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Hello, and welcome back to the second episode of Southern Demonology. Today's episode, we're going to be tackling the Dead Sea Scrolls. What are they? How they were found, how they're important, and then at the end, I'm going to go over one of my favorite passages which relates directly to this topic. And then at the end, maybe close up with some general ideas about Second Temple Judaism and uh try to set a base for how we can then examine that going forward in some future uh episodes. So the Death Sea Scrolls. Perhaps the most important archaeological discovery of this century.
Oh actually of last century, sorry. But why? So let's back up. So in the spring of 1947, a uh group of uh veteran goat herds uh were searching from s for some lost goats when they stumbled upon a series of caverns and in these caves they found pottery, some fabric, some wood, but truly exciting was they found an entire cache of scrolls. These scrolls, as it came to be discovered, were early religious writings. And this is important for a few reasons.
So the version so when people bel think of the Bible, they believe that, oh, God spoke, we have these texts now, and we've had them ever since they were uh written. And that's not quite the way things work. Um the version of the Hebrew Bible that are used in the vast majority of synagogues and for um uh for the for the Bible, I mean for the Christian Bible is actually the Aleppo Codex, which comes from the tenth century CE. Think about that. The tenth century a more than a thousand years older than the source material actually happened.
And we we know that it's the most probably uh the more solid um source material because of the fact that A, it was produced by the Masoretics, which were um probably were the most rigorous school of scribes to actually carry these translations forward, and then the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, uh, we have that, and so we can compare them and see that they are almost the same. And the key word in there is almost. There are editions and omissions between those two copies.
So if you take the Biblio Hebraic astute gartensea, which is the actual uh Hebrew uh that most students use when translating, and then you take the Septuagint and you start comparing them, you will see differences. Uh there are passages that are missing with in the Masoretic text that the Septuagint carries, and vice versa. And that is bound to happen. It doesn't matter how rigorous the scholars are, the scribes are, there will be human mistakes, and those mistakes can be carried throughout time.
If you make it at point A, at point B, that's still going to be there because you're going to have people that uh will now take that point A as the official source and use that going forward. So preserving text is not an easy thing to do. It is in fact one of the most difficult things to do. Um, you know, in the age of computers where we have source control and we can easily go back and compare uh version upon version upon version is easy, but that's not the case with handwritten manuscripts.
So, going forward from there we uh so it was discovered that these scrolls that were found at um in the at Qumran had a terrific amount of canonical material. So we now had probably the earliest version of the Hebrew Bible that had been discovered up to that time, and that is terrifically important in and of itself. But then we also found other works that were interspersed with that, and that also proved that the version that of the Hebrew Bible that we have now, it did not contain all of the works that people from that time period considered to be the absolute truth, canonical.
There were two books in which they kept to be holy that have since been deemed non-source material. And you can even see this in between looking at uh the Catholics and the Protestants. There are the Apocrypha, a collection of books in which the Catholics hold to be holy and Protestants do not. You can even see this in between most of the Christian um uh religions and uh the Ethiopic Orthodox Church. They the Ort the Ethiopic Orthodox Church actually keeps the pseudopigrapha as holy works, whereas the vast uh all other uh Christian sects or uh organizations do not.
So the idea of what is canonical and what is not is extremely important. Um and we can we'll get back to that uh sometime later. But regardless, so we have now these texts which have we have an older source material, but the other interesting part is that based upon the writings that we found, we can identify who actually composed these works, who kept these works as holy. So there was a first century uh Jewish historian named Josephus, and he wrote about various different groups that held kind of alternate uh Jewish philosophies, I guess you could say.
Um, you know, one of them were the Pharisees, another one were the Zealots. Um one of the other group were called the Essenes, and uh this historian wrote that you know they were led by priests, they were not extremely happy with the priesthood in Jerusalem, um, they believed in like a tangible fight between good and evil. The interesting thing is that based upon these writings from the Dead Sea Scrolls, we know, or we at least were almost entirely positive, that this group at Qumran were the Essenes. And that's for a few reasons. Uh the first is that they were led by priests.
In fact, a lot of uh the poems and prayers that we have found uh start off with um uh an invocation by the Mishkil, which is an instructor, a religious instructor. Second, they believed, uh the Essenes, uh this group at Qumran, that there was going to be an actual physical battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. They believed that angels were going to come down and fight with those that believed in the right things against God's enemies, which were typically taken to be the Romans.
And in fact, within the war scroll, which is a particular scroll found at Qumran, um there were a ton of prohibitions and rules about how to keep uh a person holy in the presence of an angel. You know, how far back do you dig latrines, etc. So all of this matches up with the with the Essenes and the people that were at uh Qumran that had these scrolls. The other interesting part about the Dead Sea Scrolls is their effect upon academia.
So once the importance of these scrolls came to light, a team was assembled in order to piece together the um the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls uh and to lead their lead in their translation. Uh the person that was headed uh that was chosen to head this um this effort was uh uh Dr. Strugnell from Harvard. And he was eventually booted off from the project because of a few reasons, one of them being his uh advocacy of uh Palestine, which of course is not going to go well. But um Dr. Strugnell was an amazing man.
Um I actually got to take courses uh from him, and he would tell stories of how he would arrange the fragments one way, and then he would go upstairs and go to bed, to only to wake up in the middle of the night and run back downstairs to rearrange the fragments because he had a certain burst of insight. The way that he told the story, it was it was just absolutely magical to hear. Um but anyway, uh so within academia you had this inner group that had access to the scrolls.
Because it was a very labor-intensive process to put these things back together and to categ uh catalog them and then to translate them, uh not to mention the you know handwriting analysis, etc. And so for almost 50 years, the academic community, the broader academic community, was shut out from having this access.
So you would go to a uh a conference, you would hear the latest interpretation upon whatever uh book uh a professor was talking about, and then it was not an uncommon experience to have a researcher that did have access to the Dead Sea Scrolls step up and present some findings which blew everyone else out of the water and invalidated most of their research. This uh this situation persisted for so long and it bred so much anger um that it was almost palpitable. So the college that I went to, it definitely was not one of the inner sanctum. It was an outsider looking in.
But then an amazing thing happened. Uh in 1996, I believe, um, there had been so much source material that had been revealed through conferences that they were able to piece these all together and then programmatically fill in the holes. And all of a sudden, the entire academic community had access to the Dead Sea Scrolls. And the the the amazing impact upon my life was that um so we had a very small Hebrew class uh at my college and a publisher by the name of Brill, they do phenomenal work, but they charge through the nose for their source materials.
Um, but then again, I mean they had the right to because they output really top-notch stuff. They released a C D ROM that contained all of the released images for all of the Death Sea Scrolls. And our college, through I think mainly through the persuasive nature of our Hebrew professor, um they bought a top-of-the-line computer, they reserved a suite of rooms for us, and we got to be the very first college in the US that actually offered a course on studying, translating, and interpreting the Dead Sea Scrolls. Fast forward a year, and I find myself at Harvard University.
So in college I had access to the CD ROMs, which were prohibitively expensive, but I was still an outsider looking in. But at Harvard, which absolutely was an institution that was um in the inner cadre that had access to these scrolls for a long time, I found myself only inside and given validity. I lived not 200 yards away from Dr. Strugnell, who had a flat in behind the school. I got to take classes with him. I got to take classes with Dr. Eschel, who was one of Dr.
Strugnell's primary students, um, who was uh actually visiting that year uh from the University of Jerusalem, who had done some groundbreaking research in the Dead Sea Scrolls, him and his wife. And all of a sudden, I got to see not just tales of how some professors were slighted over the years, but I got to see the intensive research they had been doing. And yes, I was conflicted. I mean, anyone would be conflicted if you're an outsider and then suddenly you're being embraced just because of the school that you're going to, it it's going to tug at you from both extremes.
But I didn't waste that opportunity. Um I think that most students, when they hear about the Dead Sea Scrolls, then they are naturally inclined to be fascinated by the war scroll or the copper scroll or some of these really, you know, big names within um within this set of uh of this corpus of uh literature. But I became fascinated by this little fragment called 4Q 510 and 11. So before I proceed, let me just take one quick step back and explain the numbering schemas. So there were at the original founding eleven caves, and all of these, most of these caves had scroll fragments in them.
Um and so you would have the number of the cave followed by Q, which stood for Cumran, where they were found, and then you would have the scroll fragments. There's actually just the other week uh reports that a twelfth cave was found. Uh unfortunately, it had already been hit and decimated by grave robbers or tomb robbers. Um so there is actually no scrolls found besides uh there were just some uh shards of pottery, uh, some fabric, etc. Uh so that particular cave is actually prefixed first by a Q and then 12 to indicate that there are no fragments to be discovered.
But anyway, K4 was where a lot of interesting stuff was found. And my favorite is 4, Q5, 10, and 11. It starts off with Ani Mishkil, and I the instructor, am making a proclamation of his or God's glory and splendor, in order to instill dread and to terrify all of the spirits of the angels of destruction, the spirits of the bastards, demons, lilith, howlers, desert dwellers, and those who suddenly strike in suddenness to lead an astray an established spirit and to charm hearts.
This is a very short fragment, but it teaches us so very much about their mindset and what they consider to be canonical or not. So let's back up a little bit. So you have the Meshil, the instructor, who is standing in front of the congregation, and this person is invoking God's splendor to be a shield, to protect those who are participating within this prayer. And what is the Meshkeel trying to invoke protection against? The first two are interlinked. The spirits of the angels of the ProFootball is back, and so are the predictions.
So let's take a step back. What do they mean by the spirits of the angels of destruction? So in the last episode, I mentioned first Enoch, and it's going to come into play really big here. So the book starts off by God charging a group of angels to keep watch over the generations of man. And so these are called watchers. And these watchers, they did their job, but then they saw how calmly the daughters of man were. And so they got together and they bound themselves in a curse. Essentially, they made a pact of we're all going to do this, and none of us are going to rat each other out.
So they bound themselves into a curse where they flew down to where they came down to earth, and then they took the daughters of men as wives. They copulated with them, and that union of spirit and flesh brought forth an unholy set of abominations. And these are what Genesis six talks about as the Nephilim, the giants. These things were created by a union that should not have happened. Anyone who has ever played Diablo III probably knows all about Nephilim. But anyway, the Nephilim, they are said to have sinned against every living thing.
And that means that not only did they eat and devour everything they could get their hands on, the implication is that they also copulated with everything they possibly could. In fact, these giants called such destruction, and the angels themselves caused such destruction not just by creating the Nephilim, but also by teaching humanity secret arts that they were not supposed to know. That this became the basis for why God said we have to start over. This was the reason for the deluge, the flood, and why humanity needed to be reset to a pure time.
So God sent his enforcers down, captured all of these watchers, killed all the Nephilim, and then these watchers were placed in the desert Dudaiel. And to anyone who's a Hebrew Bible scholar or reader, um, you may know that Dudael is kind of the place where all of the worst things in the world happened to dwell. And now, first and foremost, above all of these evil things are these angels. And they were hidden away, and they were said to have have to stay there for seventy generations. So even though they are bound, it does not mean that their spirits are bound.
There seems to be some way that their spirits can be released to prey once again upon humanity. The same thing goes for the bastards, these unholy creations of flesh and spirit. So even though the angels slaughtered the Nephilim, they only slaughtered their physical forms. Because they were from a union of flesh and spirit, it presumably means that their ruoch, their spirit, could then be released into the atmosphere, into the ether. So now we have identified what the spirits of the angels of destruction and the spirits of the bastards are.
Demons, not really much is given about this, but the fact that we're talking about demons is really, really interesting. And it's because you may not realize, but there are extremely few places in the Hebrew Bible, if at all, where demons are actually mentioned. Now some people may say, oh, but Job, what about that? In some translations you'll see God having a conversation with Satan. And that's actually not correct. Um it's a really bad translation. So never is the word Satan used in Job. Instead, it is ha-satan.
Ha is the Hebrew article or the, and satan means it's a legal term that means prosecutor, or in this case, lead prosecutor. In fact, the phrase devil's advocate comes directly from Job. So God is having a conversation with the lead prosecutor, who is a spirit that is attempting to prove that Job is not the pious man that God believes he is. Some other places uh where we may find ideas of demons uh would be within Ezekiel, where we have mentions of uh night owls and animals, uh and even Lilith, which we'll talk about in a little bit.
Um and then the other one is in a psalm, um, which is um Psalm 91. And that is the one in which you know talks about the the shadow of uh El Shaddai. And in it it talks about some major entities. Now you could say that these are simply personifications, like the arrow that flieth by day or etc. Um, but others believe that these are actual personifications of evil spirits, of demons, and that could be the case. Um we do know that this particular psalm came very late in the timeline.
So it could very well be that the author is trying to uh protect uh individuals from these uh major categories of demons, which could actually be the um some of the items in which uh horsemen are built upon um in Revelation. But regardless, so we have we're actually talking about demons for one of the very few concrete times that we can actually say, yes, they actually mean demons. So this is really, really important. Um and then we move on to some representations of animals, um, howlers, desert dwellers.
So these are things that could become possessed themselves and not only inflict physical pain upon an individual, but also perhaps spiritual. But I think it's the one that's at the very end that carries over into the present time and really deserves the invocation of the Mishkil. Those who suddenly strike in suddenness. So the author repeated the word sudden just in a kind of different way, uh, to pro to try to stress exactly how fast these things can strike, to lead an astray an established spirit, and that is truly important.
So it doesn't matter how devout a person is, it does not matter how much they believe in God. If one of these spirits gets a hold of that person, then it will do severe damage, it will charm your heart, it can turn you away from God, which had to be for a group that tried to live piously with uh with diets and believed that they were going to be fighting alongside angels, that had to be a terrifying concept. Now we've said a few times that there seemed to be perhaps certain conditions that these things could attack humanity. But what could those conditions be?
And I think that you have to look at another part of Enoch to find that out. So Enoch does advocate for a solar calendar. Now, according you know, because of the rudimentary um uh calendar skills that would be present at that time, it's not that a year is three hundred and sixty-five point two five days as you know we think now. Um it was rather three hundred and sixty-four days. And if you think about it, those three hundred and sixty-four form a temple, a temporal temple, one that is not reliant upon a physical uh representation, but rather is always surrounding people.
So you had a four walls, each one composed of ninety days, and they surrounded anyone who were established with God. The issue was that there were four days left over. These four days of trouble. And if you think of a square, think of each end not quite meeting the other to form a corner. And so you had four points there uh a point at each one of these corners instead. These were the days in which bad things could happen. These were the days in which these creatures could escape that they were no longer bound by the holy temple, and instead could attack humanity directly.
And this is why a Mishkil needed to get in front of his congregation and protect them by invoking the shield of God. And maybe that might be true, but I don't really think it is. And there's a a couple of reasons why. So if we look back at just Genesis, we know that God created the light, and we know that he separated the firmament uh from the water, and that's great, but that also means that the night was never abolished. We also know that the water was never destroyed. We know that water in these contexts mean chaos. Um Dr.
Paul Hansen, who I got to study with as well, um, he had a famous theory called the Shalom Chaos Paradigm. If you look back, so Genesis was not the first creation myth, and that may surprise a few people. But um if you actually look back at much older creation myths, such as like the Enuma Elish, we can see the same kind of principles at work, where Marduk creates the land by clefting uh his um the mother goddess Tiamat's body in twain with his sword, uh thus creating land out of chaos.
It's the exact same kind of parallel that we have here, but the point is is that the water was never abolished, it was merely pushed back. And that becomes extremely important because if you look at the history of the Jewish people, how they were persecuted, enslaved, uh, conquered time and time and time again, who would truly believe from that group that the water was never going to come back? Who would believe that there was no darkness left in the human soul?
And the other point is that, so we knew that, you know, there's written that there were seventy nations, and over those seventy nations, there for each one there was an angel. Well, if all of those nations cooperated and worked together and were at peace, then that kind of worldview would be okay. But the problem is that it's not. Those other nations loved to fight against and persecute God's chosen nation, Israel. So how could that be? If Israel is, you know, the the shining example of God's love, then why would these other nations why w uh attack it?
Why would these angels that were set to look over these other nations allow that to happen? And that becomes the crux of the issue. Angels are not infallible. In fact, we have an exhining example of a time when angels did the one thing they were not supposed to do, and that was actually fornicate with humanity. Who's to say that these angels have not also bound themselves in a curse to fight against the one thing that God is supposed to protect? And that becomes especially true when you look at the destruction of the second temple.
Because what could be a greater metaphor than to have the one structure that houses the Khalosh Khaloshim, the holy of holies, to be eradicated. And that becomes the crust of Second Temple Judaism. It's this concept that perhaps there are angels that are not after Israel's good. It's the idea that perhaps the waters are going to come back and flood the land. Because look at the book of Daniel. All of the monsters that arise, where do they come from? They come from the water. And that is the ultimate symbolism that water is chaos.
And I hope that we can continue to explore this theme because it's those concepts that we find within Second Temple Judaism that are still present within our current day. So I think we're going to wrap up this episode here. The first episode went way uh way longer than I ever thought that it would be. Um, but I'm so glad that you came back. Thank you very much. Uh, I think for next time we're going to be having a small uh change in direction. So we've been kind of hitting the um the academics pretty hard.
Um I want to step back and talk about um something of a personal experience that happened to me in Japan and get into some of that mythology. So I hope you'll join us. Uh thank you so much, and uh I hope you have a great day. And just remember, don't go in the water. This has been Southern Demonology. Please feel free to contact us at Southern Demonology at gmail.com. We hope that you join us again for our next episode.