"An artisan, entering the Essene monastery at Qumran for the first time, would soon find himself at home, and his skills in great demand. A potter would discover there were two kilns...."

So John Allegro begins the eighth chapter of his book, "The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls"*. A lot more is known about the people of the settlement at Qumran today than it was in John Allegro's time...for he was one of the pioneers who first worked on translating the scrolls. But what follows this beginning paints a picture of a community where every man had a trade or knowledge that was used to the benefit of the community. Allegro continues to paint his picture, coming at last to the scribe...one of the most important members of the community....

There was work for the metal smith, beating out the sickles for the husbandmen, their hoes, bronze cooking pots, as well as metal scrapers...

Carpenters could also be usefully employed, making the wooden doors of the monastery buildings and the palm branch and reed roofs...

The husbandman and miller would certainly not be left idle for long in such a self-sufficient community...

There was work, too, for the stonemason...

The community probably had its own tanners.... It is even more probable that the Essenes were skilled in the art of parchment making...

The most honored handicraft in the monastery must have been that of the scribes. Comparison of the ink used on the Scrolls with that remaining in the Scriptorium innkwells indicates that it was here that many of the documents were originally writte. Certainly most of the Scrolls recovered were penned in the lifetime of the Qumran community, although some were already old and well used when they were brought into the monastery. Thus the Qumran scribes were carrying on a long tradition of copying manuscripts, and it seems not unlikely that at Qumran they were acting as a sort of "printing and publishing house" for Essene communities elsewhere. No doubt a Qumran production was almost as eagerly sought after by Jewish pietists then as by the world today. For their Biblical manuscripts especially are masterpieces of calligraphic art. It seems that Hebrew formal handwriting reached its high-water mark during the century or so before Christ. Dissuaded by his piety from pictorial representation of living things, the Jewish artist expressed his profound sense of the beautiful in his Bible scrolls. At Qumran many of the sectarian writings also attain the same quality of careful layout and balanced presentation which makes the Scrolls a delight even to the layman's eye. The letter forms are attractively simple, and free from the ornamental extravagancies which were later to mar the square Aramaic script. Here and there the scribe allowed himself a little color in his writing, as when, in a Numbers manuscript, he added a rubric in red ink. In another work he wrote a particularly important phrase in the same manner. Elsewhere the carbon-and-gum ink served him well, giveing a clear, jet-black line which has remarkably suvived twenty centuries.

Even the most careful scribes tire, however, and here and there one can detect errors in their copying, or carelessness on the part of the assistant dictating, or, more rarely, a seeming ignorance of Hebrew orthography. When all allowance is made for differences in dialect among the scribes or their clerks, some errors clearly spring from an unfamiliarity with classic Hebrew, which is not altogether surprising.

There is little doubt that for most of the Jewish population of Palestine at the time of Christ, the common tongue was Aramaic. It seems highly probably that both an archaizing "Biblical" Hebew and a colloquial "spoken" Hebrew were preserved in preistly and scholarly circles from earlier days. At the time of the Maccabean fervor, Hebrew was revived as the national tongue and thereafter kept alive by the militant pietists and their successors. Besides the Biblical scrolls, there are documents in both archaizing and the more colloquial Hebrew, as well as Aramaic and Greek. Thus the Qumran scribe had to be proficient not only in the different varieties of Hebrew, but also in the other languages.

A few chosen scribes would have been trained in the secret codes used by the Essenes to defeat the prying eyes of unauthorized readers of their manuscripts. For the most part these amounted to new alphabets, where wer are now seeing for the first time. One code, however, rests mainly on the simple device of reading the words from left to right instead of in the normal Semitic fashion, from right to left. To add to its difficulty, some of the letters are written in a different alphabet, proto-Hebraic or "Phoenician" type, Greek, their own cryptic writing, and in the ordinary Aramaic character.

Even the most experienced scribe would have much to learn in the Qumran Scriptorium before he could handle the duties in his new surroundings. There is evidence that the community trained it's own scribes, for one inscribed potsherd was covered with the rather crudely written letters of the Hebrew alphabet, some written twice, apparently the practice work of a young trainee. This would be in accordance with the report of the historians that the Essenes used to accept young children into their midst and bring them up as though they were their own, training them in their ways and thus ensuring the continuation of even their celebate communities.

The artisan received no wages for his work. It would be enough that he should serve his community and in return receive food and shelter and the religious priveleges of the Elect of God. It is no accident that nowhere in the caves were coins found. Yet there was money in the community; for each new initiate when he was received fully into the inner circle of the community was required to declare and surrender all his worldly wealth.

It would appear that our angelic scribe Penemue is meant to represent these artisans and their craft. It would also appear that Penemue -- whoever he might have been, also did double-duty as a cook in the settlement.

THE ANGEL SCROLL

Some of you may be aware of the existence of this 'new' scroll, by way of Andrew Collins' web-site. If you would like to read more about it, click here. This scroll, according to Collins, seems to be a link to Penemue who was a man (possibly) called Yeshua ben Padia. Check it out!

* Published by Doubleday & Co. © 1958

Pictures from "The Dead Sea Scrolls" published by the
Public Museum of Grand Rapids/Eerdmans Publishing, 2003
(Slightly altered)