What are the Dead Sea Scrolls, and why do they matter?

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a large collection of ancient Jewish writings, mostly fragments of parchment and papyrus, found in caves of the Judean wilderness. The best-known texts come from eleven caves near Qumran. They matter because they contain our earliest Hebrew-language copies of many works later received into the Old Testament, and because they show the religious world of Judea before the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE. According to Bible Gateway, they predate the major medieval codices of the Hebrew Scriptures by about a millennium. The Israel Antiquities Authority's scrolls site and Bible Gateway are the main sources for this article. [1] [2]

Bible Gateway describes about 930 fragmentary manuscripts discovered between 1947 and 1952, written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. The Israel site notes that most of the archive is thousands of fragments rather than intact scrolls. Dates range from the third century BCE to the first century CE. Hebrew is the most common language, about 15 percent of the texts are in Aramaic, and a few are in Greek. Most are parchment, some are papyrus, and one is engraved on copper. Other sites yielded mostly documents and letters, including papyri hidden by refugees from wars. [2] [1]

About 230 manuscripts are copies of works now in the Hebrew Bible, and the collection includes partial or complete copies of every book except Esther. The rest are other religious writings of the period, such as hymns, prayers, wisdom texts, apocalyptic texts, calendrical texts, and commentaries. Some, like Jubilees, were already known from later translations, while many others were previously unknown. About a quarter of the non-biblical manuscripts are called sectarian, because they appear to describe the beliefs and rules of a particular community. [1]

For the text of the Hebrew Bible, many biblical scrolls closely resemble the Masoretic Text, the standard text from the later first millennium CE onward. The Israel site calls this similarity remarkable given the gap of more than a thousand years. Other scrolls differ in wording and spelling, and additions and deletions suggest scribes felt free to modify what they copied. Translators use these variants, and Bible Gateway notes that modern Bibles flag scroll-based readings in footnotes. [1] [2]

The scrolls also show that the idea of a closed biblical canon came later. The Israel site says the evidence suggests the communities of the time had no unified conception of an authoritative collection of scriptures. No New Testament texts appear among the scrolls, but because they come from the same Second Temple Jewish world, they offer comparisons for phrases, interpretation, and practices found in the New Testament. The Biblical Archaeology Society adds that they rewrote not only the history of the Bible's development but the history of Judea in the late Second Temple period. [1] [2] [3]

Early researchers attributed all the Qumran scrolls to the Essenes, one of three main Jewish sects described in ancient sources. Bible Gateway presents this view, saying the texts were copied or composed by an Essene scribal community living at Qumran from around 100 BC to 68 AD. The Israel site reports that this consensus has been challenged and modified in recent years, though many scholars still link the Essenes to the scrolls. Scholars agree that some of the literature was valued by large parts of the Jewish population while other works reflect specific sub-groups, but they disagree about which communities are represented and how they interacted. The search results do not detail the specific arguments of the dissenting scholars. [2] [1]

Bible Gateway also notes that recent fragments sold to private collectors are mostly likely or confirmed forgeries, which are separate from the authentic texts found in the late 1940s to mid-1950s. [2]