The Mystery and Meaning
of the Dead Sea Scrolls

By Hershel Shanks
Random House, $25
ISBN 0679457577

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Everybody loves a treasure hunt, and the Dead Sea Scrolls certainly qualify as "the greatest archaeological discovery of the twentieth century." Add in the fact that one of those scrolls appears to pinpoint the various locations of old-fashioned buried treasure, worth up to a billion dollars, and the reader's interest is compounded beyond calculation.

More speculative than real at this point, the buried treasure (possibly saved from the Second Temple just before the destruction of Jerusalem) is recorded on the unique Copper Scroll (actually bronze) found apart from other scrolls and artifacts in 1952. Hershel Shanks saves this for the next-to-last chapter in a book that proves enthralling from the start.

Founder and editor of Biblical Archaeology Review and Bible Review, and author and editor of several books on Biblical archaeology, Shanks is himself something of a player in the ongoing, modern drama of the Dead Sea Scroll discoveries. Here, on the 50th anniversary of the discovery, he provides a clear and orderly overview of their meaning, publication, and ramifications.

Actually, the truth about either the recent or the ancient past of the scrolls and thousands of manuscript fragments that make up the discoveries is not as clear as one would have hoped by now. Much of the book is devoted to tracing alternative theories and opinions about everything from the identity of the original scroll hiders, to the nature of the nearby Qumran community, to the latter-day personality quirks of the scholars assigned to study and publish them.

In regard to one of the more inflammatory issues, Shanks, a down-to-earth voice in the stratospherics of academic Biblical archaeology, cools off some of the fireworks with two chapters about the real effects of the discoveries on modern Christianity and Judaism. He concludes pacifically that, except for "a certain kind" of faith, neither will suffer from anything the Dead Sea Scrolls have to reveal.

Yet, already the Dead Sea Scrolls have changed the face of Biblical studies, and much remains to be learned. Shanks confidently anticipates more manuscript discoveries to come, and every reader of this book will hope that in future overviews we may still enjoy the treasure of his company.

Maude McDaniel is a writer in Cumberland, Maryland.