What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls?

The most important manuscript discovery in the history of the Bible was, by most accounts, an accident — a thrown stone, a cave, and jars that had sat sealed for two thousand years.

The discovery

In 1947, near the ruins of Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, a Bedouin shepherd is said to have thrown a stone into a cave opening and heard it strike pottery. Inside were clay jars holding leather and papyrus scrolls, wrapped in linen, some remarkably intact after roughly two thousand years in the dry desert air. Over the following decade, archaeologists and Bedouin searchers located ten more caves, eventually recovering fragments of more than nine hundred separate manuscripts.

What was in the caves

The scrolls include a copy — often several — of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, the oldest of which are more than a thousand years older than any previously known Hebrew Bible manuscript. The Great Isaiah Scroll, an essentially complete copy of Isaiah, is the single most famous piece.

Alongside the Hebrew Bible, the caves held multiple copies of books this site carries as pseudepigrapha — at least eleven of 1 Enoch, in the original Aramaic, and fourteen or more of Jubilees — along with the community's own writings, never adopted as scripture anywhere: a “Community Rule” governing daily life, a “War Scroll” describing an end-times battle, and commentaries reading Israel's prophets as predictions about the group's own history.

Who wrote them

Most scholars connect the scrolls to the Essenes, a strict Jewish sect described by the first-century historians Josephus and Philo, thought to have withdrawn to Qumran to live in ritual purity apart from a Jerusalem priesthood and calendar they considered corrupted — the very calendar dispute at the center of Jubilees and 1 Enoch's Astronomical Book. Not every scholar agrees the site belonged to the Essenes alone, but the community's own writings describe exactly this kind of separatist group.

Why they matter

Before 1947, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible manuscripts dated from around the tenth century AD. The scrolls pushed the evidence back a thousand years further, showing the text had already been copied with striking care and consistency — real evidence for how stable the Hebrew Bible's wording has stayed across the centuries. Just as significant for this site's own corpus: they proved 1 Enoch and Jubilees weren't late curiosities preserved only in Ethiopia, but genuinely popular Jewish scripture, read in the very century Jesus was born.

Where to read what they confirm

This site's own 1 Enoch and Jubilees texts descend from the later, complete Ethiopic tradition rather than these Qumran fragments directly, but the fragments remain the earliest hard evidence that both books circulated widely centuries before either survived complete anywhere.