The Dead Sea Scrolls

Beginning in 1947, Bedouin shepherds and then archaeologists recovered roughly nine hundred manuscripts — some whole scrolls, most reduced to thousands of fragments — from eleven caves near the ruins of Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. The find continued through 1956, and the material dates from about the third century BC to the first century AD, making it by far the oldest surviving cache of Jewish religious writing.

The scrolls were written in Hebrew, Aramaic and a small amount of Greek, mostly on parchment, with one — the Copper Scroll — engraved on sheets of copper. Who owned them is debated, but the long-standing scholarly view ties the collection to a community living at Qumran, widely (though not universally) identified with the Essenes, a Jewish sect described by the first-century writers Josephus and Philo.

Roughly a third of the scrolls are copies of books that would later form the Hebrew Bible — every book except Esther is represented, most only in fragments. The best known is the Great Isaiah Scroll, a copy of the entire book of Isaiah and the only biblical scroll recovered essentially complete.

The rest fall into a few broad groups: writings that set out the Qumran community's own rules and beliefs, such as the Community Rule and the Damascus Document; commentaries that read biblical prophecy as being fulfilled in the community's own recent history, called pesharim — the Habakkuk Pesher is the best preserved; devotional poetry such as the Thanksgiving Hymns; and works like Jubilees and 1 Enoch, widely read in the period but not part of the later Jewish or Protestant canon.

Before this find, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament dated to roughly the ninth and tenth centuries AD — the Masoretic tradition on which most modern translations, including the King James Version, ultimately rest. The scrolls are about a thousand years older than that, copied while the biblical text was still being transmitted by hand across many separate communities.

What they show, on the whole, is continuity: the Isaiah scroll in particular tracks the later Masoretic text closely, letter for letter in long stretches, across a thousand-year gap. Where the scrolls do differ from the Masoretic tradition, they sometimes agree instead with the ancient Greek Septuagint or the Samaritan Pentateuch — evidence that more than one respected form of the Hebrew text was in circulation before one eventually became standard. Neither finding was a foregone conclusion before 1947, and both are why the scrolls are treated as the single most significant discovery in the history of Old Testament textual scholarship.