DJD Project

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What are the scrolls and where were they found?

The Dead Sea Scrolls are considered by many to be the single most important archaeological find of the twentieth century. They comprise more than 800 documents, some complete or nearly complete (such as the Isaiah Scroll), but many quite fragmentary. There are about 100,000 fragments in all. Most of the scrolls are made of dried animal skins (parchment), and some of the larger ones stretch as long as 30 feet.

Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts were written on the scrolls in columns. Containing all or part of every book of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) with the exception of Esther, the scrolls also include many non-biblical books, some previously known only in Greek or other languages, but now found in Hebrew. There are many compositions which were previously completely unknown.

Most of the scrolls were discovered in caves along the western shore of the Dead Sea from 1947 to 1956. The most famous of these are the eleven caves near Qumran, where a community lived which some scholars identify as Essenes, a Jewish sect known to have existed elsewhere in Israel during the Second Temple period, which includes the time of Jesus. Scrolls were also discovered at several other locations north and south of Qumran, and in the 1960s scrolls were unearthed during the excavation of Masada. A few have been discovered during the past decade.
 

Why are the scrolls important?

The scrolls comprise, among other things, the oldest copies of the Bible in existence. The Qumran scrolls date from approximately 250 B.C. to about 65 A.D., and at some other locations to about 135 A.D. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest existing manuscripts of parts of the Hebrew Bible came from about 800-1,000 A.D. The oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, dates to 1008 A.D. This means that the Dead Sea Scrolls give us texts of the Bible which were copied more than 1000 years earlier than any others now in existence!

The scrolls are also important because they have enabled scholars to gather an immense amount of information about how the Bible was written and how it was transmitted from generation to generation. In many cases the scrolls show a remarkable similarity to the text of the Hebrew Bible currently in use. In some cases differences between the scrolls and the traditional Hebrew text help explain difficulties in the present Hebrew Bible, and most modern translations of the Bible (such as the NIV) incorporate some of the new information from the scrolls.

Another crucial feature of the scrolls is the picture they portray of the Judaism of Jesus’ day. The scrolls show that Judaism in that period was more diverse than was once thought, and the literary parallels between the Gospels and the literature of Qumran demonstrate several instructive points of contact between Jesus’ teaching and the Judaism of his day.

Where are they now and what is their present availability?

Almost all of the scrolls are in Jerusalem. A few are in Jordan and Europe. The few scrolls on display at the Shrine of the Book are accessible to all. Most of the, others, extremely fragile and many fragmentary, are stored in a vault on the campus of the Israel Museum in a small temperature and humidity controlled vault. Nearby is a small laboratory where several conservators are now engaged in the lengthy process of remounting and preserving the scrolls. Any scholar who has a legitimate reason to view the actual scrolls may receive permission to do so, but they are rarely seen except by those who are actually preparing them for publication by Oxford University Press in what will eventually be a forty-eight volume series entitled Discoveries in the Judaean Desert. These volumes will form the basis for all future translations and studies of the scrolls.

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