The Dead Sea Scrolls

In the winter of 1946–47 Bedouin shepherds of the Ta‘amireh tribe, searching for a lost animal according to the usual account, entered a cave in the cliffs near Qumran and found tall clay jars containing leather scrolls. Seven scrolls from this first cave reached scholars through antiquities dealers. Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University bought three in 1947, and the other four, sold by the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan Mar Samuel, were bought by Sukenik’s son Yigael Yadin in 1954.

Between 1949 and 1956 Bedouin and archaeologists, including the Dominican scholar Roland de Vaux, explored the area and found ten more caves. Cave 4 alone held fragments of hundreds of manuscripts. De Vaux also excavated the nearby site of Qumran, a settlement occupied from roughly the first century BCE until it was destroyed by Roman forces around 68 CE, during the First Jewish Revolt.

The manuscripts include biblical books, commentaries, hymns, calendars, legal texts and community rules such as the Community Rule and the War Scroll. One unusual text, the Copper Scroll, is engraved on metal and lists places where treasure was supposedly hidden. Today many of the scrolls are kept in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The biblical scrolls are of great importance for the history of the Bible. They show that the Hebrew text familiar from later medieval manuscripts was already well established, but also that other versions circulated alongside it. Some match the Greek Septuagint or the Samaritan Pentateuch more closely than the later standard Hebrew text. The scrolls also preserve parts of works such as 1 Enoch and Jubilees in their original languages.

The non-biblical texts reveal a Jewish group that saw itself as a community of the new covenant, followed a solar calendar, observed strict rules of purity and expected a final battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. Many scholars identify this group with the Essenes, a Jewish movement described by ancient writers such as Josephus and Pliny the Elder. Others argue that the scrolls came from several groups, or were brought to the caves from Jerusalem, and the relationship between the caves and the Qumran settlement remains debated.

The scrolls do not mention Jesus, John the Baptist or any early Christian. They are nonetheless valuable for understanding the Judaism from which Christianity emerged, since they share ideas about messiahs, the end of days and righteous living with some New Testament writings. Later finds at other sites in the Judaean Desert, such as Masada and the caves of Wadi Murabba‘at and Nahal Hever, added letters, legal documents and further biblical fragments, including letters from the leader of the second Jewish revolt, Simon bar Kosiba, known as Bar Kokhba.

After the first finds were published quickly, the vast fragments from Cave 4 were assigned to a small team of editors. Publication proceeded very slowly, and by the 1980s many texts were still unavailable to other researchers. Frustration grew, and so did speculation. Some popular books, notably Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh’s The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception in 1991, suggested that the delay concealed material damaging to the Church. Scholars generally rejected these claims, attributing the delay to the difficulty of the work and to the editors’ possessiveness.

In 1991 the Huntington Library in California made its photographs of the scrolls available to everyone, and other unauthorised editions appeared. The official team was expanded under Emanuel Tov, and the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert was essentially completed by the early 2000s. Nothing published supported the theories of a hidden secret.

The scrolls’ fame has also attracted fraud. Since 2002 many fragments have appeared on the antiquities market, and in 2018 the Museum of the Bible in Washington announced that several of its fragments were modern forgeries. The Copper Scroll still inspires treasure hunters, although no treasure has been found. For millions of people, the scrolls remain a powerful link to the world of ancient Judaism.