The Dead Sea Scrolls

In the winter of 1946–47 Bedouin herdsmen near Wadi Qumran, by the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, found ancient scrolls stored in tall jars in a cave. Over the next decade hundreds of caves were searched; eleven near Qumran yielded tens of thousands of fragments from hundreds of manuscripts, mostly on leather. Keeping documents in clay jars was an old practice (Jeremiah 32:14). Scrolls from the first cave, among them a complete Isaiah, are shown today in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem.

The scrolls were copied between about the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD and hidden before the Romans destroyed the site, about AD 68. Before the find, the oldest known Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible dated from about AD 900, so the scrolls are some thousand years older. Every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther is represented, Psalms, Deuteronomy and Isaiah most often. Many biblical texts are close to the Masoretic Text; others stand nearer the Septuagint or the Samaritan Pentateuch. The caves also held fragments of Tobit and Sirach, found in Orthodox and Catholic Bibles, of Enoch and Jubilees, a commentary on Habakkuk and the community’s own rules and hymns.