(July 24) It is just half a century since the Dead Sea Scrolls were found - an event which, coming at the time of the emergence of the modern Jewish State, fired the imagination of Jew and gentile alike.
Though written by members of a sect outside the mainstream of Jewish tradition, the 2,000-year-old Isaiah scroll from Qumran was found to be identical with the Masoretic text, tangible evidence of the accuracy and staying power of the biblical word.
Other scrolls threw dramatic light on Jewish mystical thought at the time of the emergence of Christianity.
The euphoria and enthusiasm of the period were further heightened by the fact that the scrolls were first identified by Prof. Eliezer Sukenik, father of the nascent IDF's chief of operations (and later chief of staff) Yigael Yadin, himself an archeologist who was later to lead successful expeditions into the caves of the Judean desert and to Masada.
To mark the anniversary, the Israel Museum has mounted - in the entrance gallery to the Shrine of the Book - a small but fascinating exhibition of finds and texts illustrating a day in the life of the Qumran sect. And over in its design pavilion, the museum is currently presenting the story of the evolution of the unusual architectural design of the Shrine of the Book.
In the late Second Temple period (167 BCE-70 CE) society in Israel was composed at various times of Pharisees, Sadducees, Samaritans, Zealots, early Christians and Essenes, the latter living in near-monastic isolation in and around the caves at Qumran, on the north-western shores of the Dead Sea. This display is built around the daily routine of the Essenes as described in detail by Flavius Josephus and illuminated by both finds and what can be inferred from many of the sect's manuscripts and scrolls.
Another source is Philo, the great Jewish scholar/philosopher of Alexandria.
The Qumran community was something like a kibbutz of scholars. Its members lived outside the main complex of scriptorium, refectory and ritual bath, some in caves, others in tents. They put tremendous store on personal and ritual purity, and above all on study. Some of their utensils on view are of stoneware, held to be proof against ritual impurity. A mattock head was probably used to excavate and then cover a primitive toilet.
Ritual immersion was widespread among Jews of the time but at Qumran, members of the sect - and members only - ritually immersed themselves before each meal - an association with repentance and spiritual purity that recalls that of John the Baptist. The Essenes ate seated on mats (more than 1,000 eating and serving utensils were found at the site). Their diet included bread, dates, date honey, dairy products and even meat; it is thought that the young bachelors of the community hunted gazelles and ran a date farm and perhaps raised fish in the fresh water pools of Ein Fash'ha.
It appears that they also raised barley in a valley above the cliffs.
At the communal midday and evening meal they drank something called tirosh, which was either wine or unfermnented fruit juice (Tiroche is today's trade name for kosher bottled grape juice).
The sect's spiritual temple was an ideological substitute or replacement for the Temple in Jerusalem, and the communal meal served as a spiritual substitute for sacrifice. Some Essenes wrote of the day when they would wrest the Temple from the hands of the Wicked Priest.
After the communal meal, certain members would study sacred texts in an attempt to reveal divine secrets of Jewish law, history and even of the cosmos. Others were employed in the library or in the production of parchment or papyrus. Books were brought in by new members, while others were composed or copied on the spot, the sectarians working at desks with inkwells situated on the upper floor of the main building.
Most of the Qumran scrolls are on parchment. When completed, the scroll was bound with a leather thong threaded through an identification tag, ready for general study.
In this early kibbutz, the sectarians adhered to strict communal ownership of property and full sharing of labor. An ostracon recently found near the central building is apparently a deed dealing with transfer of ownership of a new member's property to the sect.
As in akibbutz, new members were on trial for a year or so and their money, if any, held in escrow. A hoard of silver coins found in the main building may have included such deposits, as well as proceeds of sales of the sect's products: home industries like pottery and weaving and production of salt and date honey, both items being in great demand.
Tefillin found at Qumran are the oldest known, but their contents are often arranged differently from the usual order; others contain additional sacred passages, like the Ten Commandments.
The morning sun was welcomed with prayers, some recalling today's form. Unlike most Jews, the sectarians had a solar calendar of 364 days divided into 12 equal months each of 30 days. At the end of each quarter, an extra day was added. A product of an earlier Jewish tradition mentioned in the Apocrypha, it resulted in the festivals at Qumran being celebrated on different days from those of the rest of the population. Yom Kippur was always observed on a Friday.
But a lunar calendar was also used and ways were found to harmonize the two.
Essential to all this was an instrument for determining the hours of the day as well as the seasons, and one such instrument, a stone sundial, is the most fascinating item among all the utensils and footwear on view. This limestone disc has three deeply engraved concentric circles with three graduated rings. It no doubt had a vertical post inserted at its center in order to calculate the height and direction of the sun.
In terms of its design, this sundial is unique. At Qumran, seasonal, not absolute, hours were employed. The length of an hour depended on the length of the day, which was divided into three watches, for a total of 12 hours. The hour was read off as the shadow of the vertical post crossed one of the three rings (the inner ring in summer, the middle ring in spring and autumn and the outer ring in winter); some 36 marks are crossed by the shadow on each ring. It appears that three marks equaled one seasonal hour, one-twelfth of daylight.
In the museum's Palevsky Design Pavilion, a new exhibition attempts to trace, in photographs, drawings and models, the course of an elaborate seven-year planning process that led to the 1965 construction of the home of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Shrine of the Book, in the grounds of the Israel Museum.
Money for the project came from the same benefactor whose foundation paid for the scrolls, Sam Gottesman, but the exhibit doesn't throw any light on how the shrine's architects, Frederic Kiesler and Armand Bartos, came to be chosen, as early as 1955. In fact, Gottesman's daughter was at the time married to Bartos, and Gottesman had earlier put up the money for a planning project to see if Kiesler's Endless House could be erected at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
It seems inevitable that the shrine's donor also selected the architects.
The shrine was originally intended for a site on the Hebrew University's Givat Ram campus, adjoining the National Library. An initial meeting between the architects and the late Prof. Benjamin Mazar took place in 1957, but the university's architects objected to the proposal and Israeli architects in general were piqued that the project had been allocated to outsiders with family connections. They were fond of pointing out that Kiesler, though famed as an avant-garde stage designer and sometime associate professor, with a license to practice in New York, had never completed his architectural studies in Vienna and Berlin and hadn't a single building to his credit.
Born in Czernowitz in 1890, Kiesler had once been included in the De Stijl group. In 1926 he was invited to design the International Theater Exposition in New York and stayed there for the rest of his life. Between 1934 to 1957 he was director of scenic design at the Juilliard School of Music. In 1956 he went into a formal partnership with Bartos that lasted until 1962. Among their projects was the World House Gallery in Manhattan's Carlyle Hotel. After that Kiesler devoted much of his time to design criticism, to his own sculpting and painting, and to lecturing at Columbia University. In 1964 he was given a solo show at the Guggenheim and over the past decade he has been the subject of a number of international exhibitions.
Bartos, born in New York in 1910, obtained his master's degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1935 and served in the US Navy during the war before opening his own firm in New York. One of his notable buildings there is the library of Yeshiva University, but he also has a number of scientific buildings to his credit. Retired since 1982, he is still the president of the Aspen Center for Contemporary Art.
The flamboyant Kiesler and the eminently practical Bartos were probably an ideal partnership. Bartos has helped throw considerable light on the alleged symbolism of the Shrine of the Book, though he and Kiesler definitely wished to create a ceremonial space to express the idea of rebirth, relating the discovery of the scrolls to the establishment of the state.
The corridor entrance leading from a sunken plaza to the interior cavern has a womb and birth-canal relationship. The elegantly formed white dome of the structure, cooled and "purified" by fountains, was at once compared with the lids of Qumran storage jars, while the white color contrasted with the huge and dramatic black wall abutting the plaza was held to be symbolic of the Wars of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, the title of one of the apocalyptic scrolls.
Bartos reveals that the symbolism came later. The wall was conceived primarily as a way of enclosing the environment, echoing the role of the National Library as an anchor. The last thing the architects wanted was to have the main structure isolated in an open space.
Altogether, demystification is one of the aims of this show. The shrine has become part of the Jerusalem landscape, a familiar but unique landmark, one that sits well in its site and invites an almost ceremonial, processional entrance. It is by now impossible to imagine the museum without it.
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