Yesterday, Michele and I accompanied our friends Jay and Elizabeth to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Grand Rapids Public Museum. We'd been meaning to go for some time, and finally got around to doing so when Jay took the initiative and secured us tickets. The Dead Sea Scrolls are an example of something that I find fascinating but about which I know next to nothing, so I was looking forward to learning a bit about them.
All in all, I was quite pleased with the exhibit, which was educational and accessible at the same time. There were about a dozen scrolls fragments, most of them fairly small, which seemed (from the information provided) to be reasonably representative of the many different types of manuscripts recovered at the Qumran site. Much of the exhibit focused on the lifestyle of the Qumran community, which most scholars apparently believe to belong to the Essene branch of Judaism. According to the exhibit, the Qumran community was small, entirely male, and rigidly ascetic.
What I wasn't expecting was that the exhibit would have an emotional affect on me. It was difficult for me to read about the lifestyle and history of the Qumran community without feeling a shiver of sadness at the thought of the community's ultimate fate: destruction at the hands of the Roman army. They believed so strongly in their interpretation of the will of God that they chose to separate themselves from normal society, subject themselves to an ascetic lifestyle in a hellish desert environment, and devote their lives to preparation for the Armageddon they expected to arrive at any moment. As one of the exhibit's plaques rather glibly pointed out, they probably faced the onslaught of the Roman army with the firm, and quite understandable, belief that the Apocalypse had arrived.
It makes me sad to think that their Armageddon came and went, heralding not the final victory of Good over Evil but rather the bloody end of Jewish resistance to the hated Roman rule, another footnote in the brutal history of the Middle East. Certainly, Armageddon did not end in the way Qumran community confidently expected. What thoughts went through their minds when they heard reports of Roman soldiers descending on their isolated community? Were they ecstatic at the fulfillment of their prophecies, or did they panic in fear at the thought of being caught unprepared by the End? Did they charge defiantly from their caves and houses, secure in their knowledge that victory would be theirs? Did their faith waver at the sight of Roman spears and shields? In the ensuing slaughter, did there come a point when they realized how horribly they had been wrong? Did they die without understanding the religious implications of their defeat, or did they die feeling betrayed by God?
Maybe I think about this stuff too much.