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 that serve as the primary guide and philosophy of SEELE. Little is known about the Dead Sea Scrolls from the series, except to what SEELE eludes to during their meetings throughout the series and what is stated in the Classified Information section of the Neon Genesis Evangelion 2 video game.
History
It is known that the Scrolls were of extraterrestrial origin and that they contained information on the Seeds of Life and the Spear of Longinus. It is unknown how or when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the series, speculation between the real life Dead Sea Scrolls or not.[1] But regardless, at some point the secret organization known as SEELE discovered them and it transformed their entire society to the one we see in the Evangelion series.[2] 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 Notes section below.)
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 in 1947 on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. 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.[3]
- 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.[4]
