Chinese Comments in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Magnified Section of the Isaiah Scroll

I'll just get right to the point: In the margins of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) there are Chinese characters. Really. Chinese. Not Hebrew. The image above shows one such character in the document called the Isaiah Scroll. The image at the end of this blog entry shows a Chinese character in the Rule of Community Scroll. These characters fly in the face of all known scholarship about the DSS and the history of the world in general.

It has been commonly accepted that the DSS (a collection of almost 1,000 documents and fragments of documents -- mostly in Hebrew, but also in Aramaic and Greek) were written during the period around 150 BCE-70, concealed in at least 11 caves in the Qumran area near the Dead Sea, and finally were discovered by Bedouins and scholars between 1946-1956. The dates of origin have been determined by archeologists and historians through carbon dating, linguistic analysis of the writing, and other scientific means. Their year of concealment is based on scientific evidence at the caves, and by confirmed historical accounts tied to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Roman Empire and its laying waste to the countryside as a result of the widespread Jewish rebellion at that time. This war ended around the year 70, and that is how that date of concealment was determined so precisely. There is no evidence at all that a Jewish group in the Qumran area was creating numerous documents of sacred writings after 70, and the Romans certainly would not have allowed it.  

The Chinese characters have been confirmed by Chinese linguistic and writing specialists. They have determined that some of the characters did not exist before the year 100, and are of a style that is most likely to have been written as late as 800. The characters I have provided here are translated as "god", "divine king", "deceased king", or "emperor." They are inserted in the margins of the scrolls in appropriate places where God is mentioned. However, they do not appear in all similar locations.

So, here's the problem: How did Chinese characters from 800 get into documents created and hidden a generation or hundreds of years earlier? There are a few attempts at explanations:

1. They were written at the time each scroll was created, before the year 70. This flies in the face of history, because there is no record of knowledge of the Chinese language in Israel before the year 70. In addition, some of the Chinese characters themselves did not exist before the year 100. It would take at least another generation, although more likely another 700 years, before this scenario could have occurred.

2. They were written at the time each scroll was created, after the year 70. This also contradicts the evidence. As mentioned above, all other physical and linguistic clues point to the scrolls' creation and concealment before 70, not after.

3. They were inserted into the scrolls many years after the year 70. This is unlikely, because it would mean that the scrolls were not placed into the caves until after 70, or that some scrolls were discovered after 70, opened, read, had the Chinese added, then sealed and stored again until at least 1946. This is contradictory to all of the physical evidence at the scene of the discoveries and does not make much common sense either.

None of the explanations above is plausible, so the characters continue to make no sense at all. Therefore, historians have basically decided to take the only course available to them: not to think about it anymore. This is why you have never heard of these anomalies. Perhaps if the experts wait a short while, they will get hungry again to try solving this Chinese puzzle.

 Chinese character highlighted in Rule of Community Scroll