COMMENTARY : The Chinese connection
Posted on Saturday, June 3, 2006
The Dead Sea Scrolls have been guarded for 60 years like crown jewels, the possessions of a scholarly elite who were challenged only in the past decade to bring the scrolls to the public. Now, there is accumulating and compelling evidence that these supposedly ancient texts are medieval at best and have a connection with China.
That connection is raising questions about the manuscripts’ true dating, origin and possible authenticity.
The scrolls were first discovered in a cave in Jordan’s Qumran region near the Dead Sea in 1947. By 1956, archaeologists and Arab treasure hunters found 10 more caves at Qumran that held mostly fragments of some 800 manuscripts, commonly thought to have been written between 200 B. C. and A. D. 25.
Soon after the scrolls’ discovery, a scholarly debate broke out over whether the writings were indeed pre-Christian, with many respected scholars arguing that the texts were much more recent.
Today, a growing number of scholars doubt the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced by a Jewish sect at Qumran but think they actually originated elsewhere. No one, however, has pointed to Asia, where new information has turned up, including a possibly new scroll called the Moshe Leah Scroll from China.
HEARING FROM MOSHE In 1991, I wrote articles for the Washington Post and Boston Herald about the idea that a number of previously undeciphered markings in the margins of two Dead Sea Scrolls were Chinese. Victor Mair, graduate chairman of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a report that the Chinese character “ti,” which was found on the Dead Sea Scrolls, meant “god, divine king, deceased king, emperor.” Word of Chinese characters in the scrolls triggered an interesting chain of events. Early in 1992, Leo Gabow, president of the Sino-Judaic Institute in California and now deceased, sent me an August 1987 copy of his institute’s journal, Points East, by which I came to know of Moshe Leah.
In the journal, Gabow wrote: “In July of 1983, a curious article appeared in the Israeli newspaper Maariv... ‘A Jew Looking for Correspondents.’ His name is Moshe Leah. He is 35 years old.... His occupation: clerk in a printing company. He lives in Taiwan....” Leah had written a letter to an Israeli newspaper saying: “I am the son of Abraham, from the Jewish community of Kaifengfu. My grandfather fled with my parents to Taiwan.” Gabow wrote to Leah, and in correspondence that lasted over three years, Gabow learned that Leah was Jewish on his mother’s side and that he and his brother were given Jewish names. Leah knew very little about Judaism, but at age 24, just before his mother died, he learned of his Jewish background.
Leah told Gabow that his mother told him that their ancestors “came to China from a land where they were deported to by their enemy. And a King of Babylon defeated our enemy... and allowed Jews to return to Israel [516 B. C. ] but our ancestor... came to Orient for the deal of tea and ivory with the tribes of Hsiung-nu [who dominated Central Asia at the time ].” Gabow noted that that “would place Moshe Leah’s ancestors ’ entry into China during the Han dynasty [206 B. C. to A. D. 220 ].” Gabow also said that Leah “mentioned that his mother previously owned two ancient Hebrew scrolls that had been destroyed by a leaky roof. One scroll dealt with ‘Moshe’s Law of the Book of Geshayeher,’ possibly Isaiah, and the other scroll exalted human ‘virtues’ in Chinese style [in Hebrew script ].” During the course of their correspondence, Gabow received two photos of Leah looking at the scrolls. The first photo was “of poor quality and the letters... difficult to identify even with a magnifying glass. Photo number two, however, had considerably more clarity,” Gabow wrote in the Points East article.
Speculation immediately arose as to whether the language of the scroll in the photo could be Judeo-Persian or Judeo-Chinese or even Aramaic, Gabow wrote.
Through the years, Gabow contacted other scholars connected with the Sino-Judaic institute to help unravel the mystery of the Moshe Leah Scroll. According to Gabow’s article in Points East, Michael Pollak, vice president of the Sino-Judaic Institute, author of five books and a leading expert on Chinese Jewry, was the first to make a breakthrough.
“This I am sure of,” Pollak wrote in a report cited by Gabow: “The lettering is Hebrew and is in Chinese calligraphic style. Especially the long, giraffe-like lamed.” The mention of this style of lamed, or “L,” caught my attention, since I have spent years studying the subject, and this style of lamed is a signature of the Dead Sea Scrolls. WHAT ARE WE LOOKING AT ?
Gabow wrote, “For the first time the Moshe Leah ‘Isaiah Scroll’ is associated with Dead Sea texts” because of the similar style of writing.
Besides finding Aramaic words mixed with the Hebrew on the Moshe Leah Scroll, Rabbi Nathan Bernstein of La Habra, Calif., was also the first to think that the section of the scroll shown in the second Leah photo was from the Book of Isaiah, and other paleographers identified the text as Isaiah 38-40.
Rabbi Emanual Silver, curator of the Hebrew section of the British Library, department of Oriental Manuscripts, saw the similarities, and Gabow says Silver wrote, “Anybody slightly acquainted with the Dead Sea Scrolls will notice at a glance the overall similarity of the hand that wrote the Moshe Leah scrolls to that of certain documents of the Dead Sea caves, and anyone a little familiar with the Dead Sea texts will be struck by the resemblances in orthography.” But interestingly, the Qumran Isaiah Scroll has no Aramaic in those chapters, indicating that the Moshe Leah Scroll was not a copy of a Qumran scroll.
Gabow later sent me the photos of Leah holding the scrolls. Since the text in the second photo (that of the Isaiah Scroll ) was written on what appeared to be paper, it was difficult to tell whether it was a copy of an earlier scroll or, far less likely, an original scroll. It would only be natural that the Chinese would write their scrolls on paper, since they invented paper. Could this be an early copy of a new Dead Sea scroll or possibly even an original scroll ? Gabow also sent me texts in Hebrew from China. In one, known as the Genesis Manuscript (1489-1679 ) from the Kaifeng Synagogue, the “mems” (Hebrew “m” ) were also like those in the Dead Sea’s Isaiah Scroll and the Moshe Leah Scroll.
SCROLL WRITING IN ASIA More importantly, Gabow enclosed a copy of the Khotan text, a business letter written on paper that came from Chinese Central Asia and had been dated from the eighth century. It had numerous Hebrew letters matching those in Dead Sea texts: the unique wishboneshape gimels, diamond-shaped kophs, S-shaped nuns, giraffeneck lameds and mems.
If the Dead Sea Scrolls were written before Christ’s time and then buried in caves until the 20 th century, how could the same script show up in China in the eighth century — or even later ?
Jews have written their spoken languages (Syriac, Chaldee, Judeo-Persian, Yiddish, etc. ) in Hebrew script since the fourth and fifth centuries. For example, the medieval Khotan text, whose Hebrew script matches the Dead Sea Scrolls, is written in Judeo-Persian Hebrew script. I used this Khotan text as a litmus test with professor John Trever, paleographer and original photographer of the Dead Sea Scrolls, who assumed the Khotan segments I sent him were from the earliest Dead Sea Scrolls. Trever wrote, “as I look at your sheet of... scroll fragments, I am not inclined to date them very much earlier than most of the [Dead Sea Scrolls ], but perhaps somewhat.” COMPARING THE SCRIPT Using Trever’s method of comparing various scrolls letter by letter, I made a chart showing the Hebrew scripts of the Khotan text, the Genesis Manuscript (A. D. 1489-1679 ), a Hebrew text from China (A. D. 1772 ), the Qumran Isaiah Scroll and Qumran Testament of Kohath. One of the scholars to whom I showed the chart was Milton Fisher, professor emeritus of Old Testament and twice president of the Philadelphia Theological Seminary. Fisher said that on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being exactly the same, the paleographic comparisons ranked “8 to 9.” These paleographic details provide some solid evidence about the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dating them not in antiquity but in the Middle Ages, at the earliest, explains the connection to medieval texts, as well as unusual things like the Chinese symbol for God in the Isaiah Scroll. University of Pennsylvania’s Mair dated this character, which also appears in The Order of the Community, another Dead Sea Scroll, no earlier than A. D. 100 and perhaps 700 years or more later.
Donald Daniel Leslie, an Australian sinologist and leading expert in Kaifeng Jewry, agreed with Mair’s dating and wrote in Points East that it’s unlikely the Jews and the Chinese knew much, if anything, about each other before the time of Jesus. Leslie wrote that “there is no hint in Western sources of any knowledge of the Chinese language or writing until perhaps a thousand years later.” THE GOSPEL IN CHINA In later scholarly reports, E. Bruce Brooks, research professor of Chinese and director of an international group of sinologists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, confirmed Mair’s findings and other possible Chinese characters on some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These Chinese connections, especially the symbol for God dating after Christ, and the fact that the characters are native to the Chinese Central Asian area, begin to explain the time frame of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their possible place of origin. Mair identified Chinese Central Asia as the area from which the Chinese symbol for God in the scrolls came.
The medieval Khotan text is from the same region and period. Ironically, the area is where Leah’s ancestors traded with the Hsiung-nu.
Clues to the cultural context of the time show several possible influences. In the eighth century, Nestorian Christians reintroduced the gospel to China. One of their bishops translated the Gospels into Chinese and possibly “parts of the Pentateuch and Isaiah,” as professor Samuel Moffett of Princeton suggests in his book, A History of Christianity in Asia.
There was also the Karaite movement of the Middle Ages. Composed of Jews who rejected rabbinic teachings, the Karaites moved north into Russia and east into Central Asia.
Nor can we ignore the Central Asian Turks known as Khazars who converted to Judaism around A. D. 740. These three communities show a Jewish-Christian influence early on. As Moffett brings out, “Jews in these parts lived with Christians” during the Middle Ages. In fact, there are scholarly accounts of Nestorian Central Asians heading toward Jerusalem in the 1300 s.
When a text such as the Moshe Leah Scroll shows up in China, the Asian connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls is no longer strange. UPON CLOSER INSPECTION Why haven’t we heard about the Moshe Leah Scroll before ? Gabow dismissed it, thinking professor Leslie had solved the mystery when he said he had evidence of a forgery.
Leslie compared the Moshe Leah Scroll with a Dead Sea Scroll photo in J. T. Milik’s Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea. That photo, Leslie wrote, contained a section of the Isaiah Scroll that included all the passages in the Moshe Leah photo, thus indicating that the Moshe Leah scroll was a copy.
But professor Fisher, of Philadelphia Theological Seminary, in an extensive January 2000 report, wrote that the text in the Moshe Leah photo starts in Isaiah 38: 8 or earlier, which is text that was not in Milik’s photo.
“There is little reason to call or classify this [Moshe Leah ] manuscript a hoax or a forgery,” Fisher wrote, after comparing Milik’s photo of the Isaiah text with Leah’s.
Fisher and I found many discrepancies between the photos of the Moshe Leah Scroll and Milik’s photo of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Among them, the Moshe Leah text has far fewer lines and words per line than the Milik photo.
Also in Milik’s photo, there is writing sideways, and there are scattered Masoretic vowels (vocalization marks from the 10 th century or later ). The Moshe Leah Scroll has none of this. Nor does the Moshe Leah Scroll have the modern Western numbers that are seen in the Qumran scrolls.
More importantly, the Moshe Leah photo shows the letter “Yod” from an earlier chapter (see photo on page 1 H ) plus words that are cut off in Milik’s photo. An additional word which refers to God as the “living God” appears on the Moshe Leah scroll and not on the Qumran scrolls. “Living God” is a term used by Chinese Jews.
Obviously, Leah could not have copied what does not exist in Milik.
Observing differences between the Milik and Moshe Leah photos, Middle Eastern archaeologist Peter W. Pick of Petaluma, Calif., stated in October 2004 that “the Moshe Leah Isaiah Scroll is not a copy from Milik” and suggested, as Fisher did several years earlier, that “the Moshe Leah Scroll may date earlier than the Qumran Isaiah text.” These were just some examples that have led a number of scholars in the past few years to conclude the Moshe Leah Scroll is not a forgery, because a forgery, of course, would try to be as true to the original as possible.
Documentation released in mid-March this year by the Sino-Judaic Institute revealed an investigation in the 1980 s by scholars into the scroll’s authenticity. Their research also showed parallels between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Moshe Leah Scroll as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls and medieval Hebrew texts.
My efforts to reach Leah, who may still reside in Taiwan and would be in his late 50 s, have been unsuccessful. CONTINUED INVESTIGATION This new scroll would have perhaps come to light sooner had Gabow accepted Pollak’s assessment that “it would be wiser to conclude that the Moshe Leah scrolls were very old family heirlooms.” Michael Pollak’s article on the Moshe Leah Scroll, in a January 1987 addendum in Points East, called for a reassessment of the writing and spelling styles of surviving medieval Hebrew manuscripts from Kaifeng. His conclusion is that “the possibility of a Dead Sea tie-in to these texts seems never to have been suspected in the past. That possibility... now demands investigation.” Scholars still disagree about the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and research is still left to be done. But all of the scholars I have contacted have come to the same conclusion that the Moshe Leah Scroll is not a forgery, nor is it based on Milik’s copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It would be in the best interest of the scholars who believe in the antiquity of the Dead Sea Scrolls to discredit the Moshe Leah Scroll because of its striking paleographic similarities to the Dead Sea Scrolls. If those scholars acknowledge it as authentic, however, the obvious conclusion would be that the Dead Sea Scrolls would have to be dated in the medieval era — after A. D. 500 — at the earliest, and the myth of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ antiquity will have run its course. Neil Altman is a Philadelphia-based writer who specializes in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He has a master’s degree in the Old Testament from Wheaton Graduate School in Wheaton, Ill., and was an American Studies Fellow at Eastern College.
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