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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the best of Coast to Coast podcast.

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Speaker 1: Become a Coast Insider to hear the rest of this

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Speaker 1: fascinating conversation and check out recent shows where we learned

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Speaker 1: about scientific efforts to revive the Woolly mammoth, the latest

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Speaker 1: in military drone technology, and the mysterious Shroud of Turin.

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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on

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Speaker 1: iHeart Radio. For some people who may be brand new

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Speaker 1: to the program, they might be younger people who might

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Speaker 1: not be aware of what the Dead Sea scrolls might be.

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Speaker 1: Can kind of explain to us what they are, who

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Speaker 1: were the authors, and what they mean. Well, we've got

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Speaker 1: to go back to the year just two years after

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Speaker 1: the end of World War Two. The location is the

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Speaker 1: lowest spot on the face of the Earth. We're talking

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Speaker 1: about the Great Jordan River Rift Valley, more than twelve

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Speaker 1: hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean Sea. It's

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Speaker 1: the lowest spot on Earth. It's a moonscape out there.

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Speaker 1: And right in the middle of that moonscape is this sea.

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Speaker 1: It's actually an enormous lake of salt. We call it

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Speaker 1: the Dead Sea. It's seven times saltier than ocean water.

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Speaker 1: Nothing lives there, it's dead, and this moonscape all around

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Speaker 1: about there's just a few desert shrubs and bushes. There

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Speaker 1: are some flocks of sheep and goats, and of course

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Speaker 1: the Bedouin better when tribesmen who tend their flocks up

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Speaker 1: and down across the western shore of the Dead Sea,

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Speaker 1: where one afternoon this better when shepherd lad his name

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Speaker 1: was Mohammad, discovered that one of his sheep was missing,

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Speaker 1: and he starts looking along the western shore of the

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Speaker 1: Dead Sea, sticks his head into every nook and cranny.

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Speaker 1: He starts throwing stones into this series of lonely desert

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Speaker 1: caves up in these chalky mirld cliffs that hawk mark

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Speaker 1: literally the western shore of the Dead Sea, thinking, well,

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Speaker 1: if my goat has gone astray, if I throw these

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Speaker 1: stones into the caves, it'll it'll frighten the animal out

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Speaker 1: into the open. And he hears nothing except something sounds

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Speaker 1: like it's a breaking inside, like breaking pottery, And he

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Speaker 1: crawls his way through that narrow cave entrance halfway up

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Speaker 1: the side of a cliff, and discovers this whole series

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Speaker 1: of earthenware clay pottery jars leaning up against the cave wall,

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Speaker 1: and they've been there for two thousand years. And he

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Speaker 1: begins to pry open these jars and discovers this big

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Speaker 1: bundle of something inside. He doesn't know what it is,

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Speaker 1: hauls it out of the out of the jar, takes

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Speaker 1: it back to his bedter Win campsite, and they're they're

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Speaker 1: greeted by these series of ancient parchments on this leathery material. Again,

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Speaker 1: they have no idea what they are, but they've discovered

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Speaker 1: the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that written by

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Speaker 1: an ancient Judean sect two thousand years ago, back in

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Speaker 1: the days of Jesus and before, written in ancient Hebrew.

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Speaker 1: And that's just the beginning of the story. That that

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Speaker 1: brings them to the United States and then back to

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Speaker 1: the state of Israel. And not only do we have

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Speaker 1: a series of more or less complete parchment strolls, uncannily

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Speaker 1: preserved beginning to end, that that give us the oldest

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Speaker 1: copies of the Hebrew Bible known to exist in all

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Speaker 1: the world. But but there are literally hundreds of additional texts.

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Speaker 1: And by the way, there begins a mad dash after

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Speaker 1: the initial discovery to comb every cave and that entire vicinity,

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Speaker 1: that entire region, and who can get there first the

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Speaker 1: archaeologists or the Bedouin, and the Bedouin come upon one

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Speaker 1: very important cave, in particular, they called it Cave four,

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Speaker 1: Cave number four. The Bedouin found what amounted to just

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Speaker 1: aisles and piles of fragments, parchment fragments. Now, our friend Mohammed,

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Speaker 1: the better Wind, found more or less intact scrolls complete

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Speaker 1: an entire inside these jars. But in this one cave

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Speaker 1: they were buried in the floor. For some reason, this

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Speaker 1: roll at least original scrolls just rolled out flat and

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Speaker 1: stacks piled on top of one another, and then covered

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Speaker 1: over with sand and debris and left there for two

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Speaker 1: thousand years, and some water seeped in, and then you've

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Speaker 1: got back droppings and worms got at it. So in

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Speaker 1: the end it's tens and tens of thousands of teeny

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Speaker 1: tiny pieces, some no bigger than a postage stamp or

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Speaker 1: a thumbnail. And the better wind get to it first,

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Speaker 1: and they begin just pulling this stuff out in big hands,

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Speaker 1: full into their burlap sacks. What what a catastrophe. It's

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Speaker 1: not the way you approach the most important artifacts in

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Speaker 1: the world, right. But eventually, uh, the government of Jordan's

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Speaker 1: pays them for every square inch of parchment that they

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Speaker 1: will turn in, and thousands of fragments start pouring into

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Speaker 1: the Jordanians who assemble them in the basement of an

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Speaker 1: East Jerusalem museum. And now geopolitics gets all involved, right,

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Speaker 1: because Jerusalem is is a divided city, and there's a

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Speaker 1: war about to break out, and the east half is

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Speaker 1: in Arab hands and the West half is in Jewish hands.

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Speaker 1: There's an East Jerusalem museum called the Rockefeller and these

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Speaker 1: thousands of fragments end up in the basement of that

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Speaker 1: museum and sequestered for some forty years, and only a

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Speaker 1: select handful of scholars has allowed access to them. What

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Speaker 1: a story. And then all the scuttle button, all of

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Speaker 1: the speculation, what could be in there? What are you

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Speaker 1: hiding in there? And eventually it all begins to come out. It's,

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Speaker 1: of course, it's the world's biggest jigsaw puzzle. Because the

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Speaker 1: Bedouins I mentioned, they just grabbed this stuff in big handfuls,

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Speaker 1: without any care to exactly where they were found in

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Speaker 1: the floor of that cave. But they represent some nine

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Speaker 1: hundred documents what at one time had been complete texts.

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Speaker 1: And we're talking not i'll just Bible, but entire books

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Speaker 1: unknown to the world until the mid twentieth century. And

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Speaker 1: now we have fragments and piece them together. And let

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Speaker 1: me ask you this. Because the King James Bible, the

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Speaker 1: version that we all know, came out around sixteen eleven,

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Speaker 1: these were found ninety seven. Were they different from what

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Speaker 1: the Bible was at that time. Well, we've got entire

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Speaker 1: portions of the Bible, some entire scrolls. For example, the

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Speaker 1: Isaiah scroll gives us the complete scroll of the complete

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Speaker 1: Book of Isaiah, like in the King James Bible. Of course,

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Speaker 1: this is the original Hebrew. So now we compare the

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Speaker 1: original Hebrew with texts that we've had all along. King James,

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Speaker 1: of course, is a translation from earlier texts, from the

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Speaker 1: Latin Vulgate and from the Greek scept two Ageant, and

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Speaker 1: of course the traditional Hebrew Bible that we find today

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Speaker 1: in synagogues. But now we've got texts of the Bible

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Speaker 1: that pre date the previous oldest text of the Bible

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Speaker 1: in any language, by not a century or two or

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Speaker 1: three or four, but a thousand years older than in

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Speaker 1: the original Hebrew. And how does that Hebrew compare with

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Speaker 1: what has come down to us, say, in synagogues today,

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Speaker 1: you pick up the Torah and the synagogue, how does

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Speaker 1: it compare. It's almost identical word for word. That is

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Speaker 1: amazing all by itself. It echoes exactly what we always had, well,

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Speaker 1: exactly exactly. That there are minor differences here and there,

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Speaker 1: and that is a study in itself, believe me, because

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Speaker 1: when we do find differences, they're amazing, They're fantastic. But

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Speaker 1: by and large, this is an incredible validation of the

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Speaker 1: Biblical text. Were the scrolls written from word to mouth

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Speaker 1: handed down over the eons, or might have be the

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Speaker 1: work of a creative writer at the time. There were

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Speaker 1: apparently a series of writers, creative writers, if you will,

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Speaker 1: and they literally wrote this. Now how the content came

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Speaker 1: down is another question. Apparently the ancient sect who composed

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Speaker 1: these we call them the scenes, most likely, but even

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Speaker 1: that in debate. There was a sect out on the

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Speaker 1: shore of the Dead seed to millennia ago, a select

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Speaker 1: group of individuals, maybe a few hundred not more, who

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Speaker 1: lived out in a place called Kirbet kum Ran right

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Speaker 1: on the western shore the Dead. See, I've been there

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Speaker 1: many times, and they had their deliberative counsels. They had

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Speaker 1: their own sense of government, in fact, to govern and

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Speaker 1: to rule the members of the sect. And they compose

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Speaker 1: a lot of it oral entire rule books, manuals of

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Speaker 1: their own, not to mention, commentaries on the Bible, and

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Speaker 1: additional books again that are not in the Bible that

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Speaker 1: we didn't even know existence, books like the Manual of

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Speaker 1: Discipline and the Damascus Rule. We never heard of these before.

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Speaker 1: And they wrote them down. Individual scribes wrote them down um.

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Speaker 1: In some cases we think a leader, perhaps the supreme

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Speaker 1: leader of the sect at any given time, actually wrote

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Speaker 1: this stuff down on parchment material vellum, it's the skin

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Speaker 1: of kosher animals. And then they rolled them up into scrolls,

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Speaker 1: protected them very carefully, and deposited them ultimately in those caves. Now,

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Speaker 1: do the scrolls basically talk about the beginning of time?

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Speaker 1: As the Book of Genesis would point out, they talk

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Speaker 1: about everything. Yes, they talk about the beginning of time.

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Speaker 1: They have specific commentary about how it all came about.

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Speaker 1: They also seemed to dwell very much on angels, on

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Speaker 1: inter dimensional beings, let's the interdimensional entities for example. They

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Speaker 1: they preserved other texts that were apparently popular in the

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Speaker 1: ancient land of Israel. Maybe you've heard of the Book

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Speaker 1: of Enoch or the Book of Jubilees. These books are

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Speaker 1: not in our our Bibles, but they were very popular

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Speaker 1: in ancient Israel. And wouldn't you know, these ancient sectarians

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Speaker 1: preserved those texts, and we've got fragments of them. Although

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Speaker 1: among the dead disease grows the oldest copies of Enoch

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Speaker 1: of Jubilees in all the world. I mentioned it because

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Speaker 1: those books also seemed to dwell and focus on super

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Speaker 1: natural entities, on the beginning of time. And both of

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Speaker 1: them introduce a solar calendar, which is unbelievable because Judaism

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Speaker 1: is all about a lunar calendar. But we're told that

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Speaker 1: the angels, we believe, the angel of the Presence, of

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Speaker 1: the divine Presence, were told dictated this Jubilee calendar to

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Speaker 1: none other than Moses. And that's what we find in

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Speaker 1: the Book of Jubilees. Do they talk about Satan? Oh,

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Speaker 1: my s uh. And they dwell also on light and darkness,

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Speaker 1: good and evil. I tell people, if you want to

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Speaker 1: understand the mentality of the Dead Sea scrolls, go watch

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Speaker 1: Star Wars. That's it in a nutshell. I mean, you've

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Speaker 1: got the forest, You've got the dark side, You've got

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Speaker 1: Darth Vader out there. Uh. And and maybe a little

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Speaker 1: bit of Tolkin image as well. How about sourn right, Uh.

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Speaker 1: Satan is the adversary or the enemy in the Hebrew language.

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Speaker 1: And yes, there's great combat. There's there's a great war

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Speaker 1: between the Sons of Light, who apparently are the members

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Speaker 1: of this secret society versus the Sons of Darkness at

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Speaker 1: the end of the age. So at the same time

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Speaker 1: they're fascinated by the beginning of all things, but they're

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Speaker 1: also completely fascinated by the end of days. We have

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Speaker 1: an entire Dead Sea scroll called the War Scroll, or

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Speaker 1: the the War between the Sons of Light and the

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Speaker 1: Sons of Darkness. It sounds eerily like a certain New

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Speaker 1: Testament book, the Book of Revelation. Of course, it describes

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Speaker 1: a series of seven great battles at the very end

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Speaker 1: of the age. Three will be won by the Sons

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Speaker 1: of Light. Three will be one by the sons of Darkness,

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Speaker 1: and the final attle will be one by the Almighty

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Speaker 1: with a with an army of angels who will descend

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Speaker 1: at the very last hour and win it for the

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Speaker 1: good guys the Force. If you will listen to more

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Speaker 1: Coast to Coast a m. Every weeknight at one a m.

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Speaker 1: Eastern and go to Coast to Coast am dot com

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Speaker 1: for more