Some scholars are thinking that the Dead Sea Scrolls, those ancient texts that include some of the oldest copies of the Old Testament, may not have been the property of the Jewish sect known as the Essenes. \u00a0They might have come from the Temple itself:<\/p>\n
Recent findings by Yuval Peleg, an archaeologist who has excavated Qumran for 16 years, are challenging long-held notions of who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nArtifacts discovered by Peleg\u2019s team during their excavations suggest Qumran once served as an ancient pottery factory. The supposed baths may have actually been pools to capture and separate clay.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And on Jerusalem\u2019s Mount Zion, archaeologists recently discovered and deciphered a two-thousand-year-old cup with the phrase \u201cLord, I have returned\u201d inscribed on its sides in a cryptic code similar to one used in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n
To some experts, the code suggests that religious leaders from Jerusalem authored at least some of the scrolls.<\/p>\n
\u201cPriests may have used cryptic texts to encode certain texts from nonpriestly readers,\u201d Cargill told National Geographic News.<\/p>\n
According to an emerging theory, the Essenes may have actually been Jerusalem Temple priests who went into self-imposed exile in the second century B.C., after kings unlawfully assumed the role of high priest.<\/p>\n
This group of rebel priests may have escaped to Qumran to worship God in their own way. While there, they may have written some of the texts that would come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.<\/p>\n
The Essenes may not have abandoned all of their old ways at Qumran, however, and writing in code may have been one of the practices they preserved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It\u2019s possible too that some of the scrolls weren\u2019t written at Qumran but were instead spirited away from the Temple for safekeeping, Cargill said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cI think it dramatically changes our understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls if we see them as documents produced by priests,\u201d he says in the new documentary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cGone is the Ark of the Covenant. We\u2019re never going to find Noah\u2019s Ark, the Holy Grail. These things, we\u2019re never going to see,\u201d he added. \u201cBut we just may very well have documents from the Temple in Jerusalem. It would be the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
via Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery Solved?<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some scholars are thinking that the Dead Sea Scrolls, those ancient texts that include some of the oldest copies of the Old Testament, may not have been the property of the Jewish sect known as the Essenes. \u00a0They might have come from the Temple itself: Recent findings by Yuval Peleg, an archaeologist who has excavated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,20],"tags":[641],"class_list":["post-6063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible","category-history","tag-dead-sea-scrolls"],"yoast_head":"\n
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