said, it took decades and decades for these things to be available. Why did it take so long for this to get published?
Andrew Perrin
It wasn’t until the mid 90s where the scrolls were fully available and published in their original languages. Then they had to be translated. So, part of the reason is that it’s long, arduous work. That’s a big part of this reason.
Actually, you can look back on articles, essays and news coverage even, 20 to 30 years ago, and people were angry. They asked where are the scrolls? Why haven’t the scrolls been published? You get conspiracy theories about this. This is being done by scholars all over the world. They’re doing this as part of a teaching and research job. They’ve got families. There are all sorts of things going on geopolitically in the world, in the 50s, 60s and 70s. You can’t publish 1000 manuscripts overnight, so we need to go easy on folks that were doing that work at the same time. I think there was some ongoing angst asking is there something that’s being hidden, covered up? And that’s where you get some exciting conspiracy theories.
David Capes
Right, they said it’s all the Vatican! The Vatican is holding on to something, and there is something in the Dead Sea Scrolls that disproves the Christian faith, according to these conspiracy theories.
Andrew Perrin
Yes, that gave rise to popular imagination. But we’re in the fortunate position today. The Scrolls are fully published. You can find them in English translations, and even more than that, you can go online and look at digital images from the comfort of your couch and see the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were years and years in the making. We’re in the golden age right now, because we can read the text, we can see the text, and hopefully we have books like mine to help you find your way through them.
David Capes
A lot of these scrolls, Andy, are not intact. It’s not like you’ve got 1000 intact scrolls where you can read every line. A lot of them are very fragmentary. They are very small. They’re partial, and there’s some conjecture that goes on in terms of trying to reconstruct the text that’s there.
Andrew Perrin
Yes. You know, you’re absolutely right. I somewhat tongue in cheek say, most of these aren’t Dead Sea Scrolls. They’re closer to Dead Sea scraps. And I’m not saying, they’re worthless. What I mean is that’s just the material reality. As you’d imagine. The largest scrolls we have in the Dead Sea Scrolls are the temple scroll, which is, I think, 8.2 meters long. Then the Isaiah scroll is about 7.5 meters long. That may not be the exact figure but they’re in that ballpark. Those are great exemplars of what a scroll would have looked like, perhaps. But most of them are puzzle pieces that we have to reconstruct. The text is challenging.
Imagine doing a puzzle without having all the pieces and not knowing what the picture on the front of the box was. Are you reconstructing a blue sky or a blue ocean? There are methods and approaches to do this in the scrolls, but there’s always a balance between deep, analytical, critical, scientific work and the art of interpretation that goes along with that. But that’s why doing this with other colleagues around the world working on this, we can pressure test our ideas.
We can ask, have we reconstructed the best thing, or are we going off in a direction that doesn’t make a lot of sense when it comes to known writings like text in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. Often, we’ll look to the Septuagint or the Masoretic text and say, we’re missing this gap in a Jeremiah scroll. What are other Jeremiah manuscripts doing during this period? And that’s not to say you can copy and paste, but it does give us some guidelines. There’s principles for doing it better and worse. If you love puzzles, then the scrolls are for you. If you do not, then please do not study the Dead Sea Scrolls!
David Capes
Don’t take them on vacation with you and try to sit around the fire and reconstruct the puzzle!
Andrew Perrin
Yes! You’ve got to have a real curiosity and openness to study the scrolls, because sometimes you might not actually know what you’re missing in any given manuscript.
David Capes
The other thing is that these scrolls are written in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek from that period. Not just anybody in the world can pick these things up and start looking at them. I mean, we can read the translation obviously, but not everyone can read the originals.
Andrew Perrin
And it’s exciting to dive into. You know, even folks that might be listening that know some Hebrew Greek and Aramaic, that’s awesome. Keep going on that journey, because it opens up all sorts of places you can go like reading the scrolls. But I remember when I went from learning Biblical Hebrew to diving into Qumran Hebrew. All of a sudden, the crutches of your vowel points are gone. You don’t have all these things to help. These rules that I thought I knew dissolved. It’s like the English language. Language changes over time. So Qumran Hebrew is not necessarily the same as Biblical Hebrew is not necessarily the same as rabbinic Hebrew. There are always some growing pains that go with it.
But the payoff is to be able to recover something, encounter an idea, appreciate a context, and seeing that in a physical Scroll of Qumran that you can digitally or even in person, pick up and feel if you’re in a museum. That’s a rewarding experience that I don’t think any other area of Biblical Studies has. We have texts that we can actually encounter and work closely with from that ancient of a time.
David Capes
As you begin to open your book up, you say, which are the best [DSS books in] English translations. If you can’t read the scrolls in Hebrew, which would be the best thing, go out and get this English translation, because it’s a good translation, and say same thing in the translation of the Septuagint. Because for those of us who dabble in these things, we work in these areas, those are the go-to resources very often. So you’re giving them good advice on books that you and I use, and others use who work in the scrolls on a regular basis.
Andrew Perrin
Yes, we’re familiar with all sorts of different English Bible translations. But it can be tougher to find things like this. They are a little bit off the beaten path. I’ll give a shameless plug for two books that are not my own. But were some of my own mentors and teachers, the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible by Eugene Ulrich and Peter Flint and Martin Abegg, who were my teachers in the scrolls. It’s a fantastic resource. And the Dead Sea Scrolls, A New Translation by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg and Edward Cook. If you want to be able to read just about everything in the scrolls and in an accessible translation with some great introductions and footnotes, you can’t beat those two volumes. They’d be money well spent, and I’m sure books that are well worn by the time you’re done with them.
David Capes
The editio princeps, the official sort of major editions [of the DSS books]. Those are very expensive. You’re not going to find those in every library. We’ll put information in the show notes that will help people find the originals. They’re fascinating to read because they come from a culture that is roughly the same time as Jesus, John the Baptist, Paul and the early Christians. Many of them are earlier than that period of time, but it’s still the culture of what Jews and Judaism was like in those days.
