And tomorrow, a TV interview for KARE-11… all in Minneapolis. I’m visiting MN during one of the year’s most beautiful times in the “land of 10,000 lakes.” Believe it or not, this place — so far from the desert wilderness of Israel is hosting an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This afternoon, my whole Minnesota family will check it out. My St. Paul sister Deb, who lined up tickets to the show, asked if I’d seen them before. “Yes,” I said, “but years ago.” “Well, they’re older now!” she quipped. My Minneapolis sister Linnea brought Bible Babel to the attention of the museum, which has been selling copies to supplement the exhibit. How different today’s modern books are from those ancient scrolls, dating to a few centuries straddling the year zero. Enormously important for our understanding of the Bible’s development, mysteries remain. One, who wrote the scrolls? has been the subject of considerable debate among Bible scholars and archaeologists. The collection of discovered fragments includes texts identical to what’s in the Bible, others show variations in what became biblical, some share ideas and imagery with biblical texts but are not otherwise “biblical,” and still other scrolls have in common with biblical texts only the Judaism(s) of the communities that passed such texts along. Most people have assumed that the texts were written (and hidden) by a break-away, ascetic sect of Jews called the Essenes. But recent evidence suggests that they may actually represent the collections of a number of Jewish groups, some of whom fled Jerusalem when the Romans attacked in 70 C.E. (A.D.) and deposited their precious scrolls in the dry caves around the Dead Sea. But time to go!
