The Jews In Qumran

ROBERT EISENMAN & MICHAEL WISE — THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS UNCOVERED — 1992

The long subtitle is the stake of an essential question. “The First Complete Translation and Interpretation of 50 Key Documents Withheld for Over 35 Years.” It is clear they were withheld by the Israeli state. Why, it is not clear, even after reading the whole book. It can only be explained by two main motivations. The first one is that these documents reveal that the Jewish faith or doctrine contained in the Old Testament at the time of Jesus Christ, just slightly before his apparition in the picture to just a little bit after his crucifixion, but also after the stoning of his brother James on the illegal, at least irregular decision of the High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem, reveal the phylogeny of the three Abrahamic religions that emerged from these one hundred years between let’s say 70 BCE and 70 AD.

Robert Eisenman was the discoverer, and he was swift enough to have all the documents photographed before entrusting them to the Israeli state. He was thus able to publish or release a facsimile of these documents against the will of this Israeli state.

The second explanation is that these documents reveal the deep inner ideological reality of these Jews belonging to this Dead Sea community, and the revelation is brutal. More about it in a moment. I will not discuss these documents in more depth than a few remarks.

The first remark is that the main leader of this community is James, Jesus’s own brother and the first bishop of Jerusalem assassinated by the High Priest of the Temple since the decision was taken in such conditions that it went against the standard regulations for such a decision, the standard regulation that the ruling committee of the Temple had to convene inside the Temple and in this case it convened at the High Priest’s home.

The second remark is that the commentaries are highly repetitive because the same remarks have to be repeated for most documents. A more synthetic presentation would have been a good thing. But at this level of the presentation, it is a good thing that the Hebrew reconstruction of the documents is given and then a translation in English. The Hebrew original is not exploited for the large public of the non-Jews because the basic…