Sunday: Treasure in Earthen Vessels

I went to Qumran yesterday. South of Jerusalem along the western shore of the Dead Sea stands the rubbled remains of stone walls that mark out rooms and walkways. Disputed scholarly opinion holds that this complex formed the home of a group of Jewish ascetics who schlepped out to the desert to live their sectarian vision of Judaism.

Signs along the paths indicated the location of a pottery, a kitchen, store-rooms and other necessary features. These rooms showed how the occupants lived. But one room in particular speaks to why they lived: Scholars posit the presence of a large scriptorium, a room for copying documents, on the second floor of one building. Majority opinion holds it was here that these people copied out the most famous set of books in all of biblical scholarship: The Dead Sea Scrolls.

A short jog down the trail brings one to the edge of an arroyo. Looking across, the visitor can see a smattering of holes that punch into the cliff-faces on the opposite side. A famous story recounts how a trio of Bedouin shepherds, chasing stray goats, began chunking rocks into these perforations - perhaps to locate their missing animals, perhaps out of frustration, perhaps for kicks. One boy heard the the distinct clink of pottery as the stone shivered it. They investigated and found tall clay jars stuffed with scrolls. Excavations ultimately revealed documents in several of the caves including whole or fragment copies of every Old Testament text but Esther.

(By the way, nobody knows why Esther didn't make the cut. Named after a chick so this boys-only club passed on it? Perhaps, but Ruth got in. Maybe because it never mentions the name of God and is set on foreign soil.)

This find pushed Old Testament textual criticism back centuries toward the original documents. Contrary to what many scholars expected, these far-older texts revealed no major changes from the Bible as we already had it. This was an exciting fact for everyone except the King James Only crowd, who presumably thought the whole thing a waste of time.

As I stood and stared across the draw at Cave Four where most of the pots rested, I tried to get in touch with what had happened there. I thought of this group of mentally and spiritually tough individuals who trekked out here to seek God through communal life, prayer, and the study of Scripture. Finally (so the theory holds) they bugged out one step ahead of the Roman army as it marched south in 68 CE to punish the Jewish rebellion. Before they high-tailed it (maybe down to Masada to join the rebels there; nobody knows), they stuffed and sealed their first century Tupperware and packed it away in the nearby grottos. They took care to preserve the thing that mattered to them most.

Not surprisingly, I thought of that verse, so beloved of both Christians and Jews, from Psalm 119.11, "Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against thee." "We have," so goes Paul's outrageous claim about the Gospel, "this treasure in earthen vessels." (1 Cor 4.7) I wonder if somewhere, deep inside me where neither marauding Romans nor meandering goats can get at it, lies the text of the Bible. Have I, in the high desert of my soul's solitude, inked the Word of the Lord onto the living leather of my being? Could it be, if the Lord stays His coming, that when nobody can remember or even decipher who I was or what I did or why I did it, they will find an unmistakable and unmarred witness to God's Word? And if someone had to recover the Bible based on the text of my life, would they find it a faithfully copied witness to the original?

I pray today for God's grace to fill the hollow places of my inner landscape, the gaps and wounds that experience and sorrow have stabbed into the rocky surface of my heart, with the faithful memory and living witness of the very words of God.