Andrew Perrin
Yes, that’s one of the big ideas in this book. I have a few chapters later on in the book that get directly at this. Some of the things I’m most excited to think about these days is how we think about Christian origins as it grew up. That movement grew out of Second Temple period Judaism. We hear similarities or echoes between the Qumran texts and the New Testament. There’s many of them, and that’s because these are the early Christians. Jesus, Paul and their followers are largely coming from that second temple period context in Judea.
Now Jesus or John the Baptist, or Paul were not Essenes. They were unlikely to have been at Qumran. But you and I right now are thousands of miles apart but we probably share a lot of cultural common fabric just by virtue of being in the same broad culture. That makes sense to you and I living today. But imagine looking back a few thousand years and going and wondering what Paul means when he says that. Or what is Jesus trying to get at when he uses that phrase. Sometimes hearing from different ideas writers and expressions in the culture of the New Testament can actually help us hear it differently. Or maybe even the way it was meant to be heard in the first place.
So, one of the big ideas in this book is not just engaging the scrolls in their own right, which is exciting, but then asking what if we put our foot in the camp of the early Jesus movement and have our ears open to the New Testament. Now, with this new knowledge, does it challenge what we thought before? Does it confirm what we thought before? Does it change our reading of the text? Sometimes it does, and it can help us add value in some unexpected ways.
David Capes
Yes. We’re talking with Andrew Perrin about his book, “Lost Words and Forgotten Worlds:
Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls.” It’s a terrific book! Now the scrolls are truly a library of books. It’s not just a book or it’s not just a Bible. It’s a lot of different kinds of things, isn’t it?
Andrew Perrin
Yes, the scrolls are a collection. We have about 930 fragmentary texts, give or take, depending on how you count puzzle pieces. As you said, they’re in Hebrew, Aramaic and in Greek. Among this collection, we have texts that include materials of almost all of the books that later show up in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. Everything except for Esther, as far as we know. They’re incredibly important for text criticism and understanding the shapes of Scripture before the canon. As well as we have writings that are sectarian writings.
I think I mentioned the Essenes earlier. This community at Qumran seemed to be a scribal community that was part of an Essene movement, and they had a lot of writings that outlined their practices, their structure, their liturgy, their expectations. Those materials give us insight into a very unique and distinct social, scribal context for a second temple period Jewish community. Also in the scrolls, we have copies of writings of books that we already knew about but didn’t have ancient copies. Such as the Book of Tobit or Aramaic Levi document, for example. We knew about those writings from other traditions, maybe like the Cairo geniza or the Septuagint, but we didn’t know how far back they went. And these DSS have some of our earliest manuscripts of those texts.
And then probably some of the coolest stuff in the scrolls, at least for my money, is stuff we didn’t even know about before. Texts that we didn’t even know existed, something like the Genesis Apocryphon or liturgical text or apocalyptic text. The Hodayoth, for example, is a beautiful and complex, poetic and liturgical text.
David Capes
Those are praise works. Praising God. A lot of Psalm-like texts, giving thanks to God.
Andrew Perrin
Yes, and these are the things that we have not had a fresh context for studying. In this case, quite literally, new texts that are actually very ancient. And that’s kind of a cool dynamic to open up the scrolls and see all those things in that library.
David Capes
Is there a scroll book that you gravitate toward more than any of the other books? You lit up when you started talking about some of these books that we didn’t previously know about.
Andrew Perrin
Yes, for sure, I spend most of my research in the Aramaic texts at Qumran, and that’s about 10-13% of the collections in Aramaic. So not a huge slice of the pie. And I love these texts because they have the vibe similar to the book of Daniel. I work a lot in Daniel, in the Hebrew Bible Testament space. Writings like the Genesis Apocryphon. If you’re going to go read one of these ancient Aramaic texts that we didn’t know about, go read the Genesis apocryphon. It is a rewritten, retold, reimagined interpretation of some of these classic stories we know. But it’s threading them with new ideas and interpretations, and it’s a great read. And these Aramaic texts, they’re interesting, they’re sophisticated, and quite often, they’re just fun to read because you’re watching scribes create and interpret while they’re trying to honor tradition. They’re holding all those things together. It’s really interesting.
David Capes
Last night, I was teaching at a church, and we were looking at Matthew 3 and hat’s introduced with the story of John the Baptist. There’s a verse associated with John the Baptist, that is from the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah, 40:3. “A voice calling in the wilderness. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight his path.” We see that in the Gospels associated very closely with John. But this is also an important text understood differently by the people who wrote at least some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Andrew Perrin
Yes, Matthew is a great example to look at because Matthew seems to quote the Old Testament about every three verses. “As the Prophet said”, just so you know this is all connected. He’s not the only one doing that in this period. There are other Jewish groups, the Qumranites being one of them, where they’re looking at their ancestral scriptural traditions saying, we think that matters. We think that it said something. What does it mean for us and who we are today?
And Isaiah 40:3, gets quoted and used as a way of interpreting the community of Qumran’s orientation to finding their way in the wilderness. In their case, quite literally. It’s a different interpretation than Matthew, because Matthew is, as we said, trying to understand the arc and the trajectory towards Jesus. Whereas the quranites are trying to trace their own arc and trajectory. We don’t have to agree with either one of those readings to see that. What’s interesting is that people in this period are trying to make sense of that scriptural tradition and connect it to their world back then their present day. I find that very relatable all of a sudden, because that’s what I think many of us are still trying to do.
So when we look at Qumran and we look at the New Testament or even other writers of this period, it’s really interesting. My ears perk up when I realize I’ve heard someone else try to interpret this text. What are they doing with it, and how is it different? And that can help us understand some of the conversation that we were not privy to, because we’re not Jews living in the first century. But we can kind of hear some of their ideas new.
David Capes
You have this culture that’s there, and it’s produced this wonderful volume of texts that give us an insight into the mind and the hearts and the values of these people. It’s really a unique kind of archeological find, isn’t it?
Andrew Perrin
Yes. And this is one of the advantages and challenges at the same time of working with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Because the advantage is we have thousands of fragments, hundreds of fragmentary scrolls found in caves dotting the northwest shores the Dead Sea. From around Masada in the south to the corner of the Dead Sea in the north. But 11 caves and those texts on their own are great reads and challenging to interpret. They’re found in quite close proximity to this archeological site known as Qumran, which seems to be the site of a Jewish community of Essenes that penned or preserved some of the scrolls. So, on the one hand we have texts, and on the other hand, we have archeology. I have a chapter in this about the challenge of how you make sense of the rocks and the rubble on their own
without reading the text onto them.
And how do you make sense of the text without overly informing your read of them with the archeology. How do you do that well together? Because this is a real opportunity, even if it’s a challenge. We see in the scrolls, that this community really prized ritual purity, and how they maintained that ritual purity. Not as a kind of trite fundamentalism. But to express their belief in a God through purity practices every day. We look at Qumran, and they have out in the desert waterways, filling cisterns of water that have steps in them for ritual purity. That’s a great example of how we can try and read the scrolls for what they’re trying to articulate about purity. Then looking at archeology and trying to see life on the ground. What did this look like? And it’s both. That’s not always easy, but it can be really worthwhile. If we’re trying to get a sense of the bigger picture from both of those data points,
David Capes
I’ll ask you to put on your prognostication hat. Do you think there are more scrolls yet to be found in the desert?
Andrew Perrin
That’s a great question. I think it was Jerome if I’m not mistaken who says we’re aware there’s some caves out there. And that’s in the fourth century. And after the scrolls were first found the Bedouin folks, archeologists, scholars, the Israeli military spent years and made many attempts to try and find more caves. I don’t know at this point if there are more scrolls in caves, because it’s been so well combed over, but I hope so.
Having said that, 75 years after discovery and then the publication of all the scrolls, the amounts of texts that have not been closely looked at, is huge. So in a way, there are still unknown discoveries right here. I’m far more interested in the scrolls we have and making sense of them first, before I worry about trying to find some more caves. But since you asked if I think there are there more out there, it’s like asking is there life on other planets? Well, I don’t know, maybe! There’s a part of me that thinks, I hope so. That sounds cool.
David Capes
It does! We don’t know, but you’re right. It takes a long time for scholarship to come around. To describe these, to compare these, to look at the archeology over against the literature. Just because they come to a firm conclusion today doesn’t mean that that will be the same conclusion in days ahead, because new data could be discovered. I’m grateful for this book. It’s called, “Lost Words and Forgotten Worlds: Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Dr. Andrew Perrin, thanks for being with us today on “The Stone Chapel Podcast.”
Andrew Perrin
Thanks so much for having me.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
