Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of roughly 900 manuscripts, most surviving only as fragments, found between 1946 and 1956 in eleven caves near the ruins of Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank. Composed over some four centuries, from about the third century BC to the first century AD, and written mainly in Hebrew with significant portions in Aramaic and a smaller amount in Greek, the collection includes the oldest known copies of nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible, a large body of para-biblical and apocryphal literature, and previously unknown sectarian texts describing the beliefs, rules and calendar of the community, widely though not universally identified with the Essenes, believed to have owned and hidden them. Their discovery, beginning with a Bedouin shepherd's chance find in a cave in 1947, transformed scholarship on the textual history of the Hebrew Bible, on Second Temple Judaism, and on the Jewish background from which early Christianity emerged, since the scrolls predate by roughly a thousand years the oldest complete Hebrew Bible manuscripts previously known. Most of the scrolls are held today by the Israel Antiquities Authority, with the best-preserved examples displayed in the purpose-built Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.