The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Discovery That Changed Bible Studies

In late 1946 or early 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd searching for a lost goat near the northwest shore of the Dead Sea threw a stone into a cave and heard pottery break. Inside were clay jars holding ancient scrolls. That accident began the most important archaeological find in biblical studies.

Over the following decade, archaeologists and Bedouin searchers explored eleven caves around Qumran and found the remains of some 900 manuscripts, most of them in thousands of fragments. They date roughly from the third century BCE to the first century CE and are written mainly in Hebrew, with some in Aramaic and Greek.

About a quarter of them are books of the Hebrew Bible, every book except Esther is represented, and they are around a thousand years older than the previous oldest known Hebrew copies. The Great Isaiah Scroll, nearly complete, showed how remarkably carefully the text had been passed down. The rest include previously unknown religious writings, hymns, commentaries and community rules describing a strict, separatist group.

Who wrote them? The most common view links the scrolls to the Essenes, a Jewish sect that lived communally at the nearby site of Qumran, but scholars still debate whether the scrolls came from there or were hidden by others, perhaps from Jerusalem, during the Roman revolt of 66-70 CE.

You can visit Qumran National Park, see the ruins of the settlement and look across at Cave 4, which held most of the fragments. In Jerusalem, the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, with its white dome shaped like a jar lid, displays the scrolls in rotation.

We can fit Qumran into our Masada and Dead Sea or Holy Jerusalem and Dead Sea tours. Contact us to plan it.