The Dead Sea Scrolls are a large set of ancient manuscripts found near the Dead Sea in Israel. They are especially important because they contain very old copies of much of the Old Testament.

Qumran

To first set the scene, we have to look at the area where this archaeological goldmine was discovered.

About a mile northwest of the Dead Sea, there is an area of desert and rocks with a large, dry ravine. A few times a year this ravine turns into a raging river when heavy rainfall hits.

Next to this ravine, there is a large, steep plateau. Nothing but steep cliffs and bare rock.

At the top of the plateau, however, there are remains of a small, ancient settlement.

This settlement is called Qumran. (It seems that people only started calling the area Qumran at some point in the 1800s.)

Thanks to later excavations of the site, we know that the settlement had a couple large buildings, several cisterns for water, and some sort of tower. Different scholars estimate that anywhere from a couple dozen to, at most, 200 people might have lived here at any given time.

There is significant debate as to who exactly settled this place. Some scholars guess that it was originally a fortress. That would explain the tower.

Some think it was a small trading settlement or a rural villa.

But, whatever it originally was, most scholars agree that Qumran eventually became the home for a group of Jews called the Essenes.

The Essenes

Josephus, a first century Jewish historian, wrote that in the first century there were three main Jewish sects: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.

We already know about the tradition-loving Pharisees and the afterlife-denying Sadducees from the New Testament.

But, who are the Essenes?

According to Josephus and other ancient writers, the Essenes were a group of no more than a few thousand Jews who lived a very strict life.

I can’t think of any better way to describe them than to say they were basically like medieval Christian monks. The Essenes lived separate from the rest of the world (like at Qumran), didn’t allow their priests to marry, didn’t use money, and had a very communal lifestyle with other Essenes.

And, very critically, just like later Christian monks, the Essenes also loved preserving written records of religious texts.

Thanks to the content of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the discovery of a communal dining hall at Qumran, and the finding of a room dedicated to writing documents, most scholars assert that Qumran was an Essene settlement at some point.

The Fall Of Qumran

Well, why is this settlement in ruins?

Because from 66-73 AD, there was a big ole’ war between the Jews and their Roman masters. The Jews got fed up with serving Rome, so they revolted. That didn’t go so well for them.

Jerusalem got sacked in 70 AD, and the Roman legions ransacked the countryside, killing many and enslaving most of the rest.

The documents at Qumran date from way back to the 2nd Century BC all the way to some time in the late 1st Century AD. Because of this, most scholars think that the Essenes were forced to flee or just outright killed by the Romans during this Great Jewish Revolt. Some scholars even believe that the Romans occupied Qumran as a fort for a few years afterwards.

But now you’re wondering. “If the Essenes copied a bunch of documents, how come the Romans didn’t destroy them when they took Qumran?”

And the answer to that is

The Caves of Qumran

Along the steep cliffs of the plateau where Qumran sits, there are many small caves. Caves that are very difficult to get to.

It is believed that during the Great Jewish Revolt, the Essenes living at Qumran hid all their scrolls and papers in these caves to keep them safe from the Romans. Alternatively, the Essenes might have used the caves as storerooms for a long time.

Either way, what we know for sure is that someone, at some point, put many, many scrolls into these caves.

And there they sat.

For two thousand years.

The Discovery Of The Dead Sea Scrolls

In November 1946, three local shepherds were grazing a herd of goats on the limited vegetation in the region northwest of the Dead Sea.

There are two stories of why what happened next happened. First, one of the shepherds might have been looking for a lost goat. Second, he might have just been bored.

Either way, at some point, one of these three young men ended up throwing a rock into a cave he could see a little ways up the cliffside. He expected the rock to clatter to the ground of the cave. Innocent fun.

But instead, he heard the shattering of pottery.

Now very curious, he walked up this steep cliff to get into the cave. Inside, he found a number of old looking jars and pottery shards. When he opened some of the containers, he found very old looking papers, rolled up as scrolls.

Together with the two other men, he took seven of these scrolls back to the rest of their families. After some deliberation, they eventually took these scrolls to a local marketplace, hoping to make some money.

Sources are unclear, but it seems they were able to sell all seven of these scrolls to two different people, three to one and four to the other. In one of the purchases, the shepherds got 7 Jordanian Pounds (equivalent to maybe a little over $400 today).

The Scramble For More

When these scrolls got into the open market, they quickly began to make the rounds. Several scholars at the time were shocked at the quality and ancientness of these scrolls.

As the popularity of these scrolls grew, the locals, like the shepherds, began looking for more documents to get even more money by selling them.

However, at the time there was trouble in the Middle East (shocking, I know). So, it took over two years before any official archaeology team began to explore the caves around Qumran.

In January 1949, a team of archaeologists finally rediscovered the cave where the seven scrolls had been found. This cave is now called Cave 1. Eventually, there would also be Caves 2-11.

Excavations would go on until 1956. During the seven or so years that archaeologists were searching this area, they discovered a total of eleven caves that contained ancient writings, and they studied the ruins of the settlement at Qumran.

Locals also discovered another set of caves at this time when they were looking for more scrolls to sell. These caves are located on a cliffside in an area called Wadi Murabba’at. From these caves, we have mainly legal and political documents that tell us more about the Third Jewish Revolt that took place in the 130s AD.

And, in 2017, archaeologists discovered a twelfth cave which contained broken jars and scroll cases, and modern pickaxes. There were no scrolls left in this cave. The main theory is that during the scramble for scrolls and profit in the 1950s, some locals found this cave and stole all the scrolls it had. They then would have sold them on the black market.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Alright, we’ve looked at the area of Qumran and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls that took place from 1946-1956.

But, what exactly are these Dead Sea Scrolls that everyone is so excited about?

Well, to give a quick summary, there are around 1,000 distinct manuscripts, made up of anywhere from 15,000-100,000 fragments (depending on how you define fragment). So, straight away, we can tell that most of the documents are torn into small shreds. But, scholars have pieced much of them back together.

Around 20% of these writings are copies of Books of the Old Testament. The rest are writings about all sorts of other things, still mostly religious writings though.

The scrolls contain at least part of every single book of the Old Testament, except for Esther, and maybe Nehemiah.

About 85% of the documents are written in Hebrew, most of the rest in Aramaic, then a few in Greek, and a small handful in a language called Nabataean.

Now, the really, really important thing about these documents is that they contain the oldest copies of the Old Testament in Hebrew that we have.

You see, the oldest complete copies we have of the Old Testament in Hebrew dated back to about 1000 AD. And the oldest copies we had of any of the Old Testament were fragments from a Greek translation that dated back to maybe the 1st or 2nd centuries BC.

But now, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, our oldest copies from the original language of the Old Testament (Hebrew) go back over a thousand years earlier than the next oldest copies we have!

What does this mean for Bible translations and Christians around the world?

Well, it meant that scholars could analyze these copies of the Hebrew Bible that predated Christ and compare them to our modern Bibles. That way the atheists could show the Bible has been corrupted so much over the millennia and can’t be trusted… except that’s not what happened.

You see, these copies of books from the Old Testament matched up nearly exactly with the more modern translations we already had. The Dead Sea Scrolls did help clarify some grammar and word choice in certain passages (like Isaiah 53:11), but there were no really major differences between their contents and what we have in our modern Bibles. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, we can even see how meticulous the Jews were with copying the Old Testament back then; there are certain sections where people crossed out their mistakes when they skipped a word or something similar and put the correct word above or below the error.

Examples

To finish this up, there are two specific scrolls I want to point out because they are just fascinating.

The Great Isaiah Scroll

One of those first seven scrolls that the shepherds found in the first cave was “The Great Isaiah Scroll”. This was the only complete Book of the Bible found among the caves at Qumran. It was a 23 foot long scroll of animal skin that shows the entire Book of Isaiah, minus a couple verses in areas where the parchment got damaged. Some estimate that this scroll was copied in about 125 BC.

The Copper Scroll

All of the scrolls and fragments found at Qumran were made of animal skin or papyrus. All except one.

The Copper Scroll was made of, wouldn’t you guess it, copper! It was originally a thin sheet of copper that could be unrolled. But, by the time archaeologists discovered it, the metal had become so corroded that it would have snapped to pieces if they tried to unroll it.

So, instead, they had it cut down the middle and took it apart in 23 pieces so that they could read what it said. Unlike the other scrolls which were mainly religious writings, the Copper Scroll is a sort of treasure map!

It lists 64 different areas where different items of treasure (mainly gold or silver) have been buried. The instructions are all too vague to let us know exactly where it’s talking about. Some archaeologists went out trying to follow the directions to some of the treasures, but they came up empty-handed. If the treasure is real, the Romans might have taken it after interrogating Jews who knew about it.

There’s lots of debate about what the treasure might have been. A decent number of scholars think it was some sort of treasure stored in the Temple of Jerusalem sent away for safekeeping. No one’s really too sure though. It definitely sounds strange for a bunch of moneyless hermits to be responsible for hiding the treasures of the temple.

Summary

Alright, that was a lot.

In short, the Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient scrolls found near the Dead Sea that contain very ancient Biblical manuscripts. They were likely stored away in caves by a Jewish group called the Essenes before being abandoned for two thousand years after the Great Jewish Revolt in the first century. Then, a group of shepherds found them randomly in 1946, setting off a decade of archaeological discovery. The Dead Sea Scrolls give us new knowledge about ancient Israel and help confirm the consistency and continuity of the Old Testament that we have today and they had back then.