What they are
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a large body of manuscripts, mostly fragments, found in caves along the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea in the area of Qumran, in the West Bank. They are not a single work but the remains of hundreds of separate scrolls, written mainly in Hebrew, with some in Aramaic and a smaller number in Greek. Most scholars date them to between about the third century BCE and the first century CE.
The mystery in the title is not whether the scrolls are genuine. They are, and their general age is well established. The open questions are who owned them, who wrote the sectarian works, why they were placed in the caves, and how they relate to the nearby ruin of Khirbet Qumran.
Discovery from 1947
The first scrolls are usually said to have been found in 1946 or 1947 by Bedouin shepherds, who entered a cave near the shore. The accounts of the discovery vary in detail, and the date, the number of finders and the sequence of sales are told differently by different sources. Seven scrolls from that first cave passed through dealers, and some reached scholars at the Hebrew University and the American Schools of Oriental Research.
News of the find spread and led to searches of the surrounding cliffs. Over the following decade, a total of eleven caves yielded manuscripts. Cave 4 was the richest, with tens of thousands of fragments from several hundred manuscripts. In all, the number of distinct manuscripts is commonly put at around 900, though counts differ depending on how fragments are joined.
What the scrolls contain
The contents fall into several groups.
- Biblical books. Fragments of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther are usually reported, with multiple copies of some, such as Psalms, Deuteronomy and Isaiah. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1 is almost complete. These texts are roughly a thousand years older than the earliest complete medieval manuscripts, and they show both close agreement with the later standard text and some variation.
- Other religious writings known from elsewhere, including works such as Enoch and Jubilees, which were not part of the later Jewish canon.
- Sectarian works not known before, such as the Community Rule, the War Scroll and commentaries on biblical books. These describe a community with its own rules, calendar and expectations about the end of days.
- The Temple Scroll, a long text that presents laws for a future temple.
- The Copper Scroll, a unique document engraved on metal that lists places where treasure was said to be hidden. Its meaning and whether the treasures were real remain debated.
The Damascus Document had been found before in medieval copies in a storeroom in Cairo, and fragments in the Qumran caves show that it was in use much earlier.
The scrolls do not mention Jesus or the first Christians. They are valuable instead for showing the variety of Jewish thought in the late Second Temple period, and the background to the world in which Christianity and rabbinic Judaism arose.
How they are dated
Dating relies on several methods. Palaeography, the study of handwriting styles, allows scholars to sort manuscripts into rough periods. Radiocarbon dating of samples from the scrolls has generally agreed with those estimates, giving a range from the later centuries BCE into the first century CE. A few documents contain internal references that help narrow dates. The methods agree well enough that the overall picture is secure, but dates for individual scrolls come with margins of error.
Who wrote and hid them?
The most widely known view, often called the Essene hypothesis, was developed in the 1950s by Roland de Vaux, who excavated Khirbet Qumran, and others. It holds that the scrolls belonged to a community of Essenes living at Qumran, a Jewish group described by ancient writers including Josephus and Pliny the Elder. Pliny places an Essene settlement near the Dead Sea. In this view the scrolls were a community library hidden in the caves when Roman legions approached during the Jewish revolt that began in 66 CE.
Critics have raised several objections. Some argue that the number and variety of manuscripts are too large and diverse to come from one small settlement, and suggest that the scrolls were brought from libraries in Jerusalem, perhaps hidden around the time of the revolt. Others interpret the Qumran ruin differently, as a villa, a fort, a pottery works or a commercial centre, not a monastic settlement. Cemeteries nearby and the presence of ritual baths have been used on both sides.
Many scholars today take a middle path. They accept that Qumran was linked to the sectarian texts and some group using them, while allowing that other manuscripts came from elsewhere and that the Essene label is partly an inference. Whether the Qumran community was Essene, a sub-group, or a related movement remains debated.
Publication and later work
Publication of the scrolls was slow. A small international team worked on the fragments from Cave 4, and many remained unpublished for decades, which led to criticism and rumours. In 1991 photographs became widely available, and publication in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series was largely completed in the following years. The Great Isaiah Scroll and several others are displayed in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, and the Israel Antiquities Authority has put high-resolution images online.
In recent years, researchers have used imaging and machine-assisted methods to match fragments. The market for Dead Sea Scroll-like fragments has also seen forgeries, and a number of fragments held in collections have been judged modern fakes, so provenance matters.
Why they matter
The scrolls give direct evidence, not later copies, of how biblical texts and Jewish writings looked around the turn of the era. They also illustrate how texts were copied in an alphabet that wrote mainly consonants, a point linked to the consonantal alphabet found across the ancient Near East. Even so, many fundamental questions about their ownership remain open, and the debate is likely to continue.