A Review – The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS WERE DISCOVERED IN 1947. They were found in caves in ancient Palestine, especially at Qumran. They immediately were placed under the control of an elite and secretive clique and only selected ones were allowed published and interpreted.
In the autumn of 1991, this monopoly was broken when the Huntington Library in California announced they would allow public access to the collection of Scrolls they possessed. Always it was maintained that there was nothing interesting in these scrolls. Nothing that would throw any light on the rise of Christianity there in old Palestine. As expected, certain people rushed to the library and declared the same message. The Professor Eiseman, who is Professor of Middle East Religions at California State University, and Professor Wise, an Assistant Professor of Aramaic language at the University of Chicago, decided to challenge the status quo and they prepared the book ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered,’ which covers 50 of these key documents which have been withheld from the public for over 35 years. Both of these men have studied scrolls and written other books on this same subject. And I noticed from their writings that after all they have discovered, they still write as though the Palestine people at that time must have been all Jews. Although they do mention other people at certain times. Perhaps they do this so that they can get the book published as we have discovered at other times.
This book was published just last year in 1992, in England, and then in the United States, and by January of 1993, they are telling us it will soon be out of print, for someone is trying to shut down those printing presses. Wonder why?
This review may seem sort of uninteresting to some of you, but I believe it will be a good review for your library. Therefore I hope you enjoy this work.
Our authors tell us that the most important cave for our purpose of understanding was discovered in 1954 in Cave 4, after the partitioning of Palestine, and its content then went into the Jordanian controlled Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem, while the content of Cave 1 had gone into an Israeli controlled museum in West Jerusalem, the Israeli Museum.