Waist of time.
In my opinion, the scrolls are more than a miracle they illustrate perfectly to our "oh so modern progressive", scoffing and impudent world the great great Truth and wisdom given to mankind from the Maker of the World. How about this for consistency... In 1948 T.S. Eliot, the poet and Catholic, in an interview with the Time magazine quoted one of the leading Christian scholars of his day Wilhelm Gesenius, that the reason why Isaiah was attributed to have called the restorer of Jerusalem and the Temple by the name of Cyrus, and it would be this Cyrus who would be king of the Persian-Median Empire, was because the Bible was written long after that date during Roman times. That the Jewish school-men who wrote the "Tanach" could make it look like authentic prophesy because they wrote it after the fact and claimed it was written by Isaiah (Isaiah 2 they like to claim) . This was typical for the majority of Christians at that time, Eliot was one of their leading Catholic intellectual knights and it was a given that he would imply that the Jewish people were religious charlatans and deceivers who had rejected Christ. (What Eliott and many Christians could not understand was that even Jesus as a Jew in obedience to Torah law would have rejected Christ because it was proscribed by the Torah that Jews had to see the Divine in a format that was commanded at Mt. Sinai. The Rabbis had determined that Christianity with its trinity was a lawful form of the Divinty to the gentiles, but would be idol worship for Jews because it was not their subjective experience, in other words God does not condem Christians for the crucifix and the image of christ when done by gentiles, but it would be idolatry for Jews to do so as it was what was said by Him to them at Mt. Sinai.)
In 1947 while tensions were mounting between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine, Elazar L. Sukenik , professor of archeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem received a phone call from a friend , an Armenian who dealt in antiquities. The Armenian asked Sukenik to look at a piece of leather parchment with writing on it, and determine its age. Sukenik immediately recognized the parchment as being pre-Greek aged Hebrew of which he was the expert, and asked if there were more such pieces. He was told that an Arab antiquities dealer in Bethlehem had entire scrolls. On the morning of November 29th After a perilous bus trip into Arab territory with his friend, Sukenik was taken to the attic of the Arab dealer’s house and shown three scrolls that had been found in a cave by Bedouins. After reading a few sentences of what Sukenik recalled as “ a regally beautiful Biblical Hebrew” , he agreed to buy the scrolls for the university along with the jars they came in , if he could have time to examine them closely and assess their value, the Arab dealer agreed, and Sukenik hurried back to Jerusalem with those scrolls.
One of the jars contained the full “Visions of Isaiah” (Cha-zon Yee-shy-hoo) Sukenick’s first description of the philology of the script was; the writer is a man of great power, his elocution is from the upper class, his writing style has the marks of a man who rules other men by his written words, certain terms of diction as the Hebrew word phe-tee-geel, (to stuff your gut) are only in pre – First Temple Hebrew. Twenty years after a sample of the scroll was dated by Carbon 14 dating and gave the scroll a 8th century BCE age, Ten years later the jar was Strontium/Cesium dated and also gave it a 8th century BCE age.
From Jewish sources we know Yee-Shy-hoo ben Amoz (Isaiah son of Amos) was born into the Kohanim class (he was a direct descendant of Aaron) and was on staff with the diplomatic service during the rules of Uzziah, Jotham. Ahaz, and Hezekiah. He was an authentic Mosaic prophet, and was recognized in his lifetime as being the real McCoy. (To be a authentic Mosaic prophet you can’t be right 9 out of 10 times, you have to be always 10 out of 10 right, all the time). We know he witnessed King Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem, and the annihilation of the 185,000 man Assyrian army by the Blast of the Almighty’s nostrils in 701 BCE. And there is a reference in the Gemara on “witnesses” that mentions sealing documents for later exhumation. Rabbi Schtimetz thinks the Isaiah scroll was probably buried in about 690 BCE a few years before Yee-shy-hoo’s death (he was murdered) in 686 BCE.
So this jar with the full megillah (scroll book) by Isaiah sits today in the museum at the University of Jerusalem where it is on public display behind the glass of its a preservation chamber. That it dates by three independent methodologies to a time of about 120 years before the Babylonian destruction of Solomon’s temple, is accepted as beyond doubt. (Of all the 3,300 scroll books that have been found near the dead sea it is the only one with such an early date, the vast majority date to the second temple times, and there are four scrolls in the hands of the Rockefeller foundation which date to 4th century BCE.) The full scroll has all 66 parshot (chapters) and at the end of the 44th chapter it says "Hay Omer le Koresh roe-ee ve chal che-phe-shee yaa-sheleem, ve-lomer le yerushalim tee-baa-neh ve-esay-ye-chal tee-vaa-said" (That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundations shall be laid). There it is for all to see in a scroll written hundred and seventy years before Cyrus King of the Persian Medes empire issued his decree which allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. It is ironic almost delicious and poetic that it was the "Cha-zon Yee-shy-hoo" scroll that managed to fall into Israel's hands just on the very eve of partition and the start of the relentless war by the Arabs to destroy the Jewish state. The state of Israel today has control of only the scrolls it obtained on that day. The rest of the thousands of scrolls, despite being written by Jewish writers in Hebrew and found in the Judean wilderness, are under the control of a academic trust controlled by a board with members from the Catholic Dominican order (the Dominicans have been the most relentless enemies of the Jewish people for the last 900 years), Aramco, the Rockefeller foundation, and members of the Jordanian and Saudi Governments. It is an object lesson to all that this scroll's characters, letters, vowels, its every mark is identical to the same copies which exist today in torah scrolls in every synagogue the world over, with no differences. Isaiah soothed Israel with the promise that Israel will be vindicated a hundred years before the first exile occurred and foreseeing the second exile as though it was past-tense.
Dr Sukenik's own description of how he came home that night and eagerly began to decipher the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls is full of a irony beyond the roots of coincidence. On the same day in Flushing Meadow New York the newly founded United Nations were voting on the UNSCOP recommendation to partition Palestine and create a Jewish state. As Sukenik recalled while he worked in his study, his youngest son, Mati, in the next room was listening to a radio broadcast of the scene developing at the UN. As the speeches began, Sukenik was painstakingly at work on a scroll not previously known to exist. Sukenik’s labour was interrupted from time to time by his son’s calling out the votes from that historic session. As the two-thirds majority was finally reached favoring partition, Sukenik was absorbed in an engrossing passage. Written in an age when the Jewish people still resided in their homeland, it was part of a prophetic hymn foretelling both their exile and their eventual return. “I was driven from my home like a bird from its nest…I was cast down, but raised up again” the scroll foretold the triumph of the “Sons of Light over the Sons of Darkness” It was as though the scrolls lay dormant as long as Jewish sovereignty over the land was in abeyance. And the fact that the greatest manuscript discovery of all times were read on that very historic night, marks an Author who is beyond time.
The lesson here is Only the timeless have the final say. Our Torah's author is the Terrific Singularity, yes there are human writers but what entered the Tanach (it is what we call the Tanach from Genesis to Chronicles) was decided by the Author, through the last of Israel's prophets Ezra the Scribe (him and Malachi were contemporaries and acknowledged as authentic prophets). Every Hebrew letter in Cha-zon Yee-shy-hoo is copied the same in our scrolls today as they were first written 2,700 years ago, just as the Five Books of Moses are the identical to the first thirteen scrolls done by Moses himself 3,482 years ago. There are no doubt words written by others since then, which were divinely inspired, but it is only the Chumash that is Divine. Sir Isaac Newton who was a graduate of Theology from Trinity, and always studied his bible in Hebrew, also came to the same conclusion, that the New Testament had been tampered with by the frailty of human minds, whereas the Tanach was beyond the shadow of a doubt the Word of God. Isaac Newton the founder of all our most rigorous sciences, his warning and his council to everyone who sought a real understanding of the world he said "there are only two real sources of truth in this world one the "Tanach" the Hebrew's Bible, the other Nature, there are no others".
This is facinating in my opinion....
Topic: From papyrus to cyberspace: Israel to make Dead Sea Scrolls available online (Read 4086 times)