The Scroll in the Jar

There is a photograph that has been printed in a great many books. It shows a long strip of old leather, pale brown, with its edges worn and dark, and on it column after column of Hebrew letters in neat rows. It is the Great Isaiah Scroll. The picture is easy to pass over, because it looks like any old document behind glass. It is worth stopping on, because of what that scroll proves, and because of one line in it that most English Bibles leave out.

1. What the scroll is

Between late 1946 and early 1947, Bedouin shepherds of the Ta’amireh tribe, working the cliffs above the Dead Sea near a place called Qumran, found clay jars in a cave. Inside the jars were scrolls. One of them was a complete copy of the book of Isaiah, all sixty-six chapters, in the same order as our Bibles. Scholars call it 1QIsa-a, which means the first Isaiah scroll from Cave 1 at Qumran. Today it belongs to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it is kept in a building called the Shrine of the Book. The story of the whole find, and the other books that came out of the caves, is told on Where the Old Testament Came From.

Two separate methods have been used to date it. The first is the style of the handwriting, which scholars can compare with other dated writing of the period. That places it at about 150 to 100 BC. The second is radiocarbon testing of the leather itself. That gave two possible ranges: 356 to 291 BC, which the test rates as about one chance in four, or 250 to 103 BC, which it rates as about three chances in four. The usual round figure is 125 BC. On any of these numbers the scroll was copied more than a century before Jesus was born. It had already been sitting in its jar for generations on the day He stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth, "And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias" (Luke 4:17).

2. What it proves, and what it does not

Before 1947, the oldest complete Hebrew copies of Isaiah that anyone had were the Masoretic manuscripts, copied between about AD 930 and 1008. The Great Isaiah Scroll is roughly a thousand years older than those. So scholars could do something no one had been able to do before: lay two copies of the same book side by side, a thousand years apart, and see what had changed.

Both halves of the answer matter, and a fair letter gives both. There are more than 2,600 small differences between the scroll and the later copies. Most of them are in spelling and grammar, the kind of change one copyist makes when he writes a word the way it was spelled in his own day. A few of them change the sense of a line. So the differences are real, and they show that the copying was done by people. But across a thousand years it is still the same book, chapter for chapter, and very nearly line for line. The agreement shows that those people copied with great care. The book of Isaiah we read is the book the men at Qumran read.

And this is the part that matters most. The chapter Christians read on Good Friday, Isaiah 53, is in the scroll. It was written down, and copied, and sealed in a jar long before anyone could have shaped it to fit a crucifixion outside Jerusalem. A great many arguments are built after the event they explain, and a doubter can always suspect them of that. This one cannot be suspected of it. The witness was already there, waiting.

What the scroll does not do, by itself, is prove that Isaiah 53 is about Jesus. That is a question of reading the text, not of dating the leather. The date only closes one door, the door marked "the Christians wrote it afterwards." The reading is the reader’s work, and it is laid out in full on Fulfilled Prophecy.

3. The chapter itself

Read it slowly, and keep in mind that every word below was in a jar before the cross.

"He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not" (Isaiah 53:3).

"Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted" (Isaiah 53:4).

"But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5).

The Hebrew word the King James renders "wounded" is mecholal. It comes from a root that means to pierce through, and that is why most modern translations read "he was pierced for our transgressions." The King James is not wrong, but the older word is sharper than the English.

"All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:6).

"He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth" (Isaiah 53:7).

"And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth" (Isaiah 53:9).

An innocent man, silent before his accusers, wounded through, dying for the sins of others, counted among the wicked in his death and yet laid in a rich man’s grave. Matthew tells of two thieves crucified with Jesus, "one on the right hand, and another on the left" (Matthew 27:38), and of "a rich man of Arimathaea, named Joseph," who laid the body "in his own new tomb" (Matthew 27:57, 60). Peter, who was there, put the chapter and the cross together in one sentence: "Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed" (1 Peter 2:24).

4. The line most Bibles leave out

Now verse 11. In the King James it reads: "He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities" (Isaiah 53:11).

The King James follows the later Hebrew copies here, and in them the line says only that he "shall see" something. The Great Isaiah Scroll has one more word. It reads that after the travail of his soul he shall see light. The old Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, which the apostles often quoted, has the same word. That is why some modern Bibles print the words "[the light of life]" in square brackets in this verse: the brackets tell the reader the words come from these older witnesses.

Think about what that says. The Servant is wounded, crushed, silent, and buried with the wicked, and then, after all of it, he sees light. That is death, and then life. And the oldest complete copy of Isaiah we have is one of the witnesses for that line. It should be held as what it is, a reading of the text with its witnesses, and not waved about as a proof on its own. But it is there, and it was there before Easter morning.

5. The question the chapter always raises

The New Testament asks the question for us. An official from Ethiopia was riding home from Jerusalem, reading Isaiah aloud in his chariot. "The place of the scripture which he read was this, He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth" (Acts 8:32). And he asked Philip the question every honest reader of this chapter asks: "I pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet this? of himself, or of some other man?" (Acts 8:34).

It is only fair to say how long this question has been argued. Jewish readers have long taken the Servant of Isaiah 53 to be the people of Israel, suffering among the nations, and that reading deserves to be stated plainly and not brushed aside. Israel has suffered, and the prophet does call Israel God’s servant in other chapters. But read the details again. This Servant suffers for others, "for the transgression of my people was he stricken" (Isaiah 53:8). He is innocent, "he had done no violence." He goes silent to his death. He bears "the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors" (Isaiah 53:12). A nation does not fit every line of that. One Man does.

So Philip did what the chapter invites. "Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus" (Acts 8:35). And Jesus Himself did it first, on the road to Emmaus, to two men who could not understand why their Master had died: "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:26-27).

Where this lands

The weight of the scroll is not that it argues. It is that it waited. For two thousand years the old leather has said the same thing to anyone willing to read it, and it said it first in a cave where no one could reach it to change a word. Paul wrote that "the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). The scroll is a second witness of the same kind. It does not force anyone to believe. It only takes away the excuse that the Christians invented the prophecy after the fact.

And it points past itself. Jesus said that if His disciples were silenced, "the stones would immediately cry out" (Luke 19:40). A jar of old leather in the Judean hills is about as close to a stone crying out as anything men have dug up. But the voice in it is not the scroll’s. It is the Servant’s, the one who was pierced for our transgressions, silent before His shearers, laid in a rich man’s grave, and then saw the light of life. Paul said it in the oldest creed of the church: "Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). "According to the scriptures" means scriptures like this one, already written, already copied, already waiting. And the Servant still speaks for Himself: "I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore" (Revelation 1:18).

Scripture from the King James Version, linked to the Study Bible. The Hebrew word in Isaiah 53:5 is checked against the interlinear in the Study Bible. Facts about the scroll, its dates and its variants are those given on The Great Isaiah Scroll, with its sources: the published radiocarbon ranges, the Israel Museum, and the standard scholarly summaries of 1QIsa-a. The reading "light" in Isaiah 53:11 is attested in 1QIsa-a and in the Septuagint. See also Fulfilled Prophecy, The Prophecies, Laid Out and Where the Old Testament Came From.