The Dead Sea Scrolls
The Hebrew text of the Bible can be compared directly across a thousand years of copying, instead of assumed.
Named outside the BibleManuscript3rd century BC – 1st century AD
Some 25,000 fragments from roughly 900 manuscripts, including parts of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther. Before 1947 the oldest complete Hebrew Bible manuscripts were medieval; the scrolls pushed the witness back by a thousand years, and made it possible to check what a millennium of copying had done to the text.
Parts of about 230 biblical manuscripts, the oldest dating to the third century BC.
- Found
- Eleven caves near Qumran, by the Dead Sea, 1947 — Bedouin shepherds, then a decade of excavation
- Now held at
- Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Jordan Museum, Amman; and others
- Language
- Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
- How it reached us
- Dug up, or still standing where it was built.
What it shows
The picture is more varied than a single scroll suggests: some books are strikingly stable, others show real textual variety, and the scrolls also contain non-biblical works of the community that kept them. All of that is part of the finding.
How historians use it
The foundation of modern textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, and a primary source for Second Temple Judaism.
In Scripture
Connects to
Sources
- The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls (Israel Museum)
- Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (2012)
These summaries are written in English for now. Translations follow.