Burial of Scrolls in the Cemetery

       Importantly, there is a possibility that some scrolls were buried not in the natural limestone caves in the hills behind Qumran, but in the cemetery itself. In 1856 Henry Poole visited Qumran, and had one of the graves of the cemetery opened. Poole noted the measurements carefully (6 ft. long and 3 ft. wide, 4 ft. 10 ins. deep) and its design (“it was built up on all four sides with rough stones and square corners”). But, in this grave there was apparently no loculus for a human body, and - mysteriously - as Poole recorded: “there were no osseous remains traceable.”[67] Henry Poole had excavated an empty tomb.

       Poole was not the only one to dig in the cemetery to find no skeletal material. In 1951, de Vaux excavated a curious stone circle, located in the middle of the east-west transversal path in the cemetery, recorded in the plan made by Clermont-Ganneau in 1873 (Figure 10).[68] At the southern end there was a small wall of two rows of stones. At the northern end, the walls had crumbled into the pit, which was only about 75 cm. deep. At the bottom, he found only stones and an earth surface.[69] Then Solomon Steckoll excavated eleven graves, but the first one contained no skeletal material.[70] Steckoll realised there was a peculiarity in the cemetery. He writes:

However, not the least of the problems which remained to be unravelled, is the presence of what appear to be graves on the surface, carefully marked with stones, albeit smaller stones than those found in the main cemetery as markers on the tombs, in that area lying between the cemetery proper and the building of the Community. There are a number of these, all falling within a distance which is less than fifty cubits from the building.

Steckoll notes that in the Mishnah (Baba Bathra 2: 9; cf. b.Baba Bathra 25a) there is a strict prohibition against anyone burying corpses within fifty cubits (Steckoll estimates 22.352 m.) of a town. Steckoll’s first grave, containing no corpse, was within the fifty-cubit range of the building. At a loss for any explanation, Steckoll identified the graves within this zone as halting places where a funeral party would stop and say prayers (m.Baba Bathra 6: 7).[71]

       But in the examination of the Qumran cemetery made by remote sensing published by Hanan Eshel et al. in Dead Sea Discoveries in 2002, a total of 28 graves - like the one Steckoll excavated - were identified within about 22 m. of the buildings, up to a distance of only 10 m. from the buildings, though these are not visible any longer on the surface (see Figure 11).[72] These were clustered close to the eastern (cemetery) entrance. If these cavities had been used for corpses then this would mean that the people who occupied the buildings were less scrupulous about purity than the rabbis who set down the Mishnah. However, if these graves were used for manuscripts or other items, then the proximity of such burials to the buildings would not be a problem for purity. In fact, the nearest attested corpse-yielding grave is about 40 m. away from the buildings, meaning the Qumran people may well have had a stricter notion of the distance between burials of human corpses and habitations than became normative in rabbinic Judaism, though only proper examination of the cemetery could provide confirmation of this.

       The evidence for “empty graves” outside the range of 22 m. from the buildings and workshop areas - within the main cemeteries - is also apparent. In the excavations conducted by Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg from 1993 to 2004, a total of nine graves were excavated at the southern end of the regimented rows. Four out of the nine were empty, with no bones. Four contained bones of adults (from 25 to 60 years old), and one had a wooden coffin. In two of the graves without bones, fourteen jars sealed with lids came to light, with some kind of residue identified as date honey by initial tests, the jars themselves being dated to the first century B.C.E. [73] Magen and Peleg suggest that the burial of these pots indicates that they were contaminated with corpse impurity (Num. 19: 11-16, cf. Lev. 11: 33-34), requiring special treatment. Whatever the interpretation, this evidence indicates that the occupants of Qumran were burying materials other than bodies in the cemetery.

       In all the cases of empty tombs, something was buried in the cemetery that had totally decomposed, as flesh and much of the coffin wood in the graves also had decomposed. The conditions of preservation in the soil of the Qumran cemetery are not the same as in the caves. Hydrochemical analysis has revealed that the briny subterranean aquifer was much higher than today and – as Olav Röhrer-Ertl states – “the cemetery, and the esplanade, were exposed to infusions of salty and bitter aquifer water over a long period of time.”[74] This would not have enabled many organic materials to survive. In the cemetery, some coffin wood was found (for example in T18), but mostly it is either very decomposed into brown powder or worm-eaten (T17, T19).[75] Excavation may yet tell whether any “empty tombs” have fragments remaining of what was buried inside them. The rabbis defined various items, other than human corpses, that should be buried (b.Tem. 33b-34a); books were only one such item.

       Sacred manuscripts continue to be buried to this day. Therefore it seems possible that manuscripts were buried in the Qumran cemetery. If so, why would some manuscripts go into jars and topped with covers, in remote, sealed caves, while others might go into the graveyard? Perhaps some sorting took place, so that only shemot - especially biblical manuscripts - were placed in jars in preservation-burials, and other texts not worth preserving were placed in the cemetery. Only further investigation and testing of soil samples could tell us more.

The Marl Caves - a Genizah?

       We then return to the caves 4Q-5Q, 7Q-10Q. If the natural caves comprise not a genizah but the final resting place of buried manuscripts, might the very different artificially-created marl caves have been the temporary store? As noted above, they are part of the habitation region of the Qumran settlement, which was separated from the cemetery area by a long wall. They are ventilated and open, and include a more diverse range of pottery than any natural caves. Typologically, they cannot therefore be considered a burial area, but Cave 4Q contained in the fill small fragments of over 500 manuscripts, Cave 5Q had fifteen, Cave 7Q nineteen (largely found on the entrance stairway) and Cave 8Q five - with about 100 leather strips used for binding scrolls - while Cave 9Q had only one papyrus fragment and Cave 10Q an inscribed ostracon. There were hole-mouthed jars and lids found in Caves 7Q and 8Q, though these caves were partly collapsed and much of the contents would have been lost. As Hanan Eshel and Magen Broshi have proven, the artificial marl terrace caves where scroll fragments were discovered are paralleled by other artificial marl terrace caves north of the site in which evidence of human occupation from the Second Temple period has been found. 4Q-5Q, 7Q-10Q were at least in part inhabited as residential zones and/or workshops, with other likely inhabited caves located nearby, in caves that have now collapsed.[76] Curiously, cave 5Q also contained large animal bones.

       Were these hiding places? Could the people of Qumran have quickly hidden manuscripts here? In fact, the marl terrace caves are not good hiding places, since they are easily visible from both the plateau and from below. They were not noticed by archaeologists only because their entrances had collapsed over time. However, it is possible that the occupants of Qumran managed to save some of their manuscripts from out of the buildings, just ahead of the Roman burning of the buildings in 68 CE, by quickly taking them and throwing them into the marl caves.[77] In this case, the only rapid hiding scenario at Qumran would have been here, and very much an immediate - panic-stricken - activity, with the Roman army proximate.

       There may have been shelves in cave 4Qa that were then taken out in Period III, since there are holes in the walls of the cave which may have been used to support rough shelving. At any rate, the manuscripts were scattered on the cave floor at some point and no remnants of shelves have been found. Hannah Cotton and Erik Larson are not convinced of the common assumption that the scrolls were torn up in antiquity, which would account for their poor state.[78] Rather the supposed “tears” are due to “natural processes of deterioration” found also in such texts as 1QM, 1QHa, 11QPsa and 11QT. In the case of the manuscript 4Q365, often wrongly used to illustrate tearing, the breaks are along “natural creases or ‘fault lines’ in the manuscript skin that developed as it lay in the cave.”[79] This identification of the disordered state and natural decomposition of the manuscripts lying on the floor of the cave was already noted by Frank Moore Cross.[80] In other words, all we really know about the manuscripts of the artificial caves is that they were simply lying there on the floor, left to weather the centuries. Over time, they disintegrated. They were not processed for preservation. They were not left in a neat state.

       The separation of the scrolls from the buildings of Qumran in Cave 4Q may also indicate the mentality of a genizah, prior to the burial of the shemot, the texts potentially containing the name of God. It was important to separate them out in some way, even when there were only a few of these items; in Masada, copies of Deuteronomy and Ezekiel were found under the floor of the synagogue, but in general in ancient synagogues genizot within the building are small stores for coins, in the form of a depression in the floor near the Torah shrine, or in a cavity of some kind, as we see in the synagogues of Nabratein, Gush Halav, Kazrin, Hammath Tiberias and Beth Alpha.[81]

       Because they contain the name of God, shemot are not normal artefacts. In rabbinic literature holy books render the hands unclean, though “Sadducees” took the opposite line (m.Yad. 4: 5-6): presumably, to them, scripture was ultra-pure, even transferring holiness. There is no clue within the scrolls as to how this was ruled on for those who wrote these texts, but absence of discussion about scripture defiling the hands, when purity in general is so important, tends to indicate a “Sadducee” approach.[82] Whatever the case, such concepts are dynamic and reflective of the fact that the sacred was to be treated in a special way. The very holiness of the divine name on the manuscripts caused impurity of the hands as a result of this intrinsic quality: the manuscripts are themselves actually pure and sacred for their having the name of God on them, and should be stored in pure space, which would be appropriate also for pure food and drink. At any rate, a separate store for such items is exactly what a genizah is. A separate store for manuscripts that are destined to be buried might well be what we would expect within the occupation zone.

       However, the collection of scrolls in Cave 4Q, and associated artificial caves, cannot have been designed for long-term storage. Some corroborating evidence that this area of the site was linked to scroll processing for preservation-burial comes from the curious evidence of many pieces of fine leather straps and tongues for binding scrolls in Cave 8Q, as well as remains of fabric and thread.[83] Only 7Q and 8Q contained jars and lids, though much of the contents of these damaged caves have been lost when they collapsed into the Wadi Qumran.

       If this processing took place close to cave cluster 7Q-9Q then manuscripts would have been taken up from the marl terrace caves, and then wrapped with linen and warm pliable bitumen (in a mixture), before being placed in jars and carried off for burial to a cave further away. If so, the processing area would have been close to these caves on the plateau itself. The recent excavations by Randall Price have brought to light bitumen deposits precisely in this vicinity, above Caves 7Q to 9Q.[84] That bitumen was not melted inside the buildings is no wonder. Bubbling bitumen and fires would have had to be carefully managed, and the fumes would have been pungent. It would have been much more practical to work with this material on the site of Qumran than in the caves.

       A store of even large numbers of manuscripts in Cave 4Q would have been intended as temporary. It was not a repository that was built up over time; Cave 4Q was not a final destination. A genizah was not supposed to be that. The manuscripts remain in this cave simply because their processing was interrupted by the destruction of the site in 68 C.E.