Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a library of roughly 900 to 1,000 ancient Jewish manuscripts, recovered from eleven caves near Qumran on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956. Written for the most part on parchment, with some papyrus and one text on copper, they date from about the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE and are the oldest substantial body of Jewish scripture and religious writing to survive from antiquity.

They fall into three broad groups. Roughly a quarter are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, among them the Great Isaiah Scroll, a nearly complete manuscript a thousand years older than any Hebrew Bible previously known. A second group consists of other Jewish works of the period, apocrypha, wisdom texts, expansions of biblical stories. The third and most distinctive group are the "sectarian" writings, such as the Community Rule and the War Scroll, that lay out the beliefs, discipline and expectations of a strict Jewish movement. Together they transformed the study of the Hebrew Bible's text and of Judaism on the eve of Christianity. The best-preserved are displayed at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem.

The discovery is usually dated to 1947, when Bedouin of the Ta'amireh tribe came upon jars of scrolls in a cave at Qumran. Over the next nine years archaeologists and Bedouin between them located eleven caves, yielding intact scrolls and tens of thousands of fragments. Excavation of the nearby ruin of Qumran revealed a communal settlement with cisterns and a large writing or dining hall, which many scholars connected with the scrolls.

Assembling and publishing the fragments took decades, and access to the unpublished material became a scholarly controversy in its own right before the full corpus was released in the early 1990s. The manuscripts passed, with the territory, from Jordanian to Israeli control after 1967; today the Israel Antiquities Authority conserves the great majority and has digitised them, while the finest scrolls are exhibited at the Shrine of the Book, purpose-built as a wing of the Israel Museum. A portion excavated during the Jordanian period remains in Amman.

Custody is politically contested. Because Qumran lies in the West Bank, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority have both challenged Israeli possession of material taken after 1967, and individual purchases and sales of fragments have raised further disputes. These questions of ownership are separate from the authenticity of the manuscripts, which is not in doubt.

The genuineness of the main Qumran scrolls is not in dispute. Two independent dating methods converge on the same window: palaeography, the study of how the Hebrew and Aramaic scripts developed, and radiocarbon dating of the parchment itself. Both place the corpus between roughly the 3rd century BCE and 70 CE, and the Great Isaiah Scroll in particular has been dated to around 125 BCE. This agreement, together with the archaeological context of the caves, puts the antiquity of the collection beyond reasonable doubt.

Two genuine debates continue. The first is authorship: the long-dominant view links the scrolls to the Essenes and to the community at Qumran, but a significant minority argues that the manuscripts came from libraries in Jerusalem and were hidden in the desert during the First Jewish Revolt, the caves serving only as a hiding place. The second concerns modern forgeries: from 2002 a wave of small "post-2002" fragments appeared on the antiquities market, and several high-profile examples, including all sixteen fragments once held by the Museum of the Bible in Washington, were shown by scientific analysis in 2020 to be modern fakes. These forgeries involve recently produced pieces sold as scrolls, not the authentic Qumran manuscripts, and their exposure has sharpened scholarly caution about unprovenanced fragments while leaving the original corpus untouched.