Now, after the Israeli seizure of the scroll, the Bedouins -- who received no payment for the Temple scroll -- no longer trust Kondo or the scholars. It is believed they still possess some 20 scrolls from the 1956 Cave 11 excavation, said Cross. These, and any more they find, will probably be sold on the open market, where they may earn 10 times more money than they would have through the old channel system, where the Jordanian government set a reasonable price and imprisoned those caught selling to anyone who would remove the scrolls from the country.
"Since 99 per cent of the findings are in fragments," said Cross, "it is essential that the scrolls be kept in one place so they can be pieced together." The Jordanian government deposited all the scrolls in the Palestine Museum in Old Jerusalem, an international institution founded with Rockefeller funds.
The finds at Qumran, most of which date from the first century B.C., are early versions of the Old Testament. The complete Old Testament--except the Book of Esther, which was not written at the time, is found among the Dead Sea scrolls, said Cross.
"The scrolls precipitate us back into the period before the fixing of the Biblical text," he continued. "Once the text was stabilized during the first century A.D., it became impossible to tell what was the original material and what was edited. But with these earlier documents, we can reconstruct a chronological development of the text and write the history of the Bible."
The Dead Sea scrolls provide information other than textual history of the Bible. All the scrolls from the first century B.C. are ruins from the library of the Essene Jews. According to Cross, these were the "leftists" of the first century B.C., who lived with the certainty that at any moment "the angels of God, the heavenly host, would fight the final battle with Satan and his forces" and the Messianic Age would be realized.
They set a place for the Messiah at every meal, and, anticipating the divine way of life, they shared all their goods. Some refused to marry because they saw no need for marriage in a divine world.
Important for both Christian and Jewish history, however, is the similarity between the Essene rights and early Christian rituals. The Essenes had a sacramental meal which included the eating of the "feast of leviathan" and closely parallels the Lord's supper and the Eucharist rite. Even the symbol of the rite--a fish--is the same for both groups. Essenes and Christians both called themselves the "People of the New Covenant," thus the scrolls not only explain the Old Testament, but provide insight into the New one.
Cross was a member of the international team of Biblical scholars who worked on Cave 4, the most prolific Qumran cave explored so far by professionals.
"Westerners usually don't uncover very many scrolls," he said, because they cannot tolerate the climate. "It's 120 every day," he explained, "and we just can't stay there very long." The results of Cross' investigation in Cave 4 will be published within the next few months