Bible Synapse
Great Isaiah Scroll
Manuscript · c. 125 BC · Bible manuscripts · also called Isaiah Scroll, 1QIsaa
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- c. 125 BC (the copying (estimate from the handwriting; radiocarbon tests give a wider range))
- Found
- Qumran Cave 1, near the Dead Sea, 1947. Found by Ta’amireh Bedouin shepherds in Cave 1 in the winter of 1946–47. The Bethlehem dealer Kando sold it to Archbishop Samuel of St Mark’s Monastery in Jerusalem, who took it to the United States; Yigael Yadin bought it for Israel in 1954.
- Now
- Israel Museum (Shrine of the Book), Jerusalem
- Passages
- Isaiah 53:11
What it is
A leather scroll about 7.3 metres long, made of 17 sheets sewn together and written in 54 columns. It holds the whole Book of Isaiah in Hebrew, apart from a few small damaged patches, and is the only biblical scroll from the Qumran caves to survive almost complete.
How it connects to the Bible
It is a copy of Isaiah made roughly a thousand years before the oldest medieval Hebrew manuscripts of the book. Its text broadly agrees with the later standard Hebrew text, but it differs in more than 2,600 places, mostly in spelling and small details, and later hands corrected it in places. In the suffering-servant passage, at Isaiah 53:11, its wording sides with the Greek Septuagint against the standard Hebrew text, whose line there is hard to construe.