What are the Dead Sea Scrolls?
The Dead Sea Scrolls is the collective name for ancient manuscripts found in caves around Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. Written mainly in Hebrew and Aramaic on parchment and papyrus, they amount to more than 900 manuscripts when fragments are counted. They date from about the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD, and include texts about 1,000 years older than the oldest Old Testament manuscripts previously known.
The discovery
The first discovery came in 1947, it is said, when a Bedouin shepherd boy searching for a lost goat threw a stone into a cave and heard the sound of a jar breaking. The jars in the cave held scrolls. By 1956, manuscripts had been found one after another in 11 caves in the area, and they came to be called “the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century.”
What the scrolls contain
The Dead Sea Scrolls include copies of almost every book of the Old Testament, most famously the Great Isaiah Scroll, which survives complete. They also include apocryphal and pseudepigraphal texts not included in the Bible, the “Community Rule” setting out the rules of the community that left the scrolls, the “War Scroll” describing a final war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, and the “Copper Scroll,” a copper sheet said to list the hiding places of treasure.
The leading theory is that the scrolls were left by the Essenes, a Jewish sect living at Qumran, but another theory holds that they were brought from Jerusalem and hidden, and debate continues among researchers. Today the main scrolls are displayed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Urban legends about the scrolls
Because it took many years from discovery until the full texts were published, rumors spread that “they contain secrets that would shake Christianity and are being hidden.” In Japan, the name became widely known when a fictional prophetic book called the “Dead Sea Scrolls (secret version)” appeared in the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. Since the 1990s, photos of all the manuscripts have been made public, and today they can even be viewed online.
