Everybody loves a good mystery. That's just what the Dead Sea Scrolls are to many people>A good mystery.

Think about it> Hidden documents, undiscovered for two thousand years, largely suppressed by scholars for another forty years.

Documents dating at least back to the time of Jesus and the early church. What new insights are contained in these mysterious scrolls ? What can they tell us about Judaism and the early church ?

Why were many of them suppressed by scholars for so many years ? Anyone know why ?

I don't think anyone is specifically ignorning the Dead Sea Scrolls... they're still being studied and analyzed *shrugs* Most people I know who are either religious or interested in religion are pretty darned fascinated by them. That's a good thing... I'd call it cautious optimism that they can shed any new light. Cautious optimism is a good thing in my opinion.

It's worthwhile to note that they were found over a 40 year span, not all at once; some changed hands many times through art and antiquity dealers, many badly deteriorated after being taken out of their casings. it's really only been pretty recently that they've been seriously studied. They require scholars well versed in ancient and obscure Hebrew dialects long dead, Greek and other crazy dead languages. Combine that with the poor quality of a lot of the documents, and it's going to take decades to decide what use they are.

Personally? I love reading about new discoveries from the Dead Sea Scrolls, heck, I'm even STILL glued to any new findings about the Talpiot tomb in Israel. SeanPh and I might be the only people who are fans of James Tabor and the Talpiot tomb LOL, doesn' mean it's surpressed necessarily, just means no one is interested.

I'll say honestly I don't know whether certain dead sea scrolls are being surpressed in some big conspiracy (I don't believe in conspiracies or scholars and governments being able to keep huge secrets) -- I tend to think it's because they've been dismissed as uninteresting or useless for studying. But, like I said, I don't know.

Thanks MMW,

yes I agree that they are absolutely fascinating.

They may clear up & answer alot of questions in the future, or so I hope.

For one thing, the Dead Sea Scrolls show us that the Bible has been changed since then. For example, the original Deuteronomy found in the Dead Sea Scroll reveal that the creator God, El, assigned sub-gods to each human tribe/culture, and Yahweh was the God of Israel, but not the world god, who was El. Later, the Jews (and Christians), morphed El and Yahweh together, and considered all of the rest of the world's tribal Gods as demons.

Interestingly, Yahweh, and many of the other earliest tribal dieties all over the world were regarded as flying serpents and dragons.

I forgot all about them. They were at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle.....the real ones! I remember I saw them last year, and there were biblical ones apocalyptic (?), ones and something else. I forgot everything else.......

I believe they had a FEW of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a few of the apocryphal texts the at the Science Center last year. I had wanted to go see it, but just never got around to it (I'm in the Seattle area too). But I'm a dork about that kind of thing... I got a big kick out of seeing the Magna Carta at the British Museum and my classical Latin leaves a lot to be desired so reading it was pretty much out of the question. LOL.

It's still cool to see that kind of thing though.

Not implying you are incorrect, although it might sound that way, but a friend of mine who read the direct translations of many of these scrolls said it sent a shiver down his spine because they almost exactly matched the text from his revised king james bible, and it was like hearing the original voice of the writers, echoing down the millenia.

This is kind of interesting. I just don't understand the secrecy though .

Publication

Some of the documents were published in a prompt manner: all of the writing found in Cave 1 appeared in print between 1950 and 1956; the finds from 8 different caves were released in a single volume in 1963; and 1965 saw the publication of the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11. Translation of these materials quickly followed.

The exception to this speed that the documents from Cave 4, which represented 40% of the total material. The publication of these materials had been entrusted to an international team led by Father Roland de Vaux, a member of the Dominican Order in Jerusalem. This group published the first volume of the materials entrusted to them in 1968, but spent much of their energies defending their theories of the material instead of publishing it. Geza Vermes, who had been involved from the start in the editing and publication of these materials, blamed the delay—and eventual failure—on de Vaux's selection of a team unsuited to the quality of work he had planned, as well as relying "on his personal, quasi-patriarchal authority" to control the completion of the work.

As a result, a large part of the finds from Cave 4 were not made public for many years. Access to the scrolls was governed by a "secrecy rule" that allowed only the original International Team or their designates to view the original materials. After de Vaux's death in 1971, his successors repeatedly refused to even allow the publication of photographs of these materials, preventing other scholars from making their own judgments. This rule was eventually broken: first by the publication in the fall of 1991 of 17 documents reconstructed from a concordance that had been made in 1988 and had come into the hands of scholars outside of the International Team; next, that same month, by the discovery and publication of a complete set of photographs of the Cave 4 materials at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, that were not covered by the "secrecy rule". After some delays these photographs were published by Robert Eisenman and James Robinson (A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, two volumes, Washington, D.C., 1991). As a result, the "secrecy rule" was lifted.

Publication accelerated with the appointment of the respected Dutch-Israeli textual scholar Emanuel Tov as editor-in-chief in 1990. Publication of the Cave 4 documents soon commenced, with five volumes in print by 1995. As of 2007 two volumes remain to be completed, with the whole series, Discoveries in the Judean Desert, running to thirty nine volumes in total.

further reading & source >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_scrolls

No, I am not incorrect. This is an important point in my upcoming book and will be subject to intense scrutiny when people realize that the murderous, jealous, virgin-devouring Yahweh is NOT the Creator God of the Bible!

In the Hebrew bible, Deuteronomy 32:8 reads "sons of Israel" but in the Dead Sea Scroll fragments of Deuteronomy, the passage reads "Sons of God" .

The phrase "bene ha 'elohim" and its variant "bene 'elim" is found in other passages in the Bible, such as Job 1:6 and 2:1. Here, the Sons of God present themselves to Yahweh in the heavenly divine assembly. Job 38:7 says that the Sons of God have been with Yahweh at the creation of the world. They also appear in Psalm 89:7, where Yahweh is proclaimed incomparable to all other gods, and in Psalm 29:1 where the ""bene 'elim"" sing praises to Yahweh.

The modern passage in Deuteronomy (32:8) reads "When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided the sons of man. He established the borders of the peoples according to the number of "the sons of Israel"." The strange thing about this passage is how can the borders of all the peoples be established according to the sons of Israel when Israel hadn't already been established? The end seems to contradict the beginning. This contradiction doesn't appear in all Bibles, like the RSV based on the Greek Septuagint (dated from the 3rd century BCE), which state "according to the number of the Sons of God." This is also the wording in the Hebrew Dead Sea Scrolls version, which is now the oldest version of Deuteronomy we currently have, & what scholars now believe as the most authentic.

The implications are that the Sons of God are not just present at the beginning of the world, but also figure prominently in dividing nations. That implicates that while Yahweh chose Israel as his nation, each of the other Sons of God also received a nation to rule over. And above all of these "local" Gods, was El. The reason the Jews changed the Bible is because they wanted their local serpent deity Yahweh to be the Creator God, so they morphed the attributes of the creator God El, and the "watcher" dragon Yahweh of the Hebrews into one God. This is also why we have two different creation stories in Genesis, Elohims "scientific" creation where "life begins in the sea, and roughly follows evolution with mankind in the last epoch, and Yahweh's mythic, "humans come first creation".

I don't know that anybody had to suppress them. They died their own death. The Essenes forbade propogation.

You misunderstood the comment. The texts were suppressed by scholars, not the Essenes! My guess is that they (Essenes) were were indeed suppressed by the Romans, hence they hid their library.