The Dead Sea Scrolls

In the winter of 1946–47, a young Bedouin shepherd searching for a lost goat near the Dead Sea threw a stone into a cave and heard pottery shatter. Inside were clay jars holding ancient scrolls wrapped in linen.

Over the next decade, eleven caves near a site called Qumran yielded the remains of about 900 scrolls, most in tens of thousands of fragments. About a quarter are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible. Every book is represented except Esther.

Before 1947, the oldest substantial Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament dated to around AD 900–1000. Suddenly scholars could hold copies from the last centuries BC, roughly a thousand years older.

The most famous is the Great Isaiah Scroll, a complete copy of all 66 chapters of Isaiah from about 125 BC. When it was compared with the medieval Hebrew text, the two were overwhelmingly the same book. Most differences are spelling and small wording changes. A thousand years of hand copying had preserved Isaiah with remarkable care.

Isaiah 53 across a thousand years

Isaiah 53, the Suffering Servant passage Christians read as a prophecy of Jesus, is one of the best places to see the scrolls at work. Across the whole chapter, the Great Isaiah Scroll and the medieval text agree almost word for word. In verse 11, the scroll adds one word:

What else was in the caves

• Copies of almost every Old Testament book, often several copies each (over 30 of Psalms, over 20 of Genesis and Deuteronomy).
• Books later outside the Hebrew Bible, such as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, and Sirach.
• Commentaries, rules, hymns, and calendars of the community that kept them.

Who kept the scrolls?