Bible Synapse
Dead Sea Scrolls
Manuscript · 3rd century BC – 1st century AD · Bible manuscripts
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- 3rd century BC – 1st century AD (the copying of the scrolls (estimates from handwriting and radiocarbon tests))
- Found
- Qumran caves, near the north-west shore of the Dead Sea, 1947. Ta’amireh Bedouin found the first scrolls in Cave 1 in the winter of 1946–47. Between 1949 and 1956 Roland de Vaux and Gerald Lankester Harding explored the area, and Bedouin and archaeologists between them found scrolls in eleven caves.
- Now
- Israel Museum (Shrine of the Book) and the Israel Antiquities Authority, Jerusalem
- Passages
- 1 Samuel 11:1–2
What it is
More than 900 manuscripts, most of them now in fragments, hidden in caves near Qumran above the Dead Sea and written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. They include copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible, other Jewish writings of the period such as Jubilees and Enoch, and texts belonging to the community that kept them, such as the Community Rule and the War Scroll.
How it connects to the Bible
Parts of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther have been identified among them, copied about a thousand years before the medieval codices that had been the oldest Hebrew Bibles known. Most of the biblical scrolls agree closely with the later standard (Masoretic) text, but some differ, which shows the wording was not yet fully fixed. A copy of Samuel from Cave 4 has an extra paragraph, missing from the standard text, explaining why “Nahash the Ammonite” besieged Jabesh-gilead.
What scholars debate
Who owned and hid the scrolls is debated: a common view links them to the Essenes, a Jewish group described by ancient writers, but other explanations have been proposed.