War Scroll

A Manual for a Battle at the End of the Age

The War Scroll is one of the seven scrolls from Cave 1, and one of the three that E. L. Sukenik of the Hebrew University bought from the Bethlehem dealer Salahi rather than from Kando. It is 279 centimetres long and unusually short in height, between 15 and 16 centimetres, and carries nineteen columns; there were at least twenty originally, and the lower part of every column is lost. Sukenik published selections almost immediately, and the full plates in 1955. It is in the Shrine of the Book under accession 96.84/210.

What it contains is not a prophecy in the biblical sense but something closer to a staff manual. It sets out a war in seven engagements between the Sons of Light — the community's name for itself — and the Sons of Darkness, who are everyone else, Jew and Gentile alike, led by Belial and assisted by a nation called the Kittim. The confrontation is to run forty-nine years and end with the restoration of the Temple service. Around that frame the scroll specifies battle arrays, weaponry, the ages of the participants and the manoeuvres, in a way that recalls the Hellenistic and Roman military handbooks of the period.

Why a New Testament Reader Recognises It

Sons of light and sons of darkness, a prince of light who is also named Michael, a final conflict between heavenly and earthly forces, a decisive intervention that ends the present age: a reader who comes to this scroll from the New Testament will find the furniture familiar. The Israel Museum's own note observes that it "sheds light on the New Testament Book of Revelation, in which a final war is also described between earthly and heavenly forces." What that shows is worth stating carefully. It is not that Revelation borrowed from this scroll, and not that this community influenced the church. It is that the imagery and the vocabulary of a last battle were already Jewish and already current before the New Testament was written.

The differences are as instructive as the overlaps, and they run deep. The Israel Museum, describing the scroll, says it "lacks a 'messianic' figure" — the museum's reading of the text, given here as that rather than as a settled verdict of the field. What is plain on the surface of it is that the fighting is done by armed Israelites under priests, in formations, with weapons whose dimensions are specified. The language of Ephesians 6, where the armour is truth and righteousness and faith and the wrestling is not against flesh and blood, is doing something else entirely. The two texts share a set of images and disagree about the war.

A War That Never Happened

The obvious question is whether the Kittim are the Romans. The Israel Museum will only write "(Romans?)", and it is right to hedge, because the way the question is now asked has changed. Rather than choosing between Rome and the Seleucids for the whole scroll, recent work reads it as layered. P. R. Davies argued in 1977 that columns 2 to 9 come from the Hasmonean period while the final shape of columns 15 to 19 points to a Roman date; Brian Schultz has argued similarly that columns 1 to 9 are the older Hellenistic core and 10 to 19 a later addition made under Roman rule. On that reading the scroll is not one author's answer to one enemy but a text that kept being rewritten as the enemy changed. There is a second uncertainty of the same kind: seven further manuscripts from Cave 4 carry similar contents, and the Israel Museum's note says the relationship "is not entirely clear" — they may be an earlier version of this scroll, or material it drew on.

The larger caution is about what kind of document this is. It is tempting to read it as a first-century Jewish prediction of a real war, and to line it up with the revolt that broke out in AD 66 and destroyed the Temple. The scroll itself argues against that reading. As the Israel Museum's note puts it, the work "is not, strictly speaking, an apocalypse" — no heaven is opened, nothing is revealed — and it "lacks a 'messianic' figure"; details such as "the advanced age of the combatants and the leadership of the priests, point to the idealistic nature of the war described in the work and impart a fictional quality to the treatise." It may well reflect the real political pressure that produced the revolt. It is not a forecast of it, and no battle of the sort it describes was ever fought.

Scripture references

• Daniel 12:1-3 — The biblical tradition of a final crisis that the scroll builds on
• Ezekiel 38:14-23 — Gog and Magog — the other Old Testament text standing behind it
• Ephesians 6:10-13 — The same imagery, and a wholly different war
• Revelation 19:11-16 — A last battle in which the fighting is not done by the saints

Sources

• Holding institutionThe Israel Museum, Jerusalem — The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls: The War Scroll — The Israel Museum, Jerusalem — Shrine of the Book · The museum's own object record: "Qumran, Cave 1", "1st century BCE - 1st century CE", "H: 15-16; L: 279 cm", "Accession number: 96.84/210", nineteen columns of at least twenty, the Kittim glossed only as "(Romans?)", the seven further manuscripts 4Q491-497 whose relationship to 1QM "is not entirely clear", and the judgements quoted in section three about the work's idealistic and fictional characterSupports: The dimensions, accession number, date, the Kittim question, and the honest limit in section three
• Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority, Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library: 1Q War Scroll (1Q33) — Israel Antiquities Authority · The authority's own record of the manuscript, giving the site as "Qumran, Cave 1", the material as parchment, the period as Herodian, and the official publications as Milik, DJD 1: 135-136, and Sukenik, The Dead Sea Scrolls of the Hebrew University (Jerusalem, 1955), plates XVI-XXXIVSupports: The manuscript number, period and publication record
• ScholarshipJean Duhaime, The War Texts: 1QM and Related Manuscripts — Jean Duhaime, Université de Montréal · Companion to the Qumran Scrolls 6 (London: T&T Clark, 2004). The standard book-length treatment of 1QM and the Cave 4 war texts; reviewed by J. G. Campbell in the Journal of Jewish Studies 56:2 (2005), 343-345, DOI 10.18647/2625/jjs-2005. Print onlySupports: That the date and the identity of the Kittim remain argued rather than settled
• ScholarshipHanna Vanonen, War Traditions from the Qumran Caves — Hanna Vanonen, University of Helsinki · Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah (Leiden: Brill, 2022), DOI 10.1163/9789004512061; the introduction is open. Its survey is the source for the layered readings in section three: "According to Davies, there were two main sections of the scroll: the text in columns 2-9 derives from the Hasmonean period and the final redaction of the text in columns 15-19 ... points to a Roman date"; and Schultz "argues that columns 1-9 form the primitive part of the Scroll from the Hellenistic period and columns 10-19 were added later, inspired by the Roman conquest of Judea". Davies is P. R. Davies, 1QM, the War Scroll from Qumran: Its Structure and History (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1977)Supports: The layered composition reading in section three, and the two scholars named for it
• Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority: Discovery and Publication — Israel Antiquities Authority · "Sukenik acquires and publishes selections of three Scrolls: The War Scroll, the Thanksgiving Scroll (Hodayot), and a second copy of Isaiah" — the three bought from the dealer Salahi rather than from KandoSupports: Which of the seven Cave 1 scrolls went to Sukenik and how
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: War Scroll

Further reading

• The Israel Museum: The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls
• The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library
• Wikipedia: War Scroll

Reflect

These men drew up formations for a battle that never came. What are you preparing for that may never arrive, and what does the preparing do to you?