Dead Sea Scrolls

Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of ancient Jewish texts discovered in the Qumran Caves near the Dead Sea in the West Bank. These scrolls have been of immense historical, religious, and linguistic significance, providing insight into the Second Temple period and the origins of Christianity.

Discovery

The scrolls were first discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad edh-Dhib. Over the next decade, further excavations in the area led to the discovery of eleven caves containing thousands of fragments from over 900 manuscripts. These texts are believed to have been written between the third century BCE and the first century CE.

Contents

The Dead Sea Scrolls include a wide variety of texts:

• Biblical Manuscripts: Approximately 40% of the scrolls are copies of texts from the Hebrew Bible. These include some of the oldest known copies of these texts, such as the Great Isaiah Scroll.

• Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Works: These are texts not included in the canonical Hebrew Bible, such as the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees.

• Sectarian Manuscripts: These include texts that are believed to be unique to the Essenes, a Jewish sect that some scholars associate with the community at Qumran. Examples include the Community Rule and the War Scroll.

• Commentaries and Other Texts: The scrolls also contain commentaries on biblical texts, liturgical texts, and other writings.

Significance

The Dead Sea Scrolls are significant for several reasons:

• Textual Variants: They provide evidence of the textual variants that existed in the Hebrew Bible before the standardization of the Masoretic Text.

• Historical Context: The scrolls offer insights into the religious practices, beliefs, and social structures of Jewish groups during the Second Temple period.

• Early Christianity: Some of the texts have parallels with early Christian writings, shedding light on the religious environment from which Christianity emerged.

Preservation and Publication

The preservation of the scrolls has been a major concern since their discovery. Initially, the scrolls were kept in the Palestine Archaeological Museum (now the Rockefeller Museum) in East Jerusalem. After the Six-Day War in 1967, they came under the control of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The publication of the scrolls has been a long and sometimes controversial process. Initially, access to the scrolls was restricted to a small group of scholars, but in the 1990s, the Huntington Library released photographs of the scrolls, leading to wider access and study.

See Also

• Qumran
• Second Temple Judaism
• Essenes
• Masoretic Text

References

• Schiffman, Lawrence H. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jewish Publication Society, 1994.
• VanderKam, James C., and Peter Flint. The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. HarperSanFrancisco, 2002.

External Links

• The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library
• Biblical Archaeology Society: Dead Sea Scrolls