This page raises critical questions about an exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the “Discovery Center” in New York. The exhibit, like other similar ones that have taken place, is designed to conceal the actual current state of Scrolls research from the public, and to defend a largely debunked “Essene-sectarian” theory of who wrote the Scrolls and where they came from.

[Update: for additional reviews of the exhibit, see now this series of articles, and see also here.] 

For a start: like a number of other exhibitions of the Scrolls created in cooperation with several Evangelical scholars, the current exhibit focuses to an exaggerated degree, in the context of ancient Jewish texts, on the theme of the origins of Christianity. In the process, it ends up dishing out false information — some of which even has nuances historically tied to Christian anti-Jewish themes.

For example, the exhibit falsely states that

By the end of the fourth century, after Emperor Constantine’s adoption of Christianity (313 CE) … the region of Israel had become predominantly Christian.

Similarly, under the rubric “The Sign of the Cross,” we are told:

When Constantine became a Christian and legalized the practice of Christianity in the Roman Empire, Israel became the “Holy Land,” the place of Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection.

Both of these statements are historically false. (See, e.g., this book, pp. 67, 70, 74.) Both are obviously meant to cater to popular, religiously grounded notions about the antiquity of Christian dominance in the Holy Land. These notions do not correspond to what historians know to be the reality of ancient Palestine. In an apparent effort to lend credence to what amounts to a popular fiction, the exhibit’s historical summary section fails to provide any information at all on the rise of rabbinical Jewish culture in Palestine during the first several centuries of the Christian Era.

Moving in the same direction, the exhibit ignores the basic difference between pre-rabbinic (or what’s often called “intertestamental”) Judaism and rabbinic Judaism. In the process, it repeatedly obscures the simple, basic fact that Judaism is historically antecedent to Christianity. We are told for example that

Judaism and Christianity emerge from the same religious tradition—that of ancient Israel—at the same time. Both claim to embody “Israel.” Indeed, both initially define themselves as the children of Israel, and not as Jews or Christians.

And we are told, on one giant wall text quoting a popular book written 50 years ago, that “everything that is important to Israel in the centuries before Christ is also important for Christianity.” This is again simply historically false, as historians of the two religions (or those who keep kosher) know.

The exhibitors admit that no New Testament writings were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, but then emphasize that the

earliest Christians and the authors of some Scrolls share religious ideas. These include… identification of their community as the “ideal Israel.”

The term “ideal Israel” is an unfortunate invention of the exhibitors. It echoes the old Christian term “true Israel,” which has been studied at length by various historians of religion, in most detail by Marcel Simon. As Simon shows in his detailed book on the topic, the term “true Israel” expresses an anti-Jewish idea invented by early Church fathers who wanted to convince the world that Christianity was actually the “true” Israel and that the Jews were living in sin. It is the case that many non-specialists are not aware of the history of either the term or the accompanying Christian doctrine (which is found nowhere in the Dead Sea Scrolls). It seems that the Discovery Center exhibit’s organizers either took this for granted when they came up with the “ideal Israel” variant, or else simply were themselves historically ignorant in preparing their popular exhibit.

Throughout the exhibit, a huge amount of emphasis is placed on a small group of Scrolls researchers sometimes refer to as “sectarian.” While the organizers seem reluctant to directly support the old idea that the Scrolls were written by Essene monks in the desert near where they were discovered in caves near Qumran, since that idea may well have been debunked in recent years, they still make all sorts of gestures in that direction.

A theme thus keeps on popping up that, as the exhibit’s curator Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn puts it in her introduction to the exhibit catalogue, the Scrolls “illustrate the rituals and practices of a unique community.” The term “the community” appears over and over, even though writings sometimes tied to such a single “community” are only a tiny proportion of the Scrolls, which actually seem to have been written by many different Jewish groups.

As part of this “community” theme, we are informed that “like other Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of War may have been composed by a community calling itself the Yahad….” The exhibit repeatedly defines “Yahad” as “Hebrew for ‘unity’ or ‘community,’ a self-reference to the group referred to in the scrolls.” All of these statements are misleading. The Book of War is an interesting manuscript, but it in fact doesn’t have any reference to a “Yahad” group, and there doesn’t seem any reason to conclude it “may have been composed” by such a group. In any case, despite references to “the group referred to in the scrolls,” the Dead Sea Scrolls refer not to “the group” but to many different groups; only a small number of scrolls mention a “Yahad” or brotherhood group; and it isn’t even clear whether there was only one “Yahad” group or a few of them.

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But the exhibit raises nastier questions that visitors who read the Times or Daily News might pick up on. For a start, there are various strange omissions.  A number of major archaeologists, in Israel, including Yitzhak Magen, the archaeologist assigned to officially research the Qumran site for many years, now believe the Scrolls are actually the remains of various manuscript libraries in the Jerusalem area and were brought to the desert to keep them safe when the Romans were about to attack the city. 

This is the theory of Professor Norman Golb of the University of Chicago, who subjected the curator’s previous Scrolls exhibit in San Diego to a withering scholarly critique. Golb has criticized a bunch of other Dead Sea Scrolls exhibits as well.  The Jerusalem theory is not mentioned in the Discovery Center exhibit. And by the way, a few years ago, a blogger widely known to be Professor Golb’s son exposed the fact that the exhibit’s curator, Dr. Kohn, had falsely described herself as a “Dead Sea Scrolls scholar” in an open letter published on a website in San Diego, and that she had then admitted to a reporter that she is “far from an expert.”

(Update: Golb has now also critiqued the Discovery Times Square exhibit itself, focusing in particular on the Christian, anti-Jewish theme developed on the panels: see pp. 10-15 of his new article.  As for Dr. Kohn, she is now presenting herself as an "ancient historian" who can "tell you about the past." This self-presentation is unsupported by any bona fide historical research attributable to the religious studies and bible teacher Risa Levitt Kohn.)

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Whatever has motivated the Center’s omission of one of the basic theories about where the Scrolls came from, some of the archaeological “information” furnished in the New York exhibit is simply false. For example, we are informed that of sixteen water cisterns discovered at Qumran “ten appear to be ritual baths.” But in fact, Professor Magen and his associate Yuval Peleg, leaders of the official excavation team of the Israel Antiquities Authority that spent ten years digging at Qumran, indicate in their published reports that only two or three of the cisterns were ritual baths.

Another example is when we are informed that Qumran was “destroyed” and “obliterated” in 68 CE. That was once thought to be the case, but in fact, as those who keep up with the specialized literature know, the site seems to have been seized and reoccupied by a Roman garrison soon after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

All the false statements, inaccuracies, and omissions of inconvenient alternate theories seem aimed at supporting the idea that some sect, whether Essenes or another unnamed sect, wrote the Scrolls. One wall-text thus explains that four inkwells were found in the ruins of Qumran, and suggests that this is “possible evidence that scribes there wrote with ink.” But there are other much more probable explanations for the existence of a couple of inkwells at the site including the presence here of a Roman garrison, and these explanations go unmentioned.

In what seems like an effort to fool people into thinking the inkwells are important (and maybe that Golb’s Jerusalem theory is unimportant) the curator writes that “Few people could write in ancient times, and inkwells are rarely found in archeological sites... Most people were barely literate.” This is a foolish statement, since inkwells have been found in many excavations in Palestine and Jordan, including six of them in a single place in an ordinary site near Jerusalem. And this is not surprising because ancient Jewish law required parents to teach their children to read and write — a fact Dr. Kohn again simply doesn’t mention.

Even worse, the famous, unique Copper Scroll (with writing inscribed in the copper) is not mentioned, and this omission is a scandal, since research on this document has shown it contains a list of scrolls and treasures, probably from the Jerusalem Temple and hidden all over the desert, again supporting the idea that the Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden away from the Romans during the siege of Jerusalem.

A section of the exhibit is devoted to Masada, and here visitors are not informed that scrolls were found at Masada that are similar and sometimes identical to the ones found at Qumran—and everyone knows the defenders of Masada came (with their scrolls and other belongings) from Jerusalem.

The exhibit also includes a brief description of phylacteries (or tefilin, leather boxes containing prayers that Jewish men traditionally strap to their arms and heads when praying) found together with the Scrolls in the caves near Qumran, but visitors aren’t told that one reason (along with the Copper Scroll, the scrolls found at Masada, the basic archaeological evidence, and many other factors) more and more scholars no longer accept the old Essene theory is that the many boxes discovered contain different textual contents, making the idea that a single sect owned them something going against basic common sense.

At another point in the exhibit, we’re treated to a quote of the Roman author Pliny’s famous description of the “solitary tribe of the Essenes…with only palm trees for company,” together with the comment that “Two thousand years ago, Qumran was likely surrounded by palm groves, and dates were probably the main crop.” The connection being implied here, between the Essenes, the site at Qumran, and thus the Scrolls, resembles the argument that “All men are reasonable; Jacob is reasonable; therefore Jacob is a man.” (The curator’s “therefore” is merely implicit.) Why aren’t visitors informed, for example, that Pliny describes his “solitary tribe” as consisting of celibate men, but that graves of women and children were found in the cemetery at Qumran? Instead, we learn that the site’s inhabitants “ate simple meals,” something the exhibitors clearly consider to be very important.

By the same token, we learn that “for many,” the discovery of a thousand dishes at Qumran is “evidence of communal dining,” but that “some reject the communal dining theory.” The problem here is that “many,” including Israel’s main specialist on ancient pottery, Rachel Bar Nathan, have now rejected the old communal dining theory, while “some” of America’s least respected archaeological scholars (e.g. Jodi Magness, James Strange) refuse to abandon it. Here and elsewhere the exhibit’s organizers fail to tell us who the “many” are, and who the “some.” Give us some names, please, so we can see who still supports the creaky old theory.

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The collection of books being sold in the Center’s gift shop is its own scandal. All criticism of the old theory is excluded. The works on sale include at least two books by a former local Dead Sea Scrolls star who acted as a consultant for the exhibit, and against whom longstanding charges of combined plagiarism and twisting of Professor Golb’s ideas refuse to go away. Another book being sold was co-written by Kohn herself and tries to argue that Judaism didn’t really exist until rabbinical times. Is it naive to think this amounts to a small but telling conflict of interest on the Center’s part? Is it normal for curators to sell their own publications, not directly related to the subject at hand, at exhibits they’ve designed?

So much for the things being presented, explained, and sold at the Discovery Center’s Scrolls exhibit. We shouldn’t forget that the Center is a commercial enterprise, and the exhibit has clearly been designed by its organizers for maximum commercial success, to a large extent by evoking popular Christian themes. In the process, the principle of offering visitors any real sense of the current, fractured state of scholarship on the Scrolls and the archaeology of Qumran has been cynically thrown out the window.

The contrast here with another recent Scrolls exhibit in New York, at the Jewish Museum (September 21, 2008 - January 04, 2009) couldn’t be greater. In that exhibit, the museum respected the common sense of viewers by presenting the two basic theories, Jerusalem and the Essenes, for what they are—and by simply allowing us to look at the objects, consider the theories, and make up our own minds.