Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient religious manuscripts found from about 1947 to 1956 in eleven caves near Khirbet Qumran, by the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, the first of them by a Bedouin shepherd. The Israel Antiquities Authority, which holds most of the fragments, counts about 930 manuscripts, among them a few nearly complete scrolls and tens of thousands of fragments. Most are written in the Hebrew language, about 15 percent in Aramaic and several in Greek. The authority dates them from the third century BC to the first century AD, before the Second Temple was destroyed in AD 70. The first seven scrolls found are in the care of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, on display in its Shrine of the Book since 1965; other pieces are held in Amman, in Paris and in a private collection in Norway. For a Bible reader they matter most for their roughly 230 biblical manuscripts, about a thousand years older than the medieval codices of the Masoretic Text, the accepted Hebrew text of the Old Testament.

The Biblical Scrolls

Among them are copies, whole or partial, of every book of the Hebrew Bible but the Book of Esther. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1, dated by the Israel Museum to about 125 BC, is the largest and best preserved of the biblical scrolls and the only one almost complete. Many of the biblical manuscripts closely match the Masoretic Text, a likeness the Israel Antiquities Authority calls "quite remarkable" given their age. Some, though, differ from it in language and spelling, and additions and omissions in certain texts, the Israel Antiquities Authority adds, imply that the copyists "felt free to modify texts they were copying." In the Israel Museum's words, the scrolls show that "there were several concurrent versions of the biblical text." Emanuel Tov of the Hebrew University sorts the biblical texts from Qumran into five groups: in the 2001 edition of his handbook he puts 35 percent in the proto-Masoretic group, 35 percent among nonaligned texts, 20 percent in the "Qumran practice" of copying, and 5 percent each among pre-Samaritan texts and texts close to the Septuagint.

A Samuel scroll known as 4QSam a gives a longer account of the attack of Nahash the Ammonite on Jabesh-gilead, when he demanded to "put out everyone's right eye" (1 Samuel 11:1-2). Its longer text supplies a reason for the campaign, about which the Masoretic Text is silent. Of the Jeremiah copies, two are clearly proto-Masoretic, while two others represent the text type of the shorter Greek version and are the closest to the Septuagint of all the texts from Qumran.

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The Other Writings

The caves also held writings outside the Hebrew Bible, among them Enoch; Tobit, preserved in both Aramaic and Hebrew; and Jubilees, previously known in Ethiopic and Greek versions and found here in Hebrew. The community's own writings include the Community Rule, a sectarian rule book; the War Scroll ("War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness"); the Thanksgiving Hymns; and Pesher Habakkuk, a commentary on that prophet's book. The Damascus Document, first known from two partial medieval manuscripts, turned up among the Qumran scrolls as well and is now clearly a central sectarian text. The Temple Scroll, acquired in 1967 for the Shrine of the Book and almost certainly from the Qumran caves, is the longest of the scrolls. It rewrites the book of Deuteronomy and sets out rules for Jerusalem and the temple. From Cave 3 came the Copper Scroll, engraved on copper in two parts and listing what may be hiding places of the temple's buried treasure in the Judean wilderness and around Jerusalem.

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Who Kept the Scrolls

Most scholars identify the community that hid the scrolls with the Essenes, one of the three main sects of Judaism described by ancient writers. Early research assigned all the Qumran scrolls to the Essenes; that consensus has since been questioned and revised, although many scholars still connect the Essenes with the scrolls. Some scholars hold instead that part or all of the collection came from Jerusalem, brought to the caves by Jewish people fleeing the city or ahead of the Roman siege of AD 70.

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How Old They Are

Radiocarbon tests published in 1991 and 1992 dated 14 texts, eight of them from Qumran, and with one exception agreed well with the dates already proposed from their handwriting (paleography). A 1995 study in the journal Radiocarbon reported further results "in good agreement with estimates of age based on paleography." It adds that the documents are usually regarded as copied between the middle of the third century BC and AD 68, the year the Romans destroyed the Qumran settlement.

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Discovery and Publication

The first cave was found late in 1946 or early in 1947 by a young shepherd of the Ta'amireh tribe who, as the story goes, was looking for a stray from his flock; the goatherds Jum'a and Muhammed ed-Dib (or edh-Dhib) claimed the find. In the cave were seven scrolls stored in pottery jars. The Bedouin sold four of them to one antiquities dealer in Bethlehem and three to another. In July 1947 the first dealer resold his four to Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Syrian Orthodox metropolitan of St. Mark's in Jerusalem: an Isaiah scroll, the Community Rule, Pesher Habakkuk and the Genesis Apocryphon. The other three, the War Scroll, the Thanksgiving Hymns and a second copy of Isaiah, were bought for the Hebrew University by Eliezer Lipa Sukenik, an archaeologist and professor there, who recognized their age from the script. Samuel took his four to the United States in 1948 and on June 1, 1954, advertised them for sale in the Wall Street Journal. That year Sukenik's son, the archaeologist Yigael Yadin, bought them for the State of Israel through an American middleman. From 1949 to 1956 fragments were found in ten more caves nearby; of the eleven caves, five were found by Bedouin and six by archaeologists. The richest was Cave 4, found by Bedouin in September 1952, whose thousands of fragments from hundreds of manuscripts make up, by the Israel Antiquities Authority's count, 75 percent of all the material from the Qumran caves. Roland de Vaux, director of the École Biblique, and Gerald Lankester Harding, the British head of Jordan's Department of Antiquities, led the archaeological work, excavating Cave 1 in 1949 and the Qumran settlement in seasons from 1951 to 1956.

For some 40 years after the discovery, fewer than a dozen international scholars controlled the study of the fragments, which slowed publication. In the early 1990s the authority moved to speed the work, dividing it among about 100 scholars with Tov as chief editor, and by 2001 most of the official editions had been published. Its Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library now aims to put the entire collection online. In March 2020 the Museum of the Bible in Washington made public its advisory team's unanimous conclusion that all 16 of its Dead Sea Scroll fragments are modern forgeries.