Isaiah Scroll

Isaiah Scroll, also called the Great Isaiah Scroll or 1QIsaa, is one of the first seven Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran. Of the biblical scrolls among them it is the largest and the best preserved, and the only one that is nearly complete. It dates from about 125 BC, which places it among the earliest Dead Sea Scrolls and roughly a thousand years older than any Hebrew Bible manuscript known before the scrolls came to light. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem lists it in its collection under accession number HU 95.57/27.

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Discovery

Bedouin of the Ta'amireh tribe came upon the first seven scrolls by chance in a cave, later named Cave 1, close to Khirbet Qumran by the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. This scroll was among the first manuscripts they found, at the end of 1946 or early in 1947, and the first of them to be identified. Lawrence Schiffman tells how a shepherd of the tribe, Mohammed edh-Dhib, was looking for a lost sheep near the Dead Sea in the winter of 1947, or perhaps the fall of 1946, when he came on a cave opening, threw a stone in and heard it strike pottery.

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Physical description

The scroll is made of seventeen sheets of sheepskin sewn together with linen thread. It is 7.34 m long and averages about 26 cm in height. Its 54 columns hold all 66 chapters of the Hebrew text of the Book of Isaiah, and apart from a few small gaps at the beginning and along the lower part of the scroll the text of the book is complete. The script is the formal hand that specialists call Hasmonaean.

Popović and his colleagues observe that most scholars have argued or assumed that one scribe copied the whole manuscript, with minor interventions by other scribes, some of the same period and some much later. Their 2021 study, which used artificial intelligence to identify writers, led Popović and his colleagues to conclude that "there were two main scribes" and that the two show different writing patterns.

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The text

The scroll spells words very fully, "revealing how Hebrew was pronounced in the Second Temple Period." Measured against the Masoretic Text, it has well over 2,600 textual variants, which range from a single letter, or one or more words, up to entire verses. It also contains "many variant readings, alternative spellings, scribal errors, and corrections." In Isaiah 2 the scroll lacks the latter part of verse 9 and the whole of verse 10 as they stand in the Masoretic version (Isaiah 2:9-10). On Isaiah 53:11, Anthony Ferguson judges that the external evidence favors the reading in which the servant sees "light," and he cites this scroll as the oldest biblical manuscript that preserves the verse.

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Dating and origin

Bonani and his colleagues reported the first radiocarbon dating of 14 scrolls, with the measurements made at the Zurich AMS facility. A radiocarbon study published in 1995 by Jull and his colleagues, whose dates were measured at the University of Arizona, dated a sample taken from the same part of the scroll as one tested earlier at the ETH Zurich laboratory, and the two results agree closely. The study found its radiocarbon results in good accord with the ages estimated from the handwriting of the scrolls it tested. Jull and his co-authors note that the scrolls from Qumran are usually thought to have been hidden by the community there, which most scholars identify as the Essenes. Norman Golb proposes instead that the scrolls were written in Jerusalem, and hypothesizes that they were taken to Qumran ahead of the Roman siege in AD 70.