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00:00The Lone Ranger
00:30A synagogue roll must be written on the skins of clean animals, prepared for the particular
00:57use of the synagogue by a Jew.
01:00Every skin must contain a certain number of columns, equal throughout the entire book.
01:06The whole copy must be first lined, and if three words be written in it without a line,
01:12it is worthless.
01:14The ink should be black, neither red, green, or any other color, and be prepared according
01:20to a definite recipe.
01:23An authentic copy must be the example of the most...
01:25Writings and civilization began at the same time, about 5,000 years ago.
01:31And some of these first writings were so powerful that they still influence us today through
01:37the books of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible.
01:45Now this great book wasn't just written out by a few holy men in ancient Israel, by Moses
01:50and Isaiah and all the rest of them.
01:54It developed slowly, almost anonymously, and its character was formed in times of terrible
02:00national disaster.
02:02To the ancient Israelites, their Bible offered remedies, comfort, and sometimes even a glimpse
02:13of God himself.
02:14It was a Jewish story about a lot of rabbis who were having a noisy argument about a point of holy law.
02:20One side of the argument was one rabbi, on the other a great heaving mass of them all trying to shout him down.
02:26So the single rabbi who knew he was right, decided to call on God, and he said, God, if I am right, may the trees that stand
02:32around us bend to the ground, and miraculously all the trees bend to the ground, and still they shouted at him.
02:38So he called on God again, and he said, God, if I am right, may a heavenly wind blow through this assembly.
02:44And a great wind went through the assembly, but he didn't stop the rabbis.
02:48So in exasperation, the lonely rabbi called on God, and he said, God, if I am right, send me a sign directly.
02:54And a great voice boomed out from heaven, this man is right.
02:59And the noisy rabbis didn't stop.
03:01They told God to shut up, because they had the real word of the Lord written down,
03:07and tablets, Moses, Mount Sinai, they had a written text.
03:11It shows, I think, two things.
03:13The incredible tenacious scholarship of the rabbis, and the veneration they accorded the written word.
03:19It stands, and has always stood at the heart of Judaism,
03:22and it stands at the heart of every synagogue, too.
03:29Protected by curtains, and doors, the holy law.
03:38Still written on vellum scrolls, handmade, handwritten by scribes,
03:43exactly as texts were thousands upon thousands of years ago.
03:52The texts of the Hebrew Bible go back two, three, four, perhaps even 5,000 years.
04:03But they reach their final form, the shape in which we have them today,
04:08between two distinctive events.
04:11One, the Babylonian exile of the Jews,
04:14and the other one was the destruction of Jerusalem itself by the Romans.
04:21Jerusalem is the city of the Old Testament.
04:25It was King David's city.
04:27It was the heart of ancient Israel,
04:29and the far away home that the exiled prophets saw in their mind's eye,
04:34as they sat writing by the waters of Babylon.
04:38Even when the Jews had spread right throughout the ancient world,
04:41Jerusalem, with its great temple and its priests,
04:44stood at the centre of the faith.
04:46All around the eastern hills of Jerusalem,
04:59the dead are lying waiting for the Last Judgement.
05:04Jews, Christians, Muslims alike,
05:06were all expecting, as so tradition goes,
05:09for the Lord to appear in that blocked-up gate over there
05:13and deliver the judgment.
05:15I suppose over all of old Jerusalem,
05:17there's a terrible stillness,
05:19a terrible feeling of waiting.
05:22I think it's a feeling that was born in exile,
05:25particularly the exile of the Jews in Babylon 600 years before Christ.
05:30It was the Persians who let them come back.
05:32They were there for about two generations.
05:34When they started to come back,
05:36they were very different people
05:38to the ones that had left Jerusalem 40, 50 years before.
05:41The leader of the first party actually had a pagan name,
05:44Zerubabel, the seed of Babylon.
05:47And he it was who started to rebuild the temple here.
05:49There was a rebirth of nationalism.
05:51The next generations of people had old Israelite names,
05:55Ezra, Nehemiah, people like that.
05:57So there was a difference.
05:59Now there was an understanding of history
06:01that had never been before.
06:03In fact, Judeans had left, but Jews had come back.
06:08The word was invented in Babylon.
06:11The Old Testament says that Ezra and Nehemiah,
06:15two prominent Jews of Babylon,
06:17went to Jerusalem at about a time that we would call 450 BC.
06:22Then it is said Nehemiah had found the walls of the city so weak
06:27that foxes were jumping over them and knocking them down.
06:30And so he set the local population to rebuilding them.
06:36They were also building at that time something yet more precious,
06:40the Bible itself.
06:42It's very, very difficult to find out what was going on.
06:45Nehemiah's not in these walls, he's in this book,
06:47and that's all there is.
06:49So we have to rely on what the book itself tells us about its own history.
06:54And that's rather interesting for this period, this vital period.
06:58Ezra, it said, gathered all the people of Jerusalem around him
07:03when he got here and read out the law to them.
07:05He read it out like a riot act, actually,
07:07because they were doing things they weren't supposed to do.
07:09Now, what was this holy law?
07:11It was obviously something written down,
07:12and it seems to have been something written down by Ezra himself,
07:15because the Bible tells us again in another bit
07:19that Ezra received the light of understanding from Jehovah
07:22and dictated the holy writings to the scribes.
07:26Now, that seems to put you in mind of somebody actually writing down
07:31a whole lot of verbal material,
07:33stuff remembered by priests over hundreds of years.
07:36But there must have been writing earlier.
07:38Obviously, Israel was quite a literate society,
07:41and there is one little memory in this Bible
07:44of a very ancient writing.
07:46In the 6th century BC, one of King Josiah's priests
07:49finds the holy scriptures lying around in the temple.
07:52So there you are.
07:53There is a sacred book of some description or other
07:56from the 6th century.
07:58That's as old as we can go, I'm afraid.
08:00There's no earlier mentions at all.
08:08In the time of Ezra and Nehemiah,
08:10the Jews were becoming a truly international people.
08:15Excavations here at the island of Elephantini on the Egyptian Nile
08:20have uncovered the remains of one of these far-flung Jewish communities.
08:25What is especially fascinating is that Judaism here
08:30was in many ways quite different from that of Ezra's at Jerusalem.
08:34At places like this, you can start to dig up a part of the real world of ancient Judaism,
08:43as it existed outside the pages of the Bible.
08:47And this, at precisely the same time as many of the Bible's books were being written.
08:53This is the vast old enclosure wall of the temple of the god Khnoum.
08:59And in the 5th century BC, in the Persian period, just behind it,
09:04in fact just over here, were little houses.
09:08And these houses seem to have been of the Jewish community,
09:13because in one of them was found a really remarkable lot of letters.
09:18And these letters are really important for the history of the Bible,
09:20because they show us a picture of a Judaism, a pious Judaism,
09:24which is very, very different from the Judaism of Ezra in Jerusalem.
09:29Now, this Jehovah here was worshipped in a small temple,
09:32in a little building of sandstone and gold,
09:35and there were other gods in there as well,
09:37perhaps local Egyptian gods that came in as well.
09:39Now, the Jewish community turned up in this temple,
09:41and they sung biblical psalms in it.
09:43But they intermarried freely with the local population,
09:46and they broke the Jewish law in many other ways,
09:48at least the orthodox Jerusalem law.
09:51All these different sorts of Judaism had an influence on the Bible,
09:56but Ezra's would be the most important.
09:59The Jehovah which Ezra had in mind
10:01was one which had given out holy laws,
10:05and the priests around Ezra
10:07were the people who kept and held these holy laws.
10:10This is a god that you can actually interact with in a positive way.
10:14You can go along and you can say,
10:15I will do this and this and this,
10:17I will give this at the temple,
10:18I will listen to the priest, he will tell me this secret,
10:20and you get a god who is doing things in direct.
10:25Alliance with you, you are in alliance with God,
10:28you actually can affect your own destiny.
10:32This idea of man working, actively affecting his own destiny,
10:36as an individual, was hardly unique to Ezra,
10:42or the returning Jews at Jerusalem.
10:45The Greeks, for example, had been working in the Middle East,
10:49going all through the ancient towns, visiting the ancient temples,
10:52discovering, rediscovering sometimes,
10:54the most ancient history of the gods.
10:57Making, if you like, stories up about the gods and about men too.
11:02They too believed that men could influence their own destiny.
11:06But unlike the Jews, they believed that they could influence their destiny
11:10by politics and war.
11:12And that was an idea which would run through the world like fire.
11:17The
11:20The
11:23The
11:27The
11:28The
11:30In the 4th century BC, the new Greek ideas were forced into the ancient East by Alexander
11:57the Great, who conquered everywhere from Greece to Persia. Wherever Alexander and his armies
12:04went, they founded cities, large Greek trading cities that lasted for six and seven hundred
12:11years and more. Their style, International Greek, is known today as Hellenism, and it
12:19affected everything from the city's buildings to the people's language, and indeed the very
12:24gods themselves. Alexander's Hellenistic cities held a lifestyle in them that Abraham and
12:31Moses couldn't have dreamt of. This new way of life would change the Jews, the Bible, and
12:38even their vision of God. How exciting it must have been to live in sparkling cities like Ephesus.
12:45Can you imagine what it would have been like visiting a town like this? You'd have come
12:52round the headland in your boat, and there in the cliffs would have been this great sparkling
12:56city, full of promise really. Sort of like an international airport. You'd have come ashore,
13:03walked up the main street, the first lighted street in the whole world. You'd have found
13:07shops, baths, theatres, brothels, everything. An extraordinary environment. You'd have found
13:14people too from all over the world, from France, from England. You might have even found a Buddhist
13:19monk here from India, preaching. St Paul, of course, lived in this city for three years.
13:26And in return, Ephesus exported the goods of Asia Minor. Gold, wheat, wine, pearls, glass,
13:34all sorts of things. Anything that would make money. Money, of course, had been invented a little
13:39way down the road, just a few hundred years before Ephesus. So there was the whole set-up,
13:45the whole international trade set-up. And out at sea, in Delos, in a good year, some 10,000 head
13:51of slaves went through the slave market. Now, it was those slaves that actually created
13:56the surplus of wealth in towns like this. The surplus that was gained from trading. Most
14:01of the people lived here lived off the land and lived from it, too. The little bit of money
14:05that those slaves generated generated all these palaces, because these were put up mainly
14:09by private people, these great villas and all the temples and things around. It's the sort
14:13of town, of course, that we in the West are used to, you might say. Look at the tourists here.
14:18They walk around, they lounge around, they're quite happy in this town. These squares and
14:22streets hold the same spaces in them that modern towns do. Unlike ancient Eastern cities,
14:27these Hellenistic cities were open, impious, convenient, man-centred. The first modern cities
14:35in the world. And from Egypt to Asia Minor, the Jewish communities in these cities were a
14:41major element of their life, filling every position in society, from merchant princes to day labourers,
14:48from slaves to slave masters.
14:54Perhaps the greatest invention of the Jews in these Hellenistic cities was the synagogue. Synagogue itself
15:02is a Greek word. There's no Hebrew equivalent. It means meeting house. Now, the first records
15:09we have were about the second century BC. There are already hundreds of them then. This one,
15:14which is really the finest that's survived since antiquity. It's a lot later than that. It's a
15:20magnificent building. It's because it's in the city of Sardis. Sardis was a great trading city. It was at the end
15:26of a long road from Asia Minor to Persia. Those lorries are still roaring up and down a new road
15:31built on top of it. That's where the Jews of Sardis got their wealth to build this
15:36splendid building.
15:42So these Jewish meeting houses, they were used for a variety of purposes.
15:48But the single most important thing that went on in these synagogues was the study of the law
15:54and the reading of the holy books. The law, of course, was the very heart of Judaism.
16:00Its observance, its strict observance, was what kept the whole community and the idea of
16:06Judaism together. And never did it need to be studied with such care as in these Hellenistic cities.
16:12Because everywhere the Jews went, they walked on a knife edge. On the knife edge of breaking the holy covenants.
16:21I mean, it's a million examples I could pick. Take a couple of the Ten Commandments.
16:26You shan't have any graven images. Well, Hellenistic cities are full of graven images.
16:31They're full of statues. Every little pillar top might have a little face in it or anything like that.
16:36The very money in your pocket has been stamped with a graven image. What do you do about it?
16:40Do you carry money? Are you allowed to touch it? Is it clean?
16:43How near can you go to statues? Can you walk under colonnades?
16:46All these questions concerning the law, these ancient laws,
16:49which were suddenly brought into high relief in these new cities.
16:59This is style. You know, this is Greek culture as a style.
17:03And it's a very important thing in the story of the Bible.
17:06Everybody wanted to be Greek.
17:09And, of course, the Jews in these cities wanted to join in that too.
17:12There were Jews living in these cities hundreds of years before this library was born
17:16who were already only speaking Greek, who were thinking in Greek ways.
17:19They changed their name to Greek names.
17:21Simon was a very popular name.
17:23It was a sort of adaption of the old Hebrew Shimon.
17:26And, of course, you'd expect the great Hebrew holy text, our Old Testament,
17:32to be translated into this new language for this new sort of Jewish person.
17:36There's a lovely legend about it.
17:38The story is that in Alexandria in Egypt in the second century before Christ,
17:4372 scholars were engaged to translate the holy scriptures.
17:47They were put on a sandbank in the sea outside the city in little huts.
17:51And they all sat down, and they wrote out the holy Hebrew scriptures,
17:54and by the grace of God, each one of their translations was the same as the other.
17:59The translation is called the Septuagint, so there were 72 of these scribes,
18:04six for each of the twelve tribes of Israel.
18:06So now, lots of Jewish people only read their sacred books in Greek,
18:14but great numbers of them disapproved of the translation.
18:18They suddenly realised that their heroes, Abraham, Isaac,
18:21and all those other founding fathers,
18:23according to the lights and virtues of Hellenism,
18:25have been rather funny people.
18:27Cheats, sheep-stealers, robbers, liars, thieves, butchers of guests.
18:31It looked bad.
18:32Suddenly the Jewish culture had been exposed to what was really important
18:35to what was really the desire, the dream of everybody,
18:38and it didn't look too good.
18:40There's a desire to join this wondrous new culture and all its riches,
18:43and at the same time there's a sort of tension
18:46that you don't want to lose your Jewishness.
18:55Greekness, that single essential requirement in Hellenism,
19:01wasn't just an attitude of mind, a way of thought, a way of talking.
19:07It was also actually a way of being.
19:09It was body as well as mind.
19:11In places like this, there were dozens and dozens of statues
19:16of marble athletes.
19:18It's a particular sort of a body image,
19:21which I suppose is, you know, come down with us today,
19:24even a dear old Rambo.
19:28Here they all are then,
19:29and if you didn't join them down the gymnasium,
19:31you'd never become a man of substance and position
19:34in Hellenistic society.
19:40Yet for Jews to enter places like this,
19:42there are a certain number of problems.
19:44Let's pretend a young Jewish chap has said,
19:48oh, yeah, forget it all,
19:49I'll buy myself a nice dazwa toga
19:51and go off and join the lads.
19:53I'm leaving the race behind me.
19:54And he came here.
19:56A major, an individual and a personal problem would arise,
19:59because all these events here,
20:02all the training was done in the nude.
20:04And a poor old Jewish chap,
20:07who'd been circumcised when he was a lad,
20:09would have stood out like a sore thumb.
20:11Everybody would have thought,
20:13you know, who's this nouveau Johnny-come-lately
20:16wanting to join us, ha-ha.
20:18So, believe it or not,
20:19there was an extraordinary operation device
20:21called an epispasm,
20:22which consisted of actually disguising
20:24the effects of circumcision.
20:26It's an absolutely extraordinary thing.
20:28It's one of those terrible cultural distortions
20:31that is so depressing to read about
20:33in any period of history, really.
20:37On balance,
20:38inside all the stresses and strains
20:40that were going on in Judaism,
20:42it seemed that Hellenism
20:43would eventually win out.
20:44In the second century BC,
20:46it's reported that the higher priest
20:48of the Temple of Jerusalem
20:49had actually knocked off work early,
20:51that is, left the rituals of the Temple,
20:54to go and watch athletes
20:55practising in a gymnasium.
20:57Well, the sophisticates of Jerusalem
20:59were already Hellenised,
21:00but the country people
21:01and their priests were outraged,
21:03and there was a great kerfuffle about it.
21:05Not nearly such a kerfuffle as a few years later,
21:08when a Syrian Hellenistic prince
21:10actually invaded the state of Israel itself.
21:12I suppose his idea was
21:15that he would bring all the advantages of Hellenism
21:17to these barbarous people.
21:19It's amazing what he did.
21:22He actually invaded Jerusalem,
21:23he set up a pagan altar in the Temple,
21:25he forbade the reading of Hebrew Scriptures,
21:28and he forbade circumcision.
21:30Well, that was enough for the Jews.
21:32I mean, they might like Hellenism in his columns,
21:34but they weren't going that far.
21:36And in an amazing cultural convulsion,
21:38they gathered together
21:39around a dynasty of country priests
21:41called the Maccabees
21:42and threw the Syrian prince out.
21:44More than that,
21:45they actually established
21:46a holy state of Israel
21:48with the Maccabee princes as sort of kings,
21:51priest kings of the holy state of Israel.
21:54The priest kings ruled in bloody succession
22:10for a hundred years
22:12before the Romans conquered all of the Hellenistic East.
22:17And with it, Judea and Jerusalem.
22:20Generally, the Romans were always happy
22:25to rule through local client kings.
22:28Their puppet in Judea
22:30was perhaps the most infamous of all of them,
22:33King Herod the Great.
22:35Nineteen years before the birth of Christ,
22:38King Herod, wicked King Herod,
22:41issued a proclamation
22:42to the somewhat startled inhabitants of Jerusalem.
22:45A bit of it went like this.
22:48Since I am now by God's will your governor
22:51and have had peace a long time
22:53and gained great riches,
22:54and what is the main thing of all,
22:56I am very well regarded by the Romans
22:58who, if I may say, are the rulers of the whole world,
23:01I will, after the most pious manner suitable to God,
23:05render his temple as complete as I am able.
23:08Well, nobody would have believed it,
23:11but in ten years King Herod had practically rebuilt
23:16the ancient temple of Jerusalem.
23:18When Jesus walked up these steps
23:20to go through the door of the temple,
23:22he would have had to walk under a Roman eagle.
23:25And at the end of the day,
23:27the pious Jews really didn't like it.
23:30These steps, by the way,
23:32weren't just a way of getting into the temple.
23:35They were a place for the great academies of Jerusalem.
23:38This is where the rabbis came and taught their pupils.
23:41This is where the Sadducees and the Pharisees passed.
23:44It was where the monkish Essenes used to come
23:46and talk to themselves,
23:47these strange sects and tribes of Judaism.
23:50And above all, perhaps,
23:51it was where the zealots came to rouse the rabble.
23:54It was where prophets came,
23:56where messiahs like Jesus came and talked.
23:58Everybody came on these steps and talked.
24:01And in the end, that ferment, that hatred of things foreign,
24:05the hatred of the foreign image above everything,
24:07and the hatred of foreigners on the pure sacred soil of Israel,
24:11caused the explosion.
24:12The balancing act collapsed.
24:14Less than a hundred years after King Herod,
24:17his temple was absolutely swept off the face of the earth
24:20by the Roman army.
24:21Jerusalem, the golden city, was destroyed, starved,
24:30then burnt after a long siege.
24:33So not only was Jehovah's temple destroyed,
24:36but the priesthood too,
24:37and with it the heart of the ancient Jewish state.
24:40The Romans left Judea completely ruined,
24:44inhabited by a nation that had lost its centre.
24:49It was at this terrible time that the Hebrew Bible,
24:52Christianity's Old Testament,
24:54would be finally put together.
25:01You know, when history books say grand things like,
25:05the city of Jerusalem was swept from the face of the earth in 70 AD,
25:09it doesn't begin to tell you what went on in the streets, does it?
25:14Well, this little ruin here does.
25:20That over there,
25:22was the door of this part of the house.
25:24The soldiers must have come through,
25:26this room, this room, and this room,
25:28knocking things over as they went,
25:29smashing everything before they set fire to it.
25:31Bits of human body were found in here.
25:34A couple of spears, things like that.
25:36Everything smashed, destroyed.
25:38Carbonized.
25:39Look at the walls there,
25:40covered in black soot.
25:42The plaster burnt red behind.
25:44The whole place, in fact, utterly destroyed.
25:47It's interesting.
25:48This house is actually on the eastern hill,
25:51overlooking the temple.
25:52It's part of an enormous estate of the priests.
25:55The priests, in fact,
25:56who ruled the state of Judea, the Jewish people.
25:59These were rich people.
26:00These were Hellenized.
26:01Look at that table.
26:02You'll see lots of little Hellenic details.
26:06Even their name is Greek.
26:07Katharos, the house of Katharos.
26:09These were conservative, pragmatic people
26:11who'd done deals with the Romans.
26:13Josephus, the historian,
26:15had already given himself up to the Romans
26:17after fighting in Galilee in the north.
26:19And he'd cleverly made friends
26:20with the emperor Vespasian.
26:22And he actually watched the destruction of Jerusalem
26:24with the Roman army.
26:26Vespasian, Josephus tells us,
26:29was rather upset to see his new friend
26:31so worried about what had happened to his country.
26:33And he asked him if there was anything he wanted
26:35from the ruins of the city.
26:37Perhaps he wanted to cheer the old scholar up.
26:39And Josephus asked only for the holy books.
26:44He knew that there must be still fragments of them
26:47laying in the ruins of the burnt city.
26:49And he went back there and he tells us
26:51he picked them up from amongst the embers,
26:53these charred remains of the sacred texts of his race.
26:57What were they?
26:59That's an important question
27:00because these would become the fixed version
27:02of the Hebrew Bible, the Christian's Old Testament.
27:05Well, the bits that Josephus actually picked up
27:08we don't know about.
27:09But we do know what the sacred texts were in Jerusalem
27:12just before the Roman army approached.
27:14Because the people of Jerusalem went out
27:16and buried large quantities of them
27:18in the deserts of Judea to save them and their enemies.
27:22That, at any rate, seems to be the best explanation
27:26of how masses of scrolls came to be found
27:28in a lot of desert caves.
27:30Scrolls that today are half the history of the Bible.
27:35And yet they're surrounded by so many confusions and mysteries
27:39that their real importance is often difficult to see.
27:43It's obviously no accident
27:48that the world's greatest archaeological discoveries
27:51have been found in bone-dried desert caves,
27:56Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings,
27:59the world's oldest Bible books here in the Judean desert.
28:13The incredible dryness.
28:18And places like this will preserve almost anything.
28:22And these caves were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
28:26What a find it was by the Dead Sea.
28:31There were nearly a thousand documents here,
28:34written on copper, on leather, on vellum,
28:38even on fragile papyrus.
28:41Scholars at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem
28:44undertake the painstaking work of piecing together
28:47bits of ancient biblical scrolls
28:49found in a mountain cave near the Dead Sea.
28:51This parchment document was written 2,000 years ago.
28:56There were 75 copies of the books of Moses,
28:5948 of the prophets, 57 of the histories and psalms.
29:03And there were tens of thousands of loose fragments
29:05and dozens of different versions of the same texts.
29:09And even some holy texts that no one had ever seen before.
29:13For Jews and Christians alike,
29:15the Dead Sea Scrolls promised revelations, even nasty shocks.
29:20From the first days of the discovery,
29:22there were rumours that some of the scrolls
29:24would change our understanding of the Bible forever.
29:35You know, the Bible texts weren't the only things
29:39that were found in these caves.
29:41It was a wonderful scroll describing the exact locations
29:45of huge amounts of buried treasure.
29:49There was another wondrous document
29:51which actually talked about the great battle
29:54that was going to take place at the end of the world.
29:57The battle, it was said, for the sons of light and darkness.
30:02Then there were several rule books.
30:04And these seemed to be rule books of a sort of a religious order.
30:08And when these scrolls were first found,
30:10these were some of the very first texts that people started to read.
30:14And the scholars suggested immediately
30:16that it was actually a sort of a rule book
30:18of a sect of Judaism called Essenes.
30:21These mysterious Essenes will provide an alibi for many scholars
30:27who studied the Dead Sea Scrolls.
30:30If the ancient texts had been made by the members of this unusual sect,
30:35then any impieties or aberrations in them
30:38that might offend Jews or Christians
30:40could be put down to Essene oddness.
30:45Close by the caves where the first scrolls had been discovered
30:48was an insignificant ancient ruin,
30:50a lookout post apparently destroyed in an ancient war.
30:53Now the scroll scholars were filled with a great desire to dig it up.
30:57Perhaps this ruin, which was clearly connected to the caves nearby,
31:01could now also be connected with the Essenes.
31:05And so it was declared that this ancient fortress
31:08had actually been an Essene monastery
31:11and that the Dead Sea Scrolls, with all their amazing diversity,
31:14had actually been made and stored in it.
31:17I stand like a lion upon the watchtower, said the prophets.
31:22And that's what the archaeologists dug up.
31:24And it stood high above the sea, the Dead Sea,
31:27guarding the great roads that came up the side
31:30and turned off this way, off to Jericho in Jerusalem.
31:32The archaeologists found Roman arrowheads still stuck in the walls
31:36and Roman sappers too had dug underneath and destroyed the place.
31:40And this had probably happened when the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem
31:43and were on their way down the coast to wipe up the remaining Jews
31:46that had run out of the capital on the way.
31:48But still these archaeologists, these same people, thought that they dug up an Essene monastery,
31:54this strange sect they said that had probably written the Dead Sea Scrolls.
31:58Now why would they have said that?
32:00Pliny, who's the best ancient authority on the Essenes,
32:04says that the Essenes lived without women, without money,
32:07but under palm trees by the Dead Sea.
32:09Well, there's the Dead Sea.
32:11But over there is this cemetery of this little fortress
32:15and there were found women there.
32:17And here, in the so-called monastery, they have found money hidden under the floor.
32:21And as you can see for yourself, there are no palm trees.
32:24And the archaeologists proved by digging the place up
32:26they didn't find any palm tree roots either.
32:28There had been any palm trees here.
32:30So why on earth did they persist in calling this an Essene monastery?
32:33Well, I think it's mainly because of one room.
32:36And this room they called the scriptorium
32:38and they said that was where the Dead Sea Scrolls had probably been written.
32:42This, then, is the doorway of the famous Qumran scriptorium.
32:57Now, why did the excavators call this little room that?
33:01Well, they quickly found that there had been a second story on this room
33:07and that it collapsed.
33:09When it collapsed, a whole lot of plaster work had fallen down onto the floor
33:14along here somewhere.
33:16And this, when they stuck it all back together again,
33:20looked very much like a lot of benches.
33:23And then, an amazing fact,
33:26they found a lot of ancient ink wells by these benches.
33:29And the ink they discovered was exactly the same as the ink
33:32that had been used in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
33:34And then again, they found pottery.
33:37They found tons of pottery right through this place,
33:40of exactly similar type to that which was found in the caves with the scrolls.
33:44So, this room became the scriptorium.
33:48And so the masses of tourists that come through here, it still is.
33:52But the story doesn't finish there.
33:54Look.
33:56Those plaster benches turn out to be something far more peculiar
34:01and far less like benches.
34:04The ink wells, well, why shouldn't a fortress have an ink well?
34:09And you'd expect it to have ancient ink in it, wouldn't you?
34:12So that's fair enough.
34:13As for the pottery, well, that sort of pottery you can find everywhere here
34:16from Jerusalem to Thebes and Egypt is common enough for the period.
34:19So why then do you so desperately need it?
34:23Why do you need all these hundreds of monks in here writing all these versions of the Bible?
34:29An incredible and strange story given that there hasn't been one Essene object found in this entire place.
34:36It was needed because for many scholars, the Dead Sea Scrolls had to be kept at a safe distance from the centre of the ancient faith.
34:45Their very oddness needed to be isolated from Jerusalem, the centre of orthodox piety.
34:51And for that, the Essene monks provided a convenient umbrella.
34:56By the shores of the Dead Sea, down the road from Qumran, is the legendary rock of Masada.
35:09After the fall of Jerusalem, a band of Jewish warriors and their families
35:29withstood a long Roman siege here and then committed suicide.
35:34During the siege, the defenders had built themselves a small synagogue.
35:38Now, the oldest standing synagogue in the world.
35:47From the area around this synagogue, the archaeologists found some 14 scrolls and fragments of scrolls
35:55which were exactly similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran.
35:59Now, right away, this makes the whole story a lot wider, doesn't it?
36:02The question is, they've got really two alternatives to how they got here.
36:07Were these the so-called monks that lived in Qumran, who suddenly had abandoned their pacifist ideals,
36:13run away from the Romans and come up here with their scrolls to die with the gallant defenders of Masada?
36:19Or was it just the fact that the Masada people who had come from Jerusalem simply brought the scrolls with them?
36:25The difference is a very important one.
36:29Because you come back to the question, were the scrolls made in Qumran or were they made in Jerusalem?
36:34Now, there's a brilliant new theory that really substantiates this idea of them coming from Jerusalem.
36:42And it's based on the contents of one of the scrolls themselves.
36:45This one's unique. It's a copper scroll.
36:48The letter's engraved on a thin sheet of copper. They really wanted this one to last.
36:53And this one is a treasure list. It's nothing less than a list of things buried in and around Jerusalem.
36:59This one could imagine, presumably at the time the Roman army was coming down from the north,
37:03to attack and eventually destroy the city.
37:06Now, all this seems like a nice scholarly debate, isn't it?
37:10But it's very important for the history of the Bible.
37:12And it's important for this reason.
37:14If those texts come from Jerusalem, they show us the precise state of the Hebrew Bible
37:19at the very time of the ending of the Jewish state.
37:22So, if that's true, what does it mean?
37:25It means that the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, hasn't yet been gathered together.
37:29It's still lots and lots of different books and lots and lots of different versions.
37:34That means, then, there was never one single original Hebrew Bible.
37:39At the time of the ending of the Jewish state, it was still waiting to be put together.
38:04In the century after Jerusalem was destroyed, great rabbis and teachers, like Rabbi Yochanan ben Zacchae,
38:24wandered the country, being forced ever further northwards as the Roman wars engulfed more and more of the land.
38:31They taught and they preached in little synagogues like this one.
38:38They spent a lot of their time giving advice to people about the correct forms of ritual behaviour,
38:43things that earlier would have been decided by the priests in Jerusalem in verbal argument.
38:48There are hundreds of legendary stories about these rabbis.
38:52Sometimes, too, the learned academies they founded.
38:55They were great teachers, they were great disputers.
38:58They would travel distances to see each other, to have arguments, sometimes to discuss points of law,
39:04to remember, perhaps, too, the old academies they'd been at in Jerusalem.
39:08Then there were generations of students that followed them in precisely the same way.
39:12But the most important work of these rabbis, and it was the most important work,
39:17was to memorialise on paper the ritual, the records, and the whole ethos of Judaism,
39:24the Judaism that was so near to extinction.
39:27Over several generations, all the leaders of Judaism gathered together.
39:46The scholars and the rabbis from the great cities of the East, from Babylon and Alexandria.
39:51The survivors, too, are the priesthood and the schools of Old Jerusalem,
39:58all gathered now to build the sacred books into a Bible.
40:05So the first thing the scribes had to do was to sit down and make sure
40:09that the rabbis were dealing with a text that was consistent.
40:12Every line had to be the same, from one version to the other,
40:15and that was quite a thing to decide on.
40:17It's said that one little scribe, in one night, burned an extra hundred measures of oil,
40:21just preparing the book of Ezekiel for the rabbis to examine next day.
40:26The rabbis, of course, examined whole books.
40:30They had no trouble with the centre of the faith,
40:33the five books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible.
40:36They obviously had no trouble with the book of kings and the books of judges.
40:40These great books automatically could not but be included in the canon of religious texts.
40:46But there were later books that caused much more problems.
40:49The book of Esther, for example, had been written by a woman.
40:51That was a bit dodgy in itself.
40:53So they cut it in half and kicked half out and left half in.
40:56There was the book of Maccabees, which was a splendid Greek history,
41:00but didn't seem too religious, so that went out.
41:02In fact, there's quite a collection of them that went out.
41:04And funnily enough, the Christians had already included them in their Old Testament.
41:08When they discovered that the rabbis had later left them out,
41:11they sort of pushed them to one side, so they became the Christian apocrypha.
41:16But it's very difficult talking about this stuff,
41:18because you don't have any proper record of what went on.
41:21What you have is dozens and dozens of marvellous stories,
41:24especially of the rabbis that seemed to dominate the proceedings.
41:28One of these, and typical of them, was a man called Rabbi Akiva,
41:31a man considered so intelligent that Moses himself couldn't understand him.
41:36There's a wonderful story of how actually he saved the Song of Songs,
41:40that great erotic poem for our Bible.
41:43And the story goes that they were having a meeting
41:45and people were getting really worried about the Song of Songs,
41:48should this marvellous piece of literature go into a sacred volume?
41:52And Akiva, who wasn't exactly known for his liberal attitudes...
41:57I mean, when one of his parishioners came to him
41:59and said he was contemplating suicide, Akiva told him he used a strong rote.
42:04So, Akiva addressed the meeting, so the story goes, and he said,
42:09Brothers, all the sacred texts are sacred,
42:12but the Song of Songs is the most sacred of all.
42:15What he meant was, I think, that the Song of Songs,
42:18that piece of pure erotica, should be in the Bible
42:21because the Bible should represent the whole body of man
42:24from its beginning to its end,
42:26and therefore needed something like that in the middle.
42:28So it's through these legendary debates
42:31that the Bible has come down to us today,
42:33and through men, through legendary figures like Akiva himself.
42:43Akiva came to a terrible end.
42:45This is his tomb.
42:47Seems that when the old man was about 70, he went on the warpath.
42:52I think he must have decided that what he really wanted to do
42:58was to go back to the Jerusalem of his youth,
43:00when the temple was there,
43:01and when the great scribal academies and studying
43:03had been all over the great city.
43:05So he got a local resistance leader
43:08and christened him as the Messiah,
43:10and together they set Judea alight.
43:12The war went on for five years.
43:14We don't know much about it. It was quite terrible.
43:17The old Jewish histories tell us that the Roman cavalry charges
43:21at the end,
43:22the horses were wading in blood up to their chests.
43:25Some of the Jews committed suicide,
43:27wrapping their children in the sacred scrolls
43:30and setting fire to them.
43:31Kiva himself was captured.
43:33He refused to give up teaching the law,
43:36and the Romans tortured him to death.
43:38Combing the flesh from his body, it is said,
43:41with combs of iron.
43:43Well, as many Jews have done in such final moments,
43:48Akiva started to recite the Shema,
43:50Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one God.
43:54Then he suddenly stopped and smiled.
43:57And the torturers, who were obviously not used to such things,
44:00were quite alarmed at this, and they stepped back from him
44:03and said, Old man, old man, why do you mock us?
44:05What are you doing?
44:07They were obviously frightened at his power.
44:09And Akiva said, Calm yourselves.
44:12I have just realised for the first time in my life
44:15a new meaning for these verses,
44:17and started out on a learned exposition,
44:19the last of his life,
44:20with this old guardian of the sacred scriptures,
44:23delivered to his Roman torturers.
44:25And with that, as the Jewish history says,
44:28the old man gave up his soul to God.
44:31That sacred text was guarded by the care of scribes and scholars
44:56for thousands of years after Akiva's time.
44:58It stayed the same, though they had one major task in hand.
45:02You see, as the Jews spread out through the Mediterranean,
45:05up into Europe in the diaspora,
45:07their accents changed.
45:08So the old system of writing Hebrew,
45:10which was mainly in consonants, didn't work anymore,
45:13because as people read it,
45:14it sounded different and seemed to mean different things.
45:17So the scribes invented an elaborate system of vowels,
45:21and they also started to space the words and the sentences
45:23and the paragraphs for the first time.
45:25But can you imagine the care?
45:28Really, 14, 1500 years of careful copying.
45:32And can you imagine, too,
45:33how wonderful it must have seemed when printing came along?
45:36How you could set up a page of type,
45:38make sure it was absolutely correct,
45:40and then print off hundreds and hundreds of copies.
45:42And so within 30 years of Gutenberg printing the first Bible,
45:47Jews printed a Hebrew Bible in Hebrew,
45:51and this is it,
45:52a copy of the first printed Hebrew Bible,
45:55made in the 1480s, most of them.
45:57And there's the sacred text up there,
45:59and you see how it's become surrounded by this scholarship,
46:02like a great protection around the Holy Word.
46:05It's a marvel of printing.
46:07In fact, the whole book is an extraordinary story.
46:09Christians didn't want Jews printing things.
46:11They were hounded out.
46:13There was a Duke in Milan
46:14who allowed a little family of Jewish printers
46:16to settle in a village called Sonshino.
46:18And from that village,
46:20Jewish printers were trained,
46:21who went out with portable printing presses all over Europe,
46:24actually from Spain to Istanbul,
46:26and they printed what are now called these Sonshino Bibles
46:30in many different towns.
46:31Small Bibles, fugitive Bibles, you might say.
46:34Luther used one of these when he was on the run,
46:37when he was translating a Protestant Bible,
46:39the sort of father of all Protestant Bibles.
46:41He used a Sonshino Bible.
46:43Now, the Catholic Church, too,
46:45was very interested in the new scholarship
46:47and was evolving whilst printing was coming up.
46:50This extraordinary work here
46:53is one of the earliest examples
46:55of this new scholarship that went with printing, really.
46:58The Complutensian Polyglot.
47:00It's wonderful, isn't it?
47:01Polyglot means many languages.
47:03Complutensis is the town in Spain, Acala,
47:06where it was printed by a very proud Catholic cardinal.
47:11There's his coat of arms and his hat,
47:14a magnificent Renaissance title page.
47:16Now, the book is a major work of scholarship
47:19and for the first time in history
47:22all the versions of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament
47:25have been brought together on one page,
47:27the three major versions of the West.
47:30Here is the Greek translation of the Hebrew text
47:34made before Christ, the Septuagint, in the Hellenistic cities.
47:38There is the Sonshino Bible,
47:40that text copied from those first printed Bibles.
47:43And there in the middle, the Orthodox Latin text
47:46of the Catholic Church.
47:48The cardinal says that these two volumes hang like thieves
47:52either side of Christ.
47:53Talking about the Orthodox Latin.
47:55That's not quite the end of the Hebrew Bible.
47:58You see, the Sonshino Bibles weren't as precise
48:03as Jewish scholarship would like it.
48:06And so 20 years later, in the 1520s, in Venice,
48:10a Tunisian Jew called Jacob Ben Chaim
48:14edited the text of the Jewish Bible that we still have today.
48:18And this is a copy of it. Look, magnificent Renaissance binding.
48:21This is a product of some of the finest printers of the Renaissance,
48:26printed in Venice, in the High Renaissance.
48:31Look at the title page with the new architecture on it.
48:36And there the Hebrew language in the middle.
48:43A magnificent volume.
48:45And literally the same text, the same text you will find
48:49in Hebrew Bibles today.
48:51And there it is, again, the Bible itself,
48:54covered by the commentary.
48:56And the most curious thing is, perhaps,
48:58that he worked and was paid by a Christian,
49:01Daniele Bomberg.
49:02Bomberg believed that really the roots of Christian religion
49:06lay in this book, the Hebrew Bible.
49:08And he and his sons continued to produce these books for generations.
49:12In fact, they actually had to get special permission
49:14for the Jews of Venice to leave the ghetto
49:16to come and work in his Christian print studio.
49:18And he got special permission, too,
49:20for them to leave their yellow hats behind
49:22that they always had to wear outside the ghetto.
49:24Ben Haim said of his work,
49:26that Bomberg was sent to him by God.
49:29He asked me to purify the text.
49:31And he said, I worked on it, I worked on it,
49:33I worked on the words, I worked on the marks,
49:35and I worked on the phrases,
49:37until they was polished silver and purified gold.
49:41An authentic copy must be the exemplar
49:44from which the transcriber ought not in the least to deviate.
49:49No word or letter, not even a jot,
49:51must be written from memory.
49:53Between every consonant, the space of a hair or thread must intervene.
50:00Between every word, the breadth of a narrow consonant.
50:03Between every new section, the breadth of nine consonants.
50:07Between every book, three lines.
50:10The fifth book of Moses must terminate exactly with a line.
50:15The copyist must sit in full Jewish dress,
50:19wash his whole body,
50:21not begin to write the name of God with pen newly dipped in ink.
50:25And should a king address him while writing that name,
50:28he must take no notice of it.
50:30von romantii
50:42von romantii
50:47von romantii
50:53von romantii
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