A long work table with scissors, needles and snow-white sheets of rice paper spread out on it; a few more tables with ordinary computers; cabinets with black cardboard boxes and materials to work with …
This is the whole furnishings of a small room in the Israel Antiquities Authority, where the great sacrament of the Dead Sea Scrolls conservation is performed. Their discovery is rightfully considered the main archaeological discovery of the 20th century. And the scrolls themselves still contain secrets to be solved.
The golden hands are urgently required …
The history of the discovery of the first unique Dead Sea scrolls, their acquisition by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the subsequent searches for more and more new manuscripts is well known. Unfortunately, since the discovery of these unique artifacts in the Judean Desert, many of them have suffered serious damage.
The first blow to the relics came from the Bedouins who discovered them - they cut the scrolls into pieces, hoping that in this way they would be able to get more money for their sale. But, as it turned out, the restorers who worked with the scrolls made quite a few mistakes at first.
It took a while to understand: the scrolls have survived for millennia because they lay sealed in jugs in absolute darkness and the unique microclimate of the Dead Sea caves. Normal humidity, direct sunlight - all this led to their destruction. On top of that, the early restorers of the scrolls glued their fragments with ordinary adhesive tape and placed them between simple window panes. The pressure of the glass, aging of the glue and sunlight caused the parchments to darken before our eyes.
It is difficult to say what the fate of these historical treasures would have been if in the early 1990s, in the wake of the mass exodus of Jews from the USSR, restorers who had gained experience in working with ancient manuscripts in the best museums in Moscow and Leningrad had not arrived. Their expertise has been used to ensure the preservation of priceless artifacts.
Only women work in the scroll conservation department. It turns out that only female hands can touch the scrolls so as not to damage them. Only they can, with minimal losses, clean them from the glue left by the tape, place them between two sheets of special transparent paper, put them in a frame and then sew the space around the scroll with the thinnest thread.
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Sometimes all the work has to be done under a microscope. This frame is then exhibited in the Israel Museum in a repository that maintains a microclimate corresponding to the caves of the Judean Desert.
Thanks to the experience and truly golden hands of these women, the process of documenting and preserving the scrolls has been completed over the past two decades. And now they are actively involved in the process of photographing scrolls based on spectral photography, using technology purchased by the Hebrew University from NASA.
From the darkness of millennia
According to historians, most of the Dead Sea scrolls known today belonged to Jews who fled after the Roman defeat of the Bar Kokhba uprising (131-135) to the Judean Desert - to the very caves in which the future King David was hiding from his father-in-law, King Saul.
The Jews who took refuge here were not members of the Essenes sect, which is considered the herald of Christianity. But just like the Essenes, they lived in the hope of the coming of the Messiah, who would return their state to them, and lived in a commune, which they called "Yahad" ("Together"). The charter of this commune has been found among other Qumran scrolls.
At some point, the Romans discovered the Communards and decided to destroy them.
Foreseeing the inevitable death, the "Yhadovites" decided to preserve the most valuable thing they had - the sacred books. They wrapped the parchment and papyrus scrolls in linen cloth, placed them in jugs, sealed them tightly and hid them in caves. There they lay until 1947, when some of them were accidentally discovered by a Bedouin shepherd boy.
Today, the Antiquities Department stores over 900 such manuscripts, consisting of several tens of thousands of fragments. Several hundred more such artifacts were at the disposal of Jordanian historians. Most of these scrolls are written in Hebrew, the same alphabet that Jews use today, and therefore can be easily read and understood by any Israeli student. But there are also scrolls written in Greek and Aramaic, as well as the form of the Hebrew alphabet that the Jews used even before the Babylonian exile (before 598 BC), and dated to the 8th century BC.
The found scrolls contain all the books of the Old Testament (Tanach, as the Jews call it), with the exception of the Book of Esther, and their texts practically coincide with the biblical texts known today. Which, in turn, proves that the Bible has come down to our days almost without any changes. At the same time, sometimes there are slight differences in the scrolls from the current canon, and scholars today argue whether it is a question of the scribes' mistakes or we have proof that the biblical text has been edited over the centuries.
At the same time, among the manuscripts, texts were also found that, for one reason or another, were not included in the Old Testament. This is the apocryphal to the Book of Daniel, and the Book of the War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness, and the psalms of David that were stunning in their poetic power. But perhaps one of the most interesting finds among the Qumran finds is the manuscript of the Book of Enoch - one of the most mysterious and mystical works of antiquity, not included in the biblical canon.
Bible of UFOlogy
This is exactly how - "The Bible of UFOlogy" - sometimes the Book of Enoch (Sefer Hanoch) is called by the supporters of the theory according to which the contacts of mankind with alien intelligence played a decisive role in the development of civilization.
The basis of the Book of Enoch is the story of how the angels descended from heaven to earth, began to cohabit with earthly women and passed on secret knowledge to people.
There is a mention of this in Genesis, but the Book of Enoch is a detailed and detailed story about how a detachment of two hundred celestials rebelled against God, led by an angel named Shamkhazai, descended to Mount Hermon, the main peak of the current Golan Heights.
These aliens not only amused themselves with love with women, but also taught people different crafts, as well as magic and witchcraft. For example, an angel named Azazel taught people how to forge iron weapons; the angels Kochaviel, Tamliel and Barkiel - the sciences of the movement of the stars and the moon and the calendar; Shamkhazai himself passed on to them knowledge about the magic and healing properties of plants. But at the same time, the righteous Enoch (Hanoch) refused to communicate with the rebellious angels.
Therefore, the Archangel Gabriel himself began to descend to him and teach him other secret knowledge - much more true and profound than those that Shamkhazai and his associates imparted to humanity. So Hanoch became the keeper of the secret knowledge of astronomy, cosmology and ways of serving the Creator, which he passed on to his son Methuselah, that to his grandson Noah, and Noah after the flood - Seth, etc., and so this knowledge has been preserved to this day.
Other biblical sources say that Enoch did not die an ordinary death, but was taken alive to heaven, for which a certain luminous object, "like a great fiery horse," descended from above. However, even before that, Enoch managed to visit heaven. Ufologists see in the description of his flight a confirmation that Noah's great-grandfather visited an alien ship.
Indeed, the book first talks about a "large round body", as if made of pearls and surrounded by fires and tongues of flame. Nevertheless, Enoch calmly passed through this flame and found himself inside a circular room with many windows through which the surrounding landscape was clearly visible. Then he heard a certain voice, got into another, even larger luminous body and found inside it many rooms, including a round hall, and in the middle of it - a high throne.
"Before us," say the ufologists, "is a classic description of a flight on a reconnaissance boat to an in-orbit spacecraft and the control panel of this spacecraft." The mystics, of course, interpret this text completely differently. As, however, the words of another biblical source - the Book of Truthfulness, asserting that, being taken alive to heaven, Enoch received a new body and became the angel-ruler of the higher worlds named Metatron.
Biblical tradition dates the "ascension of Enoch" 2773 BC, and this is exactly the period of the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age, when the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Babylon and Egypt make a giant spiritual and technological leap forward. In India, the Harappan civilization arose, and in Britain, by the way, it was at this time that Stonehenge was being built.
So the Book of Enoch really gives many reasons for reflection and various kinds of hypotheses. Meanwhile, the Qumran scrolls are fraught with many other equally attractive and exciting mysteries, to which we will certainly return more than once.
Peter LYUKIMSON