Hi everyone! As promised, here is today’s second podcast episode.
I have recently been engaged in an online discourse that has emerged around the “Great Isaiah Scroll” — 1QIsaa — from a collection of ancient documents discovered in the 1940s called the Dead Sea Scrolls.
One question that has not been very comprehensively addressed in all that is this: what exactly are the “Dead Sea Scrolls”? What do they contain? What did their discovery reveal about the Bible?
In this episode, I’m joined by Kipp Davis, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, and Dead Sea Scrolls specialist.
We talk about the history and content of the scrolls, including their accidental discovery by a Bedouin shepherd boy searching for a lost goat. We discuss whether the Book of Isaiah was originally written in two separate parts, and look at the manuscript evidence towards this conclusion.
We explore the history of forgery in the story of the scrolls — including the 16 fake fragments fraudulently sold to the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., which were on display at the museum’s opening in 2017 — and the ethics and risks of the private antiquities market.
Hopefully this episode provides a helpful introduction to and overview of this fascinating set of texts.
