The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Beginnings of Western Mysticism
by Professor Philip Alexander FBA
6 Jun 2025
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Folklore Reimagined
This 10-Minute Talk is part of our Folklore Reimagined season, which explores the connections folklore forges between us and communities of the past, and how these customs and cultures are presented today.
Transcript
Let’s explore the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and their role in uncovering the beginnings of Western Mysticism.
In late 1946 or early 1947 – so one story goes – a Bedouin shepherd of the Tacamireh tribe was searching for a stray goat along the cliffs that line the north-west shores of the Dead Sea. Thinking it might be lurking in a cave, he tossed a stone in to scare it out. He heard a crack like a pot breaking. He went in to investigate and found clay jars with scrolls in them. Thinking the scrolls might have some value he took them and tried to sell them to antiquities dealers. Scholars got wind of this, and thus the world became aware of the existence of one of the greatest caches of manuscripts of all time.
Having finally identified where the scrolls had been found, the archaeologists moved in and scoured the area. In the end twelve caves were discovered which contained scrolls, including a sheet of rolled up copper which had oxidized and broken in two. When it was finally unrolled, it contained a list of buried treasure – apparently precise locations, where fabulous quantities of gold and silver and precious objects had been concealed.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls caught the public imagination. It was as sensational as Howard Carter’s discovery of the unrobed tomb of the boy-king Pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1920. Wild theories swirled around – and still swirl around – as to the meaning of these mysterious texts, but the scholars got to work, and over the past seventy years an astonishing, worldwide effort has gone into deciphering, editing, translating and interpreting them.
The learned books and articles that have been published on them in many languages would now fill a small library. It would be too much to expect unanimity among scholars: they are an argumentative lot and can disagree fiercely over minor details – often to the bemusement of outsiders. But, broadly speaking, there is now agreement as to when the scrolls were written, and by whom.
They turned out to be from very different dates, but they were all copied between the third century BCE, and the first century CE. They seemed to have formed the library of a sort of monastic Jewish community that inhabited the nearby ruins at a place now called Qumran.
Who this community was has been the subject of fierce debate, but many argue that they were a group called the Essenes by the first century CE Jewish historian Josephus. They don’t completely match Josephus’s description of the Essenes, but they come close, closer than to any of the other Jewish sects of this period.
According to their own account, the community was in fundamental dispute with the Jerusalem priesthood based in the great Temple in Jerusalem. In the mid-second century BCE, under the leadership of a prominent Jewish priest (whose historical identity has provoked heated debate) they had withdrawn from the Jerusalem Temple, because they regarded its leadership as illegitimate and its worship as, consequently, corrupt, and after some wanderings set up their community at Qumran, on the north-east shores of the Dead Sea.
There they studied and worshipped, and waited for the imminent coming of the Messiah, who would defeat Israel’s political enemies (at this period the Romans), rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and reinstate the legitimate priesthood and legitimate sacrifices. This would take place at the end a great war, in which they would play a leading part. They described this as “The War of the Sons of Light [that is themselves] against the Sons of Darkness [that is everyone else, including their fellow Jews]”. Analogies between Qumran and a radical Islamist Madrasa today, and the Dead Sea community and the Taliban, may not be all that wide of the mark.
The community got caught up in the great Jewish revolt against the Romans that broke out in 66 CE and lasted till 73 or 74. It ended with the famous last stand of the Sicarii (the Knife Men), an extremist group of Jewish assassins, at the mighty Herodian fortress of Masada just down the coast of the Dead Sea from Qumran.
Archaeology indicates that Qumran itself was attacked by the Romans, and this suggests a plausible story as to why the community’s library ended up in the caves. Foreseeing the eventual Roman attack on their headquarters at Qumran, the Dead Sea Sectarians decided to hide away their precious scrolls in nearby caves, with a view to coming back and recovering them, but they were dispersed and effectively wiped out, and so the scrolls remained in the caves for nearly 2,000 years till a Bedouin lad chanced to find them.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are important for many reasons. They contain the remains of around 900 texts (many now very fragmentary). Most are written in Hebrew, some in the sister language of Aramaic, and a few in Greek. By ancient standards this is a substantial library. We might compare the scrolls found in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, which were buried by the irruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.
As to content, there are large numbers of parts of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, such as scrolls of the first five books (the Pentateuch/Torah of Moses) and of the Psalms. There are Bible commentaries. There are rulebooks regulating the life of the community (somewhat similar to the Rule of St Benedict, which governed Christian monastic communities in the middle ages). There are books of hymns and prayers. There are texts about what will happen at the end of history, which the community clearly believed was at hand, and in which they would play a starring role.
All these throw a flood of new light on the history not only of Judaism, but also of Christianity. Christianity emerged out of Judaism in the first two centuries of the current era. Its emergence was an event of immense historical importance, which continues to shape our world. Anything which helps us understand its origins is important for our self-understanding today.
One of the most unexpected finds among the Scrolls was an unknown text which throws light on the beginnings of Western Mysticism. The text is very fragmentary but ten separate copies of it survive. They cover different parts of the original work, and thanks to this, and to the fact that it is rather repetitive, the whole can be reconstructed reasonably well. It is called “The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice”.
The title suggests when it was used. In the ancient Jerusalem Temple special sacrifices were offered on Sabbath, to mark the day as special. What we have here are songs which were sung by the choirs of Levites in the Temple as this sacrifice was being offered. The songs describe how the angels in heaven also offer worship to God in a Temple which matches the Temple on earth, after which the earthly temple was patterned. In a series of 13 songs, sung over 13 successive Sabbaths, the description of the heavenly liturgy moves steadily inwards to the innermost recesses of the heavenly temple, till it climaxes in some sort of vision of God enthroned in the Holy of Holies on a throne which corresponds to the Ark of the Covenant in the earthly Temple.
What is the point of all this? Clearly this ritual was intended to link the worshipping community on earth at a solemn point in its liturgy with the worshipping community in heaven. The faculty by which this was done was the imagination. Through reciting the powerful, mysterious words of the hymn the worshipper on earth conjured up a picture of worship in heaven, and felt themselves drawn into it. The veil that separated earth and heaven was drawn aside, and heaven and earth became one in worshipping God.
What we have here is one of the earliest examples of a form of mystical ascent that was to become central in the western mystical tradition. The community at Qumran continued to recite the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, even though they had withdrawn from the Temple, and did not offer animal sacrifices at Qumran, but rather offerings in the form of praise – the “fruit of the lips”. They may have regarded this absence of sacrifice as drawing them even closer to the worship of the angels, since there were no animal sacrifices offered in heaven, only praise. They had reached on earth an angelic state.
In later western mysticism the ascent of the soul to union with God was often individual and private, but communal, liturgical ascent has survived to the present day in the public worship of both the Synagogue and the Church. In the synagogue it is found in a form of prayer known as a Qedushah, in which the worshippers on earth picture to themselves the angels in heaven and chant with them the angelic hymn “Holy, holy, holy”.
Exactly the same thing happens in the Christian Eucharist. There at a point of great solemnity and power, the worshipping community on earth joins with the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven to laud and magnify God’s holy name, evermore praising him and saying, “Holy, holy, holy …”. Few, if any, today reciting these words week in and week out realise that they are following a tradition that we can now, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, trace back over 2,000 years to the practice of a community of Jews on the shores of the Dead Sea.
Weird and wonderful theories have been spun around the Dead Sea Scrolls – one thinks here of Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’ – but the truth, painstakingly pieced together by scholars, often proves more wonderful than the fiction.
Professor Philip Alexander FBA is an Emeritus Professor of Post-Biblical Jewish Literature at The University of Manchester
This talk is part of the series The British Academy 10-Minute Talks, where the world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
