Lately, I have been devouring books on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The topic is of immense interest to me, in light of the Ink & Blood exhibit currently showing at the Museum of Idaho in Idaho Falls.

 

Last night, I just finished reading the book, What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls and Why Do They Matter? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007) by David Noel Freedman and Pam Fox Kuhlken.

From Jerusalem, September 15, 2006, Weston W. Fields wrote in the foreword introduction to the book:

 

For my entire adult life I’ve admired David Noel Freedman and his scholarship, so it is a deep pleasure to recommend his latest work. And consistent with his modus operandi over his entire career, Noel has brought in a new, young scholar as his collaborator, in this case Pam Fox Kuhlken.

 

When it comes to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Noel was there at the beginning. In March 1948, John Trever sent the first photos of the St. Mark’s Isaiah Scroll to Prof. W. F. Albright at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Noel and Frank Cross were the first two students to whom he chose to show the photos. Fifty-eight years later, Noel is still going strong, as evidenced by this latest contribution to the field.

This short book, 131 pages long, is geared for the popular audience, not for scholars, answering 115+ questions in thirteen colorful chapters.

 

Weston writes,

It will be a delight for readers, who are warned, however, that they might not be able to put it down!

In the book, the authors write several things that I vehemently disagree with as a conservative Christian. But I thought I would make aware to LDS friends a couple references to Mormonism mingled in the answers to some of the questions in this new DSS book to the lay audience.

Is anyone close to be being a “Righteous Teacher” today? (100).

For parallels to the Righteous Teacher, it’s probably better to think in terms of the founders of other religious movements: Moses in Judaism, Jesus in Christianity, Mohammed in Islam, and so forth. If you want to get closer to our own time, the founder of the Baha’i faith, Baha’u’llah (1817-1892), and the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith (1805-1844), seem to fulfill similar roles for the religious movements that they started.

If a remnant of the Essenes still exists today, where would we find it? Would its members be hermits in desert caves? (109).

It’s an interesting question. There must be over 100 sectarian, utopian movements in the United States alone, although none that I know of inhabit caves! Some do inhabit remote areas in the desert; the most striking example is the Mormon fundamentalist community that dominates two small towns on the border between Utah and Arizona. These communities still practice polygamy and, in some cases, child marriage, although they manage to conceal most of it from the authorities, who intervene only when a really flagrant case attracts national attention.

 

Elsewhere around the world, other sectarian groups might take specific passages of Scripture very seriously, while sharing a doctrinal foundation with mainstream believers. They might continue to live where they always have, and just form a new church to worship God as they see fit.

 

One thing about all these communities, wherever they’re located and whenever they’ve existed throughout history, is that they are almost all concerned with restoring the purity of another age. The idea is that mainstream society, or the mainstream church, is just too far gone to save, so they isolate themselves.

As I once visited Qumran, I would like to plan a stopover in these “two small towns on the border between Utah and Arizona.” God knows how much I desire to persuade them in regards to powerful tenets of Christian fundamentalism.