In the winter of 1946–47, a young Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib, of the Ta’amireh tribe, was looking for a stray goat among the cliffs near the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. He threw a stone into an opening in the rock and heard something break. When he and his companions later climbed in, they found tall clay jars, and inside some of them, bundles of old leather wrapped in linen.

Those bundles were the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Over the next decade, eleven caves near the ruins of Khirbet Qumran would yield the remains of roughly nine hundred manuscripts, written between about the third century BCE and the first century CE. Among them are the oldest copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible ever found.

The first seven scrolls

The Bedouin took the scrolls to Bethlehem, where they eventually came to a cobbler and antiquities dealer, Khalil Iskander Shahin, known as Kando. From there the first seven scrolls were divided between two buyers.

  • Four went to Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan of Jerusalem, at St Mark’s Monastery. They were the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa-a), the Community Rule, a commentary on Habakkuk, and the badly damaged Genesis Apocryphon.
  • Three were bought by Eleazar Sukenik, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University. They were a second, fragmentary Isaiah scroll (1QIsa-b), the War Scroll, and the Thanksgiving Hymns. Sukenik made his first purchase on 29 November 1947, the same day the United Nations voted to partition Palestine.

Scholars at the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, including John Trever and Millar Burrows, photographed Mar Samuel’s scrolls in early 1948. Trever compared the script of the Isaiah scroll with the Nash Papyrus, a small Hebrew text then thought to be the oldest known, and sent photographs to the archaeologist William F. Albright, who replied that it was “the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times.” The announcement was made in April 1948.

Mar Samuel took his four scrolls to the United States. Unable to sell them for years, he placed a small advertisement in the Wall Street Journal on 1 June 1954 offering “The Four Dead Sea Scrolls.” It was answered, through intermediaries, on behalf of Yigael Yadin, Sukenik’s son, who bought them for the State of Israel for $250,000. All seven of the first scrolls are now displayed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, a building designed to look like the lid of one of the jars in which they were found.

Eleven caves

Once it was known that the scrolls were valuable, the Bedouin searched the area thoroughly, and often found caves before the archaeologists. The official excavations were led by Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique in Jerusalem and Gerald Lankester Harding of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, who explored Cave 1 in 1949 and then dug the nearby settlement of Khirbet Qumran from 1951 to 1956.

  • Cave 1 gave the first seven scrolls and fragments of dozens more.
  • Cave 3 (1952) held the Copper Scroll, a list of hidden treasure engraved on metal, still not explained.
  • Cave 4 (1952), found by the Bedouin within sight of the settlement, was the richest of all. It held some 15,000 fragments from more than 500 different manuscripts, many no bigger than a postage stamp.
  • Cave 11 (1956) gave several well-preserved scrolls, including a large Psalms scroll and the Temple Scroll, which Yadin acquired in 1967.

In 2017, archaeologists from the Hebrew University announced a twelfth cave near Qumran, containing broken jars and a blank scroll but no texts: probably looted long ago.

Other sites in the Judean desert produced related finds: biblical scrolls at Masada, the fortress where Jewish rebels held out against Rome until 73 or 74 CE; documents and biblical texts at Wadi Murabba’at and Nahal Hever from the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE); and a Greek scroll of the Minor Prophets from Nahal Hever. As recently as 2021, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced new fragments of that Greek scroll, from Zechariah and Nahum, found in the “Cave of Horror.”

What is in the collection?

The roughly nine hundred manuscripts fall into three broad groups.

Biblical manuscripts. More than two hundred of the Qumran manuscripts are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible. Every book is represented except Esther (and Nehemiah, which ancient Jews counted as one book with Ezra). The most frequently copied are Psalms, Deuteronomy, Genesis and Isaiah. Most are fragmentary; the Great Isaiah Scroll is the only one that is complete.

Other Jewish writings known before 1947. These include books such as Tobit, Sirach and Jubilees, and parts of 1 Enoch, some found for the first time in their original languages.

Writings previously unknown. Rules for a community, hymns, prayers, calendars, commentaries on prophetic books, legal texts and visions of the end of the age. These are the texts that sparked most of the public debate.

Who wrote them?

De Vaux concluded that the scrolls belonged to a community living at Qumran, and identified it with the Essenes, a Jewish group described by Josephus, Philo and the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, who places Essenes on the western shore of the Dead Sea (Natural History 5.73). This remains the majority view, though in modified forms. Some scholars, such as Norman Golb, argued that the scrolls came from libraries in Jerusalem, hidden in the caves before the Romans destroyed the city in 70 CE. Others think Qumran was one of several Essene settlements, and that the scrolls were collected over a long period.

For the history of the Bible, the question matters less than it might seem. Whoever owned them, the biblical scrolls were copied by Jewish scribes over several centuries, and many were clearly brought to Qumran from elsewhere. They show what the text of the Hebrew Bible looked like in the last centuries before Jesus.

Dating the scrolls

How do we know how old they are? Three independent methods agree.

  • Archaeology. Pottery and coins at Qumran show that the settlement was occupied from the late second or early first century BCE and destroyed by the Romans around 68 CE.
  • Palaeography. The study of handwriting allows scholars to place scripts in a sequence. Frank Moore Cross’s classic study of Jewish scripts dated most of the scrolls between about 250 BCE and 68 CE.
  • Radiocarbon dating. Tests carried out in Zurich in 1990–91 and in Tucson in 1994, on samples from a range of scrolls, gave dates broadly in agreement with the palaeographic estimates.

The long road to publication

The scrolls from Cave 1 were published quickly. Cave 4 was a different matter. Its tens of thousands of fragments were entrusted to a small international team, who spent years sorting, joining and identifying them. Publication in the official series, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD), was slow, and by the 1980s many texts were still unpublished, more than thirty years after their discovery.

Frustration boiled over in 1991. Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg used a concordance prepared by the team to reconstruct unpublished texts by computer; the Biblical Archaeology Society published a facsimile edition of photographs; and the Huntington Library in California announced that it would allow access to its set of photographs. The monopoly was broken. Meanwhile, under a new editor-in-chief, Emanuel Tov, appointed in 1990, the official team was greatly enlarged, and the DJD series was essentially completed in the 2000s, with some forty volumes.

Today anyone can view high-resolution images of the scrolls online, through the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library and the Israel Museum’s Digital Dead Sea Scrolls project.

Why it matters

Before 1947, the oldest substantial Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament dated from around 900–1000 CE. Overnight, scholars had copies roughly a thousand years older. The next two articles look at what those copies show: first the Great Isaiah Scroll, and then what the scrolls show about the Bible’s text as a whole.

Sources

  • Cross, Frank Moore. “The Development of the Jewish Scripts.” In The Bible and the Ancient Near East, edited by G. Ernest Wright, 133–202. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961.
  • de Vaux, Roland. Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Schweich Lectures 1959. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
  • Fields, Weston W. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Full History. Vol. 1. Leiden: Brill, 2009.
  • Golb, Norman. Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret of Qumran. New York: Scribner, 1995.
  • Jull, A. J. Timothy, et al. “Radiocarbon Dating of Scrolls and Linen Fragments from the Judean Desert.” Radiocarbon 37 (1995): 11–19.
  • Magness, Jodi. The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021.
  • VanderKam, James C., and Peter Flint. The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002.
  • Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library: deadseascrolls.org.il.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.