Dead Sea Scrolls
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"When Aoba called B Wing's construction sloppy he hadn't seen anything like THIS!" |
The Dead Sea Scrolls, also called the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls, are a set of documents written by the god-like progenitor aliens known as the "First Ancestral Race" and during the series, in the possession of the Seele organization. Little is known about the Dead Sea Scrolls from the series, except that they can be used to predict the arrival of each Angel and contain information pertaining to Adam, Lilith, the Spear of Longinus, and events such as the Second Impact and Third Impact.
History
According to the Classified Information files*, Seele was originally a clandestine religious organization and actively sponsored searches for relics belonging to its faith, under the public image of being a patron of the arts. After acquiring the Dead Sea Scrolls, Seele evolved into the organization it was at the time of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The CI files explicitly state that the scrolls were of extraterrestrial origin and that they contained information on the Seeds of Life and the Spear of Longinus. The Dead Sea Scrolls that were released to the public were portions of the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls which were devoid of any valuable information.
- For more on the real-life Dead Sea Scrolls, see the External Links section.
Notes
- The single page from the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls that appears in the opening credits contains symbols vaguely similar to the "Angelic letters", a modified form of the Hebrew alphabet.
- During Instrumentality, the Mass Production Evangelions generate a giant Sephirothic Tree of Life made out of energy, made out of images of giant Hebrew letters and circles floating in the sky. It is possible that this implies that ancient Judaism and the mysticism of the Kabbalah were actually influenced by the alien knowledge of the "Dead Sea Scrolls". Although the Seele power cabal eventually acquired the Scrolls, their exact history from when they arrived on Earth up until the present day is not revealed. It is possible that ancient Jewish mystics or cults found the manual-artifact the First Ancestral Race left with one of the Seeds of Life (but which got separated from a Seed and due to tectonic shifts ended up in the Dead Sea area). These mystic cults then decoded much of the manual, and the knowledge of the universe which it imparted onto them greatly affected their beliefs and rituals, i.e. that the Kabbalistic "Tree of Life" is actually a real energy pattern. Ultimately, after hundreds of years Seele acquired the "Dead Sea Scrolls" in 1947, but realized that it was actually literally true and of extraterrestrial origin.
- The Classified Information files are considered Tier 2 or Tier 3 Canon depending on whether or not they were quoted directly from Anno himself.
- In real life, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in eleven caves at Qumran, on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, 13 miles(20 kilometers) to the east of Jerusalem. The texts are mostly fragmented, with the exception of a few relatively intact scripts. Scripts and script fragments are numbered according to the cave they were found in. A number of scrolls are in Hebrew, while others are in the Aramaic language. Fragments of every book of the Old Testament, except for the book of Esther, have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
A number of scrolls had not been made available to the public at the time of the series' production. They have been since released, and the mystery surrounding their contents has since disappeared.
External Links
http://www.centuryone.com/25dssfacts.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/deadsea.scrolls.exhibit/intro.html
