A discovery in the Judean Desert

The first scrolls were found in 1946 or 1947 by Bedouin shepherds in a cave near Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. Over the following years, searches uncovered manuscripts and fragments in eleven caves in the area.

Altogether the finds amount to fragments of roughly nine hundred to one thousand manuscripts, many of them in tiny pieces that scholars have spent decades sorting and joining.

What the scrolls contain

The collection includes copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, along with other Jewish writings from the period, such as community rules, hymns, commentaries and legal texts. Scholars commonly date the manuscripts from about the third century BCE to the first century CE.

Fragments of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther are usually reported among the finds. The Great Isaiah Scroll is the most complete biblical manuscript from the collection and is displayed at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem.

Why scholars value them

Before the discovery, the oldest known Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible were many centuries younger. The scrolls therefore let researchers compare much older copies with later medieval texts.

In many places the texts are very close to later versions, and in others they show variations. This helps scholars study how texts were copied and how different versions circulated in the period before the Hebrew Bible was fixed in its later form.

Open questions

Who owned or wrote the scrolls is still debated. A common view links them to a Jewish group often identified as the Essenes, but other scholars propose different explanations, including that the manuscripts came from various libraries and were hidden for safekeeping.

Good summaries mark these points as interpretations. The manuscripts themselves are physical evidence, and the arguments about who used them are inferences.

Claims to treat carefully

Popular stories sometimes say the scrolls were hidden because they contain information that institutions fear. Researchers do not find support for this in the publications and records. Large parts of the collection have been published, and the Israel Antiquities Authority has placed high-resolution images online.

You can look at many of the manuscripts yourself, which is a good habit with any strong claim about a historical source. Check what the text actually says before accepting a summary of what it supposedly means.