Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are manuscripts that were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves on the shore of the Dead Sea. Below the caves, Khirbet Qumran contains the remains of an ancient settlement where a Jewish sect, usually identified as the Essenes, lived from c . 100 bce to 68 ce . About eighty thousand fragments have been identified that in antiquity constituted some nine hundred manuscripts. Today most of the scrolls are held by the Shrine of the Book of the Israel Museum and the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem. One unique text, the Copper Scroll, remains in Jordan. The contents of the Qumran scrolls may be divided into three sections: (a) biblical books; (b) literature of Second Temple times, often called apocryphal or pseudepigraphical; and (c) the literature of the sect itself, which includes many literary genres. The community was most probably destroyed by the Romans in 68 ce during the Great Revolt of the Jews against Rome (66–73 ce ). Since the Dead Sea Scrolls are the earliest Hebrew and Aramaic Jewish documents composed after the books of the Hebrew Bible, they are a significant source of information about the history of Judaism between the Hebrew Bible (most completed by 400 bce ) and the compilation and editing of the Mishnah ( c . 220 ce ). They also provide important information about the Jewish background of early Christianity. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide a snapshot of some approaches to Jewish law and belief in the immediate post-Hebrew biblical period.