On Seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls

With the semester over, I've come into some time for taking in the world around me. Last week, I went to an exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls at a museum here in KC. It has been quite a well-publicized and, by all accounts, highly trafficked event -- there have been billboards, television advertisements; the accompanying lecture series was sold-out within a week or so. Even at $20 per ticket, the exhibit was crowded when I went during the afternoon on a week-day. It led me to wonder: what is the source of this intense interest? The scrolls themselves are tiny, dark pieces of parchment that were dimly lit with barely visible markings of archaic Hebrew letters. In some sense, they are uninteresting. The best parts of the exhibit were about the Essene community at Qumran. They did a great job situating this community historically, but unfortunately, there was little about their understanding of Scripture -- I suspect because the Essene interpretation of the Scriptures would be quite out of keeping with a contemporary evangelical understanding, and there was no desire to ruffle any feathers on the part of the organizers.

Does this event signal an awakening of interest in genuinely scholarly approaches to the Bible? As someone who has just finished teaching at a Christian college, I doubt this. My students mostly resented having their received views of the Bible challenged by an historical approach, though some found it liberating and enlightening. Perhaps readiness to face such challenges grows with age. But I suspect that there is another motive for most people: an excitement at the nearness to something that seems authentic and pure, as it were 'closer to God.' I heard one woman, approaching a facsimile (not even the real thing!) of a scroll of Deuteronomy exclaim to her husband "It's the Ten Commandments!" excitedly pushing ahead to plant herself right in front of it.

I may be misinterpreting what I saw -- perhaps I am uncharitable. But if I am seeing correctly, it seems to me that the interest in the Scrolls actually represents an kind of desperation to get spirituality. If one needs an ancient piece of parchment to put oneself in the proximity of God, then probably the other elements aren't working. The wonder I felt in front of those pieces of parchment was one of having a tiny bit of contact with a group of people who lived fully within a world very foreign to my own, who genuinely felt themselves to be living in an end time, and fully expected God to intervene in history and to turn the tables, continuing and completing his work of creation -- perfecting this world, not taking us to another world.

Someone who looked closely could see traces of an entirely different relation to the Scriptures at the exhibit. There were, found at Qumran, weathered phylacteries to hold scrolls of the Torah and the bands they used to tie them to their arms and head, as is still done by Orthodox Jews. There, it seems to me, is a deep, living way of taking the Scripture as a vehicle of relating to God. It's not the piece of paper, but the promise that it represents; one holds it near to oneself as a way of not forgetting, as a way of focusing, and meditating on one's responsibility. I find this practice to be representative of a genuine religiosity because if practiced sincerely it would engage the whole person -- the mind at contemplating the content and nature of the Torah, the heart longing to fulfill its commands, and the body through being brought into contact with the physical instantiation of the Torah. I wonder how many religious practices really engage people that fully today? My sense from students at an allegedly religious institution was that they were not used to being fully engaged -- perhaps especially unused to engaging their minds in their religion. Alas...