Dead Sea Scrolls: Ancient Jewish Manuscripts from Qumran

The Dead Sea Scrolls are the remains of roughly 900 ancient Jewish manuscripts, written between about 250 BC and AD 68 and discovered in eleven caves near Qumran, on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea, between 1947 and 1956. They include the oldest surviving copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, about a thousand years older than the medieval manuscripts previously known. They also preserve the writings of a Jewish religious community, giving scholars a unique view of Judaism in the period when Christianity and rabbinic Judaism were born.

Discovery

The first scrolls were found in late 1946 or early 1947 by Bedouin shepherds of the Ta’amireh tribe searching for a stray goat in the cliffs near Qumran. One of them, Muhammed edh-Dhib, threw a stone into a cave, heard pottery break and found clay jars containing leather scrolls wrapped in linen. This cave is now known as Cave 1.

The shepherds sold seven scrolls to two buyers in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Three went to Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University, who bought them in late 1947 at the very moment the United Nations voted to partition Palestine. The other four went to Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Syrian Orthodox metropolitan of St Mark’s Monastery in Jerusalem. In 1954 he advertised them for sale in The Wall Street Journal, and Sukenik’s son, the archaeologist Yigael Yadin, bought them through intermediaries for 250,000 US dollars. All seven are now in Israel.

A race followed between Bedouin and archaeologists to explore the area. Between 1952 and 1956 ten more caves with written material were found. Cave 4, discovered in 1952, was the richest: it held tens of thousands of fragments from several hundred manuscripts. Cave 11, found in 1956, yielded the long Temple Scroll and a large Psalms scroll.

What the scrolls contain

The scrolls fall into three broad groups. About a quarter are biblical manuscripts, copies of books later included in the Hebrew Bible. Every book is represented except Esther, though most only in fragments. Some books, such as Psalms, Deuteronomy and Isaiah, appear in dozens of copies.

A second group consists of other Jewish religious works known from later traditions or previously unknown, such as Enoch, Jubilees and Tobit, together with commentaries, prayers, calendars and legal texts. The third group comprises the so-called sectarian texts, which describe the beliefs and rules of a particular community. The most important are the Community Rule, the Damascus Document, the War Scroll, which imagines a final battle between the “Sons of Light” and the “Sons of Darkness”, and the Thanksgiving Hymns.

One of these texts was not entirely new. Two medieval copies of the Damascus Document had been found decades earlier in the Cairo Genizah, a storeroom of discarded manuscripts in an old Cairo synagogue, and published by Solomon Schechter in 1910. Its reappearance at Qumran showed that the work was far older than anyone had suspected and had been copied for more than a thousand years.

The sectarian texts are especially valuable because they speak in the voice of a group outside the Temple establishment. They describe a solar calendar of 364 days, different from the lunar calendar used in the Jerusalem Temple, and strict rules on purity, admission and punishment. Many scholars think this disagreement over calendar and law was one reason the community withdrew to the desert.

Most texts are in Hebrew, some in Aramaic, the everyday language of the region, and a few in Greek. They were written mostly on parchment (prepared animal skin), with some on papyrus. One unusual find, the Copper Scroll from Cave 3, was engraved on copper sheets and lists places where large quantities of gold, silver and other treasures were supposedly hidden. None of this treasure has ever been found.

Dating

Scholars first dated the scrolls by the style of their handwriting, comparing letter shapes across the period. Radiocarbon tests carried out in 1991 and again in the mid-1990s broadly confirmed these dates. The earliest manuscripts appear to have been copied in the 3rd century BC, and the bulk date from the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD.

The latest firm date for the collection is linked to the Roman suppression of the Jewish revolt of AD 66-73. Archaeological evidence shows that the settlement at Qumran was destroyed around AD 68, probably by Roman troops, two years before the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70. The scrolls were presumably hidden or left in the caves before that.

Qumran and the question of authorship

From 1951 to 1956 the French Dominican scholar Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique in Jerusalem excavated Khirbet Qumran, a ruined settlement on a terrace near the caves. He found ritual baths, a large dining room, pottery identical to the scroll jars and a room he interpreted as a scriptorium where scribes copied texts. He concluded that the scrolls belonged to a community of Essenes living at the site.

The Essenes were a Jewish group described by the 1st-century writers Josephus, Philo of Alexandria and Pliny the Elder. Pliny places a community of Essenes on the western shore of the Dead Sea, above Ein Gedi, which matches Qumran’s location. The sectarian texts describe a strict community with shared property, purity rules and a priestly leadership, and they refer to a figure called the Teacher of Righteousness and an opponent called the Wicked Priest.

This “Qumran-Essene hypothesis” remains the majority view, but it has been challenged. Norman Golb argued that the scrolls came from libraries in Jerusalem and were hidden during the Roman war. Other scholars have suggested that Qumran was a fortress, a villa or a pottery workshop, or have linked the sectarian laws to the Sadducees. Many now accept a middle position: a community related to the Essenes used the site, but the collection also includes texts written elsewhere.

Publication and controversy

Publishing the scrolls proved slow. The thousands of fragments from Cave 4 were assigned to a small international team, and decades passed with much of the material unpublished. By the late 1980s the delay had become a scandal, fuelling suspicions that the contents were being suppressed.

In 1991 the deadlock broke. Scholars reconstructed texts from a concordance, the Biblical Archaeology Society published photographs, and the Huntington Library in California opened its set of photographs to all researchers. Under Emanuel Tov, appointed editor-in-chief in 1990, the official series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert was largely completed by the end of the 2000s. In 2011 and 2012 high-resolution images of the scrolls were placed online by the Israel Museum and the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Myths and facts

A persistent myth claims that the scrolls contain secret information about Jesus or early Christianity that churches tried to hide. The scrolls do not mention Jesus, John the Baptist or any Christian figure, and the delays in publication were caused by academic and practical problems, not religious censorship. They are nonetheless valuable for understanding the Jewish world in which Christianity emerged.

Another misunderstanding concerns modern “Dead Sea Scroll” fragments sold on the antiquities market since 2002. In 2018 and 2020 investigations showed that fragments held by the Museum of the Bible in Washington were modern forgeries, a reminder that unprovenanced pieces need careful testing.

Significance for the Bible

Before 1947 the oldest complete manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible were medieval, such as the Aleppo Codex of about AD 930 and the Leningrad Codex of 1008. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1, about 7.3 metres long and copied around the 2nd century BC, is roughly a thousand years older. Its text is remarkably close to the later standard, called the Masoretic Text.

At the same time, the scrolls show that before about AD 100 several versions of some biblical books circulated side by side. Some agree with the Masoretic Text, others with the Greek Septuagint or the Samaritan Pentateuch. This evidence has transformed the study of how the Bible was transmitted, and modern translations now draw on readings from the scrolls.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 250 BC: The earliest manuscripts in the collection are copied.
• c. 100 BC - AD 68: A community lives at Qumran; most scrolls date from this period.
• c. AD 68: Qumran is destroyed during the Jewish revolt against Rome.
• Late 1946 or early 1947: Bedouin shepherds find the first scrolls in Cave 1.
• November 1947: Eleazar Sukenik acquires three scrolls for the Hebrew University.
• 1951-1956: Roland de Vaux excavates Qumran; Caves 2 to 11 are found.
• 1954: Yigael Yadin buys the four remaining Cave 1 scrolls after a newspaper advertisement.
• 1965: The Shrine of the Book opens at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
• 1991: Photographs of the unpublished scrolls are made available to all scholars.

Why it matters

The Dead Sea Scrolls are among the most important archaeological finds of the 20th century. They push back the manuscript history of the Hebrew Bible by a millennium and reveal the variety of Jewish belief in the age of the Hasmoneans, Herod the Great and the Roman wars. Several sectarian texts also reflect the disputes over the high priesthood that followed the Maccabean Revolt.