English 
Chinese 
Dutch 
Arabic 
Spanish 
Portuguese 
Russian 
French 
Italian 
German 
Japanese 
Continue reading with a subscription
Get unlimited access to all our premium content and exclusive features.
Enjoy unlimited access, cancel anytime.
Summary
- The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish writings, most of them now in fragments, that lay hidden for about two thousand years in eleven caves near Qumran and were found between 1947 and 1956.
- Bedouin shepherds looking for a stray goat found the first cave, and its seven scrolls passed through dealers, a Syrian Orthodox archbishop and an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal before all seven came together at the Hebrew University in 1955.
- About 230 of the scrolls are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, and every book turns up except Esther, so long as we count Ezra and Nehemiah as one book.
- The Great Isaiah Scroll, copied about 125 years before Christ, holds all 66 chapters of Isaiah and in general agrees with the Hebrew Bibles of the Middle Ages, though it has well over 2,600 variant readings, two of which we can check in our own Bibles at Isaiah 2:9–10 and 53:11.
- Most scholars still link the scrolls with the Essenes whom Pliny and Josephus describe, while others, such as Norman Golb, think several Jewish communities in Jerusalem wrote them and hid them before the Roman siege of AD 70.
- The scrolls never mention Jesus or John the Baptist, but the Community Rule and the Gospels both turn to Isaiah 40:3, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord”, and hear it in two different ways.
Bibliography (Click to show)
- Scripture is quoted from the King James Version (Isaiah 2:9–10; 40:3; 40:8; 53:11; Matthew 3:1–3; Luke 1:80; 4:17; 4:20; 7:20–22; 24:44; 1 Peter 1:24–25), with Isaiah 53:11 and its footnote from the New International Version (BibleGateway) and Luke 4:17–20 in the SBL Greek New Testament (BibleGateway).
- The Epistle of Jeremiah as Baruch chapter 6 in a Catholic Bible: New American Bible, Revised Edition, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: bible.usccb.org.
- Israel Antiquities Authority, The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, “Introduction”, “Discovery and Publication”, “Discovery Sites”, “Scrolls Content” and “Historical Timeline”: deadseascrolls.org.il.
- The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls: “The Great Isaiah Scroll”, “Discovery”, “Nature and Significance”, “The Qumran Community” and “The Shrine of the Book”: dss.collections.imj.org.il.
- Adolfo Roitman, “The Dead Sea Scrolls: Isaiah Scroll, Manuscript B”, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution: asia.si.edu.
- Library of Congress, Scrolls from the Dead Sea (exhibition, 1993): “Introduction”, “The Qumran Community”, “The Qumran Library”, “Two Thousand Years Later” and “Conclusion”: loc.gov.
- Sidnie White Crawford, “Has Every Book of the Bible Been Found Among the Dead Sea Scrolls?”, Bible Review 12 (October 1996): University of Nebraska-Lincoln repository.
- John J. Collins, “The wilderness in Jewish and Christian tradition”, The Jerusalem Report, 27 June 2018: jpost.com.
- Megan Sauter, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament”, Bible History Daily, Biblical Archaeology Society, on James C. VanderKam’s article in Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April 2015): biblicalarchaeology.org.
- UChicago News, “Norman Golb, renowned scholar of medieval Jewish history, 1928–2020”: news.uchicago.edu.
- Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, book 5, chapter 15, translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley (1855), Perseus Digital Library: perseus.tufts.edu.
- Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, book 2, chapter 8, translated by William Whiston, Project Gutenberg: gutenberg.org.
- James Strong, Greek Dictionary of the New Testament (entries 380, 975 and 4428), Open Scriptures edition: github.com/openscriptures/strongs.
- Michael Greshko, “‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ at the Museum of the Bible are all forgeries”, National Geographic, 13 March 2020: nationalgeographic.com.
Leave a Reply