KEY POINTS:
The religious ascetics believed to have written the Dead Sea Scrolls were killed off by their own scrupulous toilet habits, research by an international team of biblical scholars suggest.
The Essenes, who established a community at Qumran on the north-western shores of the Dead Sea, rejected the common Bedouin practice of relieving themselves in the open.
Instead, they assigned a dumping ground about 800m from their community and buried their waste there, believing this to be more hygienic.
But the Essenes' efforts appear to have worked against them.
The parasites and harmful bacteria associated with human waste would have been quickly killed by the desert sun had they remained above ground.
Buried, they could survive and thrive, creating a toxic environment that infected members of the Essene sect as they walked to and from their toilet area.
The parasites almost certainly bred in a cistern used in religious cleansing ceremonies, giving a compelling reason for the early deaths of many Essenes.
"Some people might laugh, but it is terribly sad," said one of the scholars, James Tabor of the University of North Carolina.
"They were so dedicated and had such a strenuous lifestyle, but they were probably lowering their life expectancy and ruining their health in an effort to do what was right."
The toilet research conducted by Tabor and his colleagues stemmed from a much broader controversy over authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Several scholars have questioned whether the Essenes wrote them, or even if they ever established a community at Qumran.
Tabor and Joseph Zias of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem took their cue from passages in the scrolls specifying rules for toilet hygiene.
They found an area of soft ground north-west of Qumran, took soil samples and had them analysed.
The analysis found preserved eggs and other remnants of roundworms, tapeworms, whipworms and pinworms. Samples taken from surrounding areas were barren.
The toilet area is now an important piece of evidence linking the Qumran site to the Scrolls, and belies recent theories that, for example, the scrolls were hidden in the caves at Qumran by Jews from Jerusalem fleeing the oppression of Roman occupation.
It could also explain earlier research which found that barely one in 20 bodies in the Qumran cemetery had reached the age of 40.
More than half of those buried in cemeteries from the same period near Jericho had survived beyond 40.
"The graveyard at Qumran is the unhealthiest group I have studied in more than 30 years," Dr Zias said.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, found by Bedouin tribesmen in 1947, give a rare insight into life around the time of Jesus's life and death.
They are also the only Biblical-era documents known to have been written before AD100, and predate the Gospels.
- INDEPENDENT
