For the past 40 years, the 2,100-year-old Isaiah Scroll has been kept in a dark room with temperature and humidity controls, far from the public eye. A few days ago, in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary, the Israel Museum put the parchment scroll on display in the Shrine of the Book - for two months only.
This is the only complete scroll among the 220 biblical scrolls, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered at Qumran.
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The scroll, whose message became "a foundation stone for humanity," according to Dr. Adolfo Roitman, director of the Shrine of the Book and curator of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was removed from display in 1967 after only two years, for fear it would disintegrate. Many scholars believe it was copied from an even more ancient scroll by the Essenes, a Jewish monastic sect from the Second Temple period. Others believe it was brought to the desert with other scrolls on the eve of Jerusalem's destruction, and hidden in a cave.
The Isaiah scroll was discovered in 1947 with six other scrolls in a cave near the ruins of Qumran on the northwestern coast of the Dead Sea, when a Bedouin shepherd, Mohammed al-Dib, threw a stone into a cave to get one of his goats to come out. When he heard the sound of breaking pottery, he went into investigate, and found the scrolls in jars.
Al-Dib sold the scrolls to two antiquities dealers from Bethlehem, who sold three of them to Eliezer Sukenik, head of the Hebrew University Archaeology Department (and the father of Yigael Yadin). They sold four others to Anastasius Samuel, the Metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Church in East Jerusalem. In 1948, Samuel smuggled the four scrolls, among them the Isaiah scroll, to the United States, where he tried unsuccessfully for a number of years to sell them. In desperation, he took out an ad in the newspaper.
"By coincidence, Yigael Yadin, Israel's second chief of staff and a well-known archaeologist, was in the U.S. at that time," Roitman says. Yadin knew Samuel would not sell the scrolls to a Jewish buyer, so he raised the $250,000 and bought them through an intermediary.
In 1955, prime minister Moshe Sharett announced to the nation that the scrolls, 1,000 years older than the previously oldest known biblical text, the Aleppo Codex, were in Israel's hands. They were first displayed at the Terra Sancta building in Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood, which was under lease to the Hebrew University.
Isaiah lived in the second half of the eighth century BCE. It was during this period, when Assyria had begun to take over large areas of the ancient Near East, including the kingdom of Israel, that he disseminated his message of peace: "And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more" (Isaiah 2:4).
According to Roitman, Isaiah was the most popular prophet of Second Temple times, as attested by the fact that 21 copies of the scroll were discovered at Qumran. However, the scroll now on display is the only complete copy.
The new display, curated by the museum's chief archaeological curator Michal Dayagi-Mendels, also presents agricultural implements and a sword, bent purposely in antiquity after the death of the warrior who wielded it, and buried with him. A replica of this sword was given to President Anwar Sadat on his visit to Israel in 1977 by prime minister Menachem Begin. A recently discovered Roman seal with a dove-like bird carrying an olive branch is also on display.
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