Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Psalms Scroll (11Q5), one of the 972 texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, with a partial Hebrew transcription
Material	Papyrus, parchment and bronze
Writing	Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Nabataean-Aramaic
Created	Est. 408 BCE to 318 CE
Discovered	1946/7–1956, 2017
Present location	Various

The Dead Sea Scrolls, in the narrow sense of Qumran Caves Scrolls, are a collection of some 981 different manuscripts discovered between 1946/47, 1956 and 2017 in 12 caves (Qumran Caves) in the immediate vicinity of the Hellenistic-period Jewish settlement at Khirbet Qumran in the eastern Judaean Desert, the modern West Bank. The caves are located about two kilometres (1.2 miles) inland from the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name. The consensus is that the Qumran Caves Scrolls date from the last three centuries BCE and the first century CE. Bronze coins found at the same sites form a series beginning with John Hyrcanus (135–104 BCE) and continuing until the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 CE), supporting the radiocarbon and paleographic dating of the scrolls.

In the larger sense, the Dead Sea Scrolls include manuscripts from additional Judaean Desert sites, which go back as far as the 8th century BCE to as late as the 11th century CE.

The texts are of great historical, religious, and linguistic significance because they include the second-oldest known surviving manuscripts of works later included in the Hebrew Bible canon, along with deuterocanonical and extra-biblical manuscripts which preserve evidence of the diversity of religious thought in late Second Temple Judaism. Biblical text older than the Dead Sea Scrolls has been discovered only in two silver scroll-shaped amulets containing portions of the Priestly Blessing from the Book of Numbers, excavated in Jerusalem at Ketef Hinnom and dated c. 600 BCE. A piece of Leviticus found in the Ein Gedi synagogue, burnt in the 6th century CE and analyzed in 2015, was found to be the third-oldest piece of the Torah known to exist, as it was dated palaeographically to the 1st or 2nd century CE, and with the C14 method to sometime between the 2nd and 4th century CE.