What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls? A Library Found in Eleven Caves

The collection is a library rather than a single work, written mostly in Hebrew with some Aramaic and a little Greek, on parchment and papyrus, and copied between roughly 250 BC and AD 68. Almost all of it is in fragments, and one scroll of Isaiah is nearly complete at more than seven metres long. The contents divide into three groups:

• •Biblical manuscripts, about a quarter of the total, including at least one copy of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, with Psalms, Deuteronomy and Isaiah the most numerous
• •Other Jewish writings that did not enter the Hebrew canon, including the books of Enoch and Jubilees, which were known previously only in later translations
• •Documents apparently produced by the community itself, including a manual of discipline setting out the rules for joining and living in the group, a war scroll describing a final battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness, hymns, and commentaries reading the prophets as predictions of the group's own time
• •A separate oddity, the Copper Scroll, written on metal rather than leather and listing the locations of an enormous quantity of hidden treasure, which nobody has convincingly explained or found

Before the find, the oldest substantially complete Hebrew Bible manuscripts dated from around AD 1000, which left a gap of a millennium between the texts in use and the period they came from. The scrolls close most of that gap, and the headline result surprised many people by being undramatic: the great Isaiah scroll is remarkably close to the medieval text, differing mostly in spelling and minor wording, which demonstrates that copying had been extraordinarily careful over a thousand years. The more interesting finding is that this was not the only version in circulation. Some manuscripts match the Greek Septuagint translation where it differs from the Hebrew, some match the Samaritan version, and some agree with neither, which shows that several text traditions coexisted in the period and that the standard Hebrew text was one of them rather than the original from which others deviated. Modern critical editions and translations use the scroll readings regularly.

The traditional answer connects the scrolls to Qumran, the ruined settlement beside the caves, and identifies its occupants with the Essenes, a strict Jewish sect described by Pliny, Philo and Josephus as living communally near the Dead Sea, sharing property, practising ritual washing and celibacy, and following a solar calendar. The settlement's plan, with its many ritual baths and a room containing benches and inkwells, fits, and the community documents match the Essene practices the ancient authors describe. The consensus has been challenged from several directions: some argue the site was a fort or a villa and the scrolls came from libraries in Jerusalem, hidden in the caves as the Romans advanced in AD 68; others note that the collection is too varied in handwriting, calendar and doctrine to be one group's own work. The current majority position is a compromise in which a sectarian community lived at the site and held a library that included both its own compositions and texts brought from elsewhere.

The handling of the material became a scandal in its own right. An international team appointed in the 1950s was given exclusive rights to the unpublished fragments, publication proceeded at a glacial pace, and by the late 1980s a large proportion remained unseen by anyone outside the group, with scholars who asked being refused. The deadlock broke in 1991 through three moves in quick succession: a concordance of the unpublished texts was used to reconstruct them by computer, a library in California released its complete set of photographs, and the Israel Antiquities Authority reorganised the editorial team and opened access. The full publication was eventually completed in forty volumes in 2009, and the entire collection is now photographed in high resolution and available online free of charge, which is close to the opposite of the position twenty years earlier.

Their importance is that they show what Judaism looked like in the two centuries before the destruction of the Second Temple, a period previously known mostly from later sources. They reveal a religion far more varied than the later rabbinic tradition suggests, with competing calendars, competing claims to the priesthood, intense expectation of an imminent end, and vocabulary about light and darkness, community meals, ritual washing and a coming anointed figure that overlaps strikingly with early Christian writing. That overlap has generated a long line of sensational claims that the scrolls contain suppressed information about Jesus or John the Baptist. They do not. No New Testament text and no named Christian figure appears in them, and the overlap is best explained as two movements drawing on the same Jewish setting. What they document is the world Christianity emerged from, which is a more useful thing than a secret.

Eleven caves near Qumran produced fragments of roughly nine hundred manuscripts copied between 250 BC and AD 68, including parts of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, other Jewish writings outside the canon, and rules, hymns and commentaries apparently written by the community itself. They close a thousand-year gap in the text's history, showing both careful copying and the coexistence of several versions. The likeliest authors are a sectarian group usually identified with the Essenes, access was restricted for four decades, and the collection is now free online.