The Scroll That Held Still

The shepherd's name was Muhammed edh-Dhib - Muhammed the Wolf - and he was looking for a lost animal in the limestone hills above the north-west shore of the Dead Sea. He threw a rock into one of the caves to see if it would startle anything. It didn't startle a goat. What it did was break a clay jar, and what the jar had been holding for two thousand years was a length of parchment seventeen sheets long, stitched end to end, containing the complete text of the Book of Isaiah.

It was early 1947. The scroll had been sealed in that cave, wrapped in linen and set in its jar, sometime around 125 BCE - which means it had survived roughly two millennia in a dry Judean hillside while the Roman Empire rose and fell, while the tribe lost its Temple, lost its land, scattered across three continents, and kept the book in its head. The book was there, in the hill, keeping itself.

When scholars finally unrolled it, the remarkable thing wasn't the age. It was the stillness. The Great Isaiah Scroll - designated 1QIsaª, the first manuscript found in the first Qumran cave - matched the text that scribes in medieval Europe had been faithfully copying for a thousand years with an accuracy that nobody had expected and everyone needed to see. The scroll is around 1,000 years older than the oldest previously known Hebrew manuscripts of Isaiah. The words had not, in any essential sense, moved.

What seventeen sheets of sheepskin can hold

The physical object is worth pausing over. The scroll is about 7.3 metres long when laid flat - the length of a London bus - and consists of seventeen sheets of parchment prepared from sheepskin, soaked and scraped and stitched together with linen thread into a single continuous surface. The text runs across fifty-four columns in a clear, deliberate hand. It was written in what we now call the Second Temple period, when the Temple still stood, when the tribe still held its land, when the idea that these words would need to outlast all of that was not yet a pressing concern.

It is the only biblical scroll from Qumran found almost entirely intact. Everything else from those caves came out in pieces. The Great Isaiah Scroll came out whole. The jar had done its job.

Isaiah was a natural choice to survive in this form - not because anyone planned it that way, but because of what the book is. It's the longest of the prophetic books, the most various, the one that ranges widest between catastrophe and consolation. The opening vision of a faithless city. The servant songs. The incomparable poetry of chapter 40 - "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people." The image of swords beaten into ploughshares. Scholars debate how many hands wrote it and over how many centuries; the scroll, characteristically, does not weigh in. It simply carries the whole thing, start to finish, in a clean and businesslike script.

The building the scroll earned

The Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem was designed specifically to hold the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the architects didn't underplay the assignment. The building's signature element is a white dome, partially submerged, its curved surface coated in white mosaic tiles. The form is modelled on the lids of the jars in which the first scrolls were found - the same jars Muhammed edh-Dhib heard shattering when his rock came through the cave entrance. Stand in front of it and you're looking at an act of architectural memory: the building remembers how the books arrived.

Alongside the white dome, a black basalt wall rises in deliberate contrast - an allusion to the Dead Sea sect's own language of light and darkness, Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness, the categories by which they organised the world. Inside, below ground level, the Great Isaiah Scroll revolves slowly on its display drum in a climate-controlled chamber. The scroll that came out of the hill has gone back, in a sense, underground.

The Shrine opened in 1965. It sits in the Givat Ram neighbourhood in Jerusalem, beside the Knesset and the National Library - a proximity that is not accidental. Whatever the scroll means to scholarship, the museum knows what it means to the state alongside it.

The day of the scrolls

The coincidence belongs in a margin note rather than the main text, but it's too good to lose entirely. On the 29th of November 1947, the Hebrew University archaeologist Eleazar Lipa Sukenik made a dangerous bus journey into Bethlehem - Arab Bethlehem, on a day when any provocation might have been fatal - to collect three of the first scrolls from an antiquities dealer. He had been shown photographs and knew immediately what they were. The risk seemed worth it.

He brought the scrolls home and sat with them that evening. While he turned the ancient parchment in his hands, a radio in the room announced that the United Nations General Assembly had just voted, by a two-thirds majority, to partition Palestine - the resolution that would lead to the declaration of the State of Israel six months later.

Sukenik wrote in his diary that he felt the two things happening at the same time - the ancient text in his hands, the new state forming in the vote - but he was a careful scholar, and he didn't press the meaning. He simply noted the date. We can do the same.

What the scribes understood

There's a reason the scroll survived so intact, and it isn't only luck. The people who made it understood that they were making something that had to last. The preparation of the parchment, the evenness of the columns, the care taken even with the stitching between sheets - none of this is carelessness. The word "scribal" has become associated in popular usage with mechanical copying, the monk at his desk, the dull work of transmission. The Great Isaiah Scroll asks you to reconsider. The scribe who sat down to copy this book knew what he was copying, and he copied it with the concentration of someone who expected it to matter to people who weren't yet born.

He was right by about two thousand years. The scroll came out of the cave and into a museum built to look like its jar. On the other side of the museum's wall, a parliament debates in the language the scroll is written in. The scribe would have thought that was more or less the point.