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General knowledge · Religion & belief

The Dead Sea Scrolls

written c. 250 BCE – 68 CE; found 1946–1956

Archaeology of religion — the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible

Around nine hundred manuscripts, most of them in fragments, found between 1946 and 1956 in eleven caves near Qumran on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. They pushed the oldest surviving copies of Hebrew scripture back by roughly a thousand years and gave a close view of a Jewish community living in the two centuries either side of the start of the common era. Most scholars connect them with the Essenes. The best of them are displayed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

How to spot them

  • ▸Eleven caves at Qumran; the first find made by Bedouin shepherds in 1946 or 1947
  • ▸Mostly Hebrew, with some Aramaic and a little Greek, on parchment and papyrus
  • ▸Every book of the Hebrew Bible is represented except Esther
  • ▸The white dome of the Shrine of the Book, shaped like a jar lid

Key facts

Eleven caves in the cliffs above Qumran, the first entered by a Bedouin shepherd chasing a stray goat (1946)

Muhammed edh-Dhib; the first jars came to light in 1946 or 1947

A near-complete copy of one prophet, a thousand years older than any Hebrew manuscript known before it

The Great Isaiah Scroll, 1QIsa-a, about 7.3 metres long

One document written not on parchment but hammered into sheets of copper, listing buried treasure

The Copper Scroll, 3Q15; none of the treasure has ever been found

'The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness'

The War Scroll, 1QM — a battle plan for the final apocalyptic conflict

Usually credited to the Essenes, a separatist Jewish group living by the shore

Pliny the Elder, Josephus and Philo all describe such a community

A white dome shaped like a jar lid, on the Israel Museum's campus in Jerusalem

The Shrine of the Book, opened 1965

Esther is the only book of the Hebrew Bible absent from them

Possibly because it never mentions God, or by chance of survival

A rulebook for the community, setting out the two-year admission process and the order of seating

The Community Rule, 1QS

Key ideas

  • Their value is not that they contain new scripture but that they show how stable the old text already was: the Isaiah scroll differs from the medieval Masoretic text in spelling and small variants, not in substance.

Quick-fire facts

  • •Found in eleven caves at Qumran, on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea, between 1946 and 1956
  • •About 900 to 1,000 manuscripts survive, represented by roughly 15,000 fragments
  • •Most are in Hebrew; some are Aramaic and a few Greek
  • •The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa-a) is the best preserved, and is about a thousand years older than the previously oldest known Hebrew biblical manuscripts
  • •The Copper Scroll is the only one engraved on metal, and reads as an inventory of hidden treasure
  • •The Temple Scroll is the longest of the scrolls, at over eight metres
  • •Scroll sigla give cave, site and title: 1QS is the Community Rule from Cave 1 at Qumran
  • •Four of the scrolls were advertised for sale in the Wall Street Journal in 1954 and bought by Yigael Yadin on his father's behalf
  • •They are displayed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, designed by Armand Bartos and Frederick Kiesler and opened in 1965
  • •The Book of Esther is the only book of the Hebrew Bible not found among them

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