Religion: Out of the Desert

(3 of 10)

With the precious fragments in their soiled cigarette boxes, Kando journeys to the "Scrollery"—the Palestine Archaeological Museum in the Jordanian Old City of Jerusalem. There he usually receives the fees for his Bedouin clients (according to the size and condition of the bits of manuscript). And there an international—and inter-credal—task force of scholars takes over, trying to fit the fragments together in a vast, incredibly difficult jigsaw puzzle.

Shadow Land. Dean of the scholars is Pere Roland de Vaux, a French Dominican priest who has spent the last 24 of his 53 years in Palestine. Archaeologist de Vaux supervises the publication of the fragments, leads the periodic expeditions to the Qumran ruins. (Features of a typically rugged day there: Mass at 5:30 a.m., digging in the merciless heat until 3 p.m., paper work amid clouds of mosquitoes until midnight.) De Vaux's fellow priest, Polish-born Father Joseph Milik, 35, who left Warsaw when the Communists took over, is known as the Scrollery's fastest man with a fragment. Chicago's Frank Cross, a Presbyterian, spent 19 months working at the Scrollery, hopes to go back soon, as will Catholic University's Msgr. Patrick W. Skehan and young (26) British Scholar John Strugnell, a Presbyterian. The atmosphere at the Scrollery is probably unique. Says Lutheran Claus-Hunno Hunzinger, of Germany's University of Gottingen: "Every now and then one of us here will discover something new, and will cry out, and everyone will crowd around to discuss and suggest. It's the only situation I know in the study of the humanities where scholars are working in the same field at such close quarters."

The work these men do is unique, too. The fragments brought to them by the Bedouins make a strange kind of shadow land. Some carry familiar Biblical names, or snatches of familiar Old Testament language; others are single words or phrases, hanging like abrupt cries in the air of history. All are tackled by the scholars.

The work is done in a long, light, white-paneled room filled with 20 trestled tables. There lie the scroll fragments, pressed flat and protected between plates of glass. Fragments are identified by labels bearing such symbols as 4 QM5, i.e., a fragment from Qumran Cave 4, under study by Milik, and belonging to the fifth plate in a series.

At one end of the room, the fragments are prepared for mounting. Those too brittle to be uncurled are placed in a humidifier until they are pliable enough to be pressed flat. Then they are cleaned of sand, mold and marl (a clayey sediment) with fine camel's-hair brushes, sometimes dipped in castor oil. Some are so delicate that special brushes of only a few hairs must be used; and these fragments bear warnings—Don't Touch or, occasionally, DON'T BREATHE!