El Museo de la Biblia ofrece una visión única de los Rollos del Mar Muerto.
Museum of the Bible chief curator Dr. Robert Duke gives 'Fox News Sunday' a special glimpse at the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have fascinated me for years, not only because of what they tell us about Judaism and the biblical world, but because of what they tell us about one of the most disputed questions in the Middle East today: the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.
I have spent years advocating for peace and reconciliation between Muslims and Jews. And I have never understood why acknowledging the ancient Jewish connection to this land should be considered threatening to Muslims.
In fact, I believe the Dead Sea Scrolls are one of Israel’s greatest defenses of its legitimacy. Far more powerful than the Iron Dome or F-35.
The Scrolls demolish one argument that has become increasingly common in parts of the Arab and Western worlds: the claim that Jewish attachment to the land is a recent political invention created by Europeans in the nineteenth or twentieth century.
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The scrolls have attracted a great amount of interest from both scholars and the public since their discovery. (Getty Images)
The Dead Sea Scrolls make that argument very difficult to sustain.
Their modern story began in 1947, when Bedouin shepherds discovered ancient manuscripts in caves near Qumran, close to the Dead Sea. Over the following years, additional caves were discovered containing thousands of fragments representing hundreds of manuscripts dating from the final centuries before the Common Era and the first century A.D.
They were written by Jews living in this region more than 2,000 years ago.
When people discuss the Dead Sea Scrolls, they often imagine that the collection consists primarily of copies of the Hebrew Bible. Biblical manuscripts are certainly among its greatest treasures. The Great Isaiah Scroll, for example, is one of the most remarkable surviving biblical manuscripts in the world.
But a large majority of the material discovered at Qumran was not simply biblical text.
The collection also contains rules governing religious communities, prayers, legal discussions, biblical interpretations, hymns, wisdom literature and writings concerned with the end of days. Some texts tell us how members of particular Jewish communities organized themselves, disciplined their members and understood religious purity.
That is one reason I find the Scrolls so much more interesting than merely saying, "Here is an old copy of the Bible."
They allow us to enter the intellectual and religious world of Jews who lived approximately two millennia ago.
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The Galilee region, where the Hukok archaeological site is located, was also the setting for much of Jesus' ministry. (Emil Aladjem, Israel Antiquities Authority)
We see how they prayed. We see how they interpreted Scripture. We see disagreements about religious law. We see their expectations of redemption and the Messiah. We even see the Hebrew and Aramaic languages they used.
As someone fascinated by languages, manuscripts and the history of religion, I find that extraordinary. It also places the Scrolls remarkably close to another historical world that has always fascinated me: the world of Jesus.
Jesus was a Galilean Jew born into the religious environment of Second Temple Judaism in Bethlehem. The Scrolls give us an extraordinary window into that broader environment.
I cannot prove that Jesus ever entered the Qumran community, nor can anyone prove that he physically held one of the particular manuscripts later discovered in those caves.
Qumran Caves in Israel. (Claudio Ciabochi/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
But I personally believe it is entirely possible that Jesus encountered or read texts belonging to the same scriptural tradition represented by the Dead Sea Scrolls (as he did with the Greek translation).
The Gospel of Luke describes Jesus entering a synagogue, receiving the scroll of Isaiah and reading from it. Today, we possess a manuscript of Isaiah discovered near the Dead Sea that predates the time of Jesus.
For me, there is something profound about that.
As a Muslim, Jesus is also part of my religious tradition. We call him Al-Maseeh, the Messiah (which, ironically, ultimately means the Savior of Israel and some Muslims reject Israel!), and the Quran speaks about him with tremendous reverence.
So when I look at the Great Isaiah Scroll, I do not see something that belongs to a civilization completely foreign to me. I see part of the religious and historical landscape from which Christianity emerged and which Islam itself repeatedly acknowledges.
This is why I believe Muslims should be among the last people to deny ancient Jewish history.
The Quran is filled with the history of the Children of Israel (Bani Israel).
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These Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered during a 1947 excavation of Qumran caves northwest of the Dead Sea. (Photo12/UIG via Getty Images)
Moses is mentioned more frequently in the Quran than any other prophet. The Quran speaks of King David, Solomon, Aaron, Joseph and the tribes of Israel. It acknowledges the Torah and repeatedly places its own religious message in conversation with earlier Jewish and Christian traditions.
There is therefore something deeply strange, in my view, about some Muslims feeling that we must erase Jewish history in order to defend Arab or Palestinian rights.
I can acknowledge that the Jewish people have an ancient and undeniable relationship with this land while also acknowledging the humanity and legitimate aspirations of Palestinians (as long as it doesn’t revolve around annihilating Israel and Jews).
Those two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
Peace will never be built by creating historical amnesia.
For decades, political arguments surrounding Israel have frequently moved beyond criticism of Israeli policy into something much more troubling: an attempt to deny Jewish history altogether.
An Israel Museum worker points at the word "Jerusalem" written in a part of the Isaiah Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, inside the vault of the Shrine of the Book building at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Two thousand years after they were written and decades after they were found in desert caves, some of the world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls are available online. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)
Israel can be criticized. Israeli governments can be criticized. Policies can be criticized.
But criticism of a government should not require pretending that a nation did not exist on its ancestral homeland.
And this is where the Dead Sea Scrolls become so powerful.
They are silent witnesses.
They do not participate in political debates. They do not appear on television. They do not care about modern ideologies.
They tell us that Jewish communities lived in this land, copied Hebrew Scripture in this land, developed religious institutions in this land and debated the meaning of their faith in this land centuries before Islam appeared and centuries before modern European nationalism existed.
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Israel se manifiestan frente a la sede de las Naciones Unidas en Nueva York el 7 de abril de 2025. (Selcuk Acar/Anadolu vía Getty Images)
This is why I sometimes describe the Dead Sea Scrolls as one of Israel's greatest weapons.
I mean a weapon against historical denial.
And unlike political propaganda, archaeological evidence does not need to shout.
For me, this subject is also becoming increasingly personal.
My academic background is software engineering, but over the years I have become deeply interested in the ancient languages, archaeology and religious history of our region.
One of my greatest personal ambitions is to pursue doctoral studies in Israel focusing on the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
I want to study their Hebrew and Aramaic, the communities that produced them, their relationship with the Hebrew Bible and the world of Second Temple Judaism.
There is something especially meaningful to me about the idea of an Arab Muslim studying ancient Jewish manuscripts in Israel.
I have spent much of my public life arguing that Arabs and Israelis, Muslims and Jews do not have to remain prisoners of the political and religious conflicts inherited from previous generations. Real peace is not merely a treaty between governments. It is also an intellectual and cultural transformation.
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View outside the Abrahamic Family House on Sept. 8, 2024 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The Abrahamic Family House is a complex consisting of a mosque, church and a synagogue and is dedicated to the pursuit of peaceful coexistence for generations to come. The space serves to bridge common humanity through the exchange of knowledge, ongoing dialogue, and the practice of faith. (Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)
It happens when a Muslim becomes curious about Jewish history instead of frightened by it. It happens when an Arab studies Hebrew. It happens when Jews learn the history and language of their Arab neighbors. It happens when acknowledging another people's story no longer feels like an attack on our own.
The Dead Sea Scrolls cannot solve the Middle East conflict. But they can teach us something essential about how we approach it. History cannot become something we recognize only when it supports our political position.
If archaeology proves something uncomfortable, we should not destroy the archaeology. We should adjust our understanding.
For Muslims in particular, recognizing the Jewish people's ancient connection to this land should not frighten us. It does not diminish Islam, and it does not require denying Palestinian identity or Palestinian suffering. It simply requires intellectual honesty.
The Dead Sea Scrolls spent almost two thousand years hidden in caves. When they finally emerged, they brought with them the voices of an ancient Jewish world.
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We should have enough confidence in our own identities to listen to those voices.
