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 holds the vision that Isaiah son of Amoz saw during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah (Isaiah 1:1). 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, among them the Leningrad Codex of about AD 1009, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible. 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. In July 1947 it was one of four scrolls sold to Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Syrian Orthodox metropolitan of St. Mark's in Jerusalem. He took the four to the United States and in 1954 advertised them for sale in the Wall Street Journal; that year the archaeologist Yigael Yadin acquired them and returned them to Israel. In 1965 the scrolls went on display in the Israel Museum's Shrine of the Book.

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Physical description

The scroll is made of seventeen sheets of sheepskin sewn together with linen thread. It is about 24 feet (7.34 m) long and averages about 10 inches (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 scroll is written in a formal Hasmonaean hand. A 2021 study in PLOS ONE led by Mladen Popović used artificial intelligence to identify its writers and concluded that "there were two main scribes," not the one scribe often assumed, each with 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." Its text generally agrees with the Masoretic Text found in medieval codices like the Aleppo Codex, copied in the 10th century AD. Counted strictly, its variants number well over 2,600, from a single letter up to whole verses, but a great many are purely linguistic, an updating of its language. 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). It also contains the passage on the righteous Servant (Isaiah 52:13-53:12). 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

Samples from the same part of the scroll were radiocarbon dated at ETH Zurich and later at the University of Arizona, and the results agree closely with each other and with the date estimated from its handwriting.