Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [9]
What’s a “testament”?
If the Bible really starts out as Jewish document, and they don’t call it a “testament,” where does that word come from? And what does it mean?
The word “testament” has come to mean several things. Most people prefer to put off thinking about the word when it comes to that unpleasantness, your “last will and testament.” In this strictly legal sense, it means a document providing for the disposal of your earthly goods after you die.
Another common use for “testament” is as evidence of something—for instance, “The Holocaust is testament to Hitler’s evil.”
But the old way in which the word was used to describe these holy writings meant something quite different. “Testament” was another word for “covenant”—meaning an agreement, contract, or pact. For Christians, the Old Testament represented the ancient deal or “covenant” struck between God and his people. In the New Testament, however, Christians think they got a “New Deal” through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Many Christians think that this means they can simply throw out the old books and stick with the new, or skip over all that long, boring “old stuff.” But the New Testament does not replace the Old. To Christians, it supplements, expands, and completes that “old contract.” In the sports world, they call it a contract extension; the old agreement is renewed with more profitable terms.
Jesus himself was familiar with the “old contract.” He was a good Jewish boy who studied the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. He could cite them by heart when he was twelve. Of course, Jesus wouldn’t have possessed a Bible to study his lessons. When he was a boy, there was no “Bible.” Books didn’t exist. More likely he would have learned by rote from scrolls kept by local religious teachers, or “rabbis.” The ancient books of Hebrew later collected as the Bible were written on papyrus or leather, stitched together, and rolled into long scrolls. Until recently, the oldest known copies of Hebrew scrolls came from medieval times, around the year 1000. Then fifty years ago a Bedouin boy scrounging around some caves in the desert wastelands near the Dead Sea made an intriguing and startling discovery.
Are the Dead Sea Scrolls the “original” Bible?
In the spring of 1947, while the British still controlled Palestine, Muhammed ed Dib was tending goats in the arid, rocky hills near the northern Dead Sea shore. The “Dead Sea” is actually a salty lake in the middle of a desert, the lowest point on the face of the earth, and one of the hottest and least inviting landscapes in the world. The fresh water flowing into it evaporates rapidly in the heat, leaving behind a thick mineral broth. Fish can’t live in these waters—hence a “Dead Sea.” In the hills that surround the Dead Sea, the young goatherd dropped a stone into a cave and heard it hit something. Investigating further, he came across ancient clay pots filled with scrolls and scraps of old leather covered in mysterious writing. His accidental find was the beginning of one of the most momentous, and controversial, discoveries in history: that of the “Dead Sea Scrolls.”
Muhammed’s find launched a wider search of the surrounding area, generally called Qumran, approximately ten miles south of Jericho, on a plateau overlooking the Dead Sea. After the initial discovery sent amateurs crawling all over these rocky hills, scurrying to find more scrolls, an orderly archaeological search of Qumran was eventually organized. Over the years, many more scrolls and remnants of scrolls were uncovered. Fifty years after that first find, researchers are still trying to piece together all of the tiny bits and pieces of leather fragments preserved by the dry desert air.
The painstaking work of sorting through these fragile old leather scraps, a massive ancient jigsaw puzzle with no picture to work form, has stirred controversy. Set against the politics and intrigue of recent Middle East wars and history, the work proceeded in secret and very slowly. Too slowly for some critics,