Dead Sea Scrolls

What Was Found

The first scrolls came to light in 1947, when Bedouin shepherds found jars in a cave in the cliffs above Qumran, near the northwest corner of the Dead Sea. Over the next nine years ten more caves were emptied, some by archaeologists and some by the Bedouin, producing the remains of perhaps 900 to 1,000 manuscripts — a handful nearly complete, the vast majority in tens of thousands of fragments, some no larger than a fingernail. Related finds came from Masada, Wadi Murabba'at, and Nahal Hever nearby.

About a quarter are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible; every book except Esther is represented. The rest are other Jewish writings of the period: commentaries, psalms and hymns outside the Psalter, calendars, the community's own rule books, and works such as Jubilees and 1 Enoch. The best-preserved is the Great Isaiah Scroll, a nearly complete copy of Isaiah on seventeen sheets of leather, dated to about 125 BC and now in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum.

Why They Changed the Picture

Before 1947, the oldest substantially complete Hebrew Bible manuscripts were medieval — the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex, from the tenth and eleventh centuries AD. The Isaiah Scroll is roughly a thousand years older. That leap is the single most important thing about the discovery: for the first time it was possible to test whether the text Jews and Christians had been reading matched what was actually circulating in the Second Temple period, rather than assuming it.

The scrolls also transformed the study of the world Jesus was born into. They give a Jewish community's own words about scripture, purity, priesthood, the calendar, and the expectation of God's decisive intervention — not filtered through a later writer's summary. Understanding first-century Judaism as a set of arguments rather than a single settled system owes a great deal to these texts.

Being Careful About What They Prove

The claim heard most often is that the Isaiah Scroll is word-for-word identical to the Bible we read, proving the text was transmitted perfectly. That overstates it, and the true version is more interesting. The Great Isaiah Scroll agrees with the medieval Masoretic text to a remarkable degree, and the differences it does carry are overwhelmingly spelling, word order, and grammatical forms of the kind that do not change meaning, plus a small number of genuine variants that translators note. Totals for how many differences there are circulate widely, and no total is given here: none of the sources behind this article supplies one, and E. Tov's survey of the scholarship on the scroll notes that even the fullest study of its readings, Kutscher's, describes them rather than counting them. The honest summary is that a thousand years of copying introduced far less change than anyone had a right to expect, and that this is a strong result rather than a perfect one.

Two other cautions. First, the scrolls do not show one fixed text; some biblical books circulated in more than one edition. The Jeremiah copies from Cave 4 include a substantially shorter form of the book matching the Greek Septuagint — evidence that the differences between the Hebrew and Greek Bibles go back to real ancient Hebrew editions rather than to careless Greek translators. Second, there is no New Testament among the scrolls. A proposal in the 1970s that a scrap from Cave 7 preserved a few letters of Mark's Gospel attracted headlines and has been rejected by nearly all specialists. And the identification of the Qumran community with the Essenes described by Josephus and Pliny, though still the majority view, is genuinely contested.

One thing more, because everything above is written from somewhere and this app has not yet said where. These articles are written from the ordinary Protestant evangelical position, whose classic modern statement is careful about exactly this problem rather than embarrassed by it. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, drawn up in Chicago in October 1978 in nineteen articles, affirms that inspiration "strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy", that "copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original", and denies both "that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs" and "that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant". That statement is one evangelical statement rather than the evangelical creed: it was framed by a particular council in 1978, evangelicals have never all subscribed to it, and nothing argued below depends on its stronger form. Notice what kind of claim it is: one about evidence, made in public, which evidence could in principle embarrass — and the writing on this page is the sort of thing that would embarrass it. Evangelical textual scholars do not hide the difficulty; P. Gurry, who works on the method behind the standard critical edition of the New Testament, concedes it whole in the opening section of his own summary for pastors: "Since no original document survives for the New Testament and since the existing copies disagree with one another, textual criticism is needed for all twenty-seven books." The Hebrew Bible is no different, and this app's own articles set the awkward cases out by name — the book of Jeremiah preserved at Qumran in two lengths, the Cave 4 scroll 4QSam-a supplying a paragraph before 1 Samuel 11 that the New Revised Standard Version prints and no Hebrew Bible has, a trinitarian sentence at 1 John 5:7 that stands in no early Greek manuscript at all. Two different objections live inside that, and they take different answers. The ordinary one is a question of quantity: if the copies disagree, how much is in doubt? To that the manuscripts give their own answer, because the manuscripts that show the variation are also what measure it, and measured rather than asserted it is overwhelmingly spelling, word order and grammatical form, with a small and well-known set of longer passages that every modern translation already prints in a footnote where a reader can see it and judge.

The second objection is not a question of quantity at all, and counting variants does not touch it. It is that "the original" may not be a single recoverable object — that a book which grew over time may have had several states with an equal claim to the word, so that it is not obvious which one textual criticism is even trying to reach. E. J. Epp gave a 1999 study the title "The Multivalence of the Term 'Original Text' in New Testament Textual Criticism"; the article itself is behind a paywall and was not read here, so nothing of his argument is reported, only that the question is one the field argues about. This app does not claim to have settled it, and the paragraph above should not be read as if it had. What can honestly be said is narrower, and it is three things. For most books the question is not live: a letter dictated once in Corinth has one original, and the manuscripts of it are copies of that. Where it is live — the two lengths of Jeremiah are the clearest case in this app — the difficulty is real, and evangelicals differ among themselves about how to describe it. And the position stated above is not in fact a claim about a lost archetype only: the same article that ties inspiration to the autographs says in its next breath that copies and translations are the Word of God so far as they faithfully represent the original, which is a claim about the book a reader is actually holding. That is where the weight sits, and a reader is entitled to know that it is a theological answer offered to a textual question rather than a textual answer that closes it. A book that had to be protected from its own manuscript evidence would be in a far worse position than this one is. Where the evidence here is awkward these articles say so, and that is not a concession made reluctantly; it is the only thing that makes the rest of what they say worth reading.

Scripture references

• Isaiah 53:1-12 — The Suffering Servant, preserved in a copy from c. 125 BC
• Jeremiah 36:1-32 — Jeremiah's scroll — a book the caves preserve in two different lengths
• Psalms 119:105 — The Psalms are among the most-copied books in the caves
• Luke 4:16-21 — Jesus reading Isaiah aloud in the synagogue, a century after the Isaiah Scroll was copied

Sources

• Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority, Leon Levy Digital Library: Discovery and Publication — Israel Antiquities Authority · Gives the 1947 find by a Bedouin shepherd, ten further caves over the following nine years, and the remains of over 900 manuscriptsSupports: The discovery years, the number of caves and the size of the corpus
• Holding institutionIsrael Museum, The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls: The Great Isaiah Scroll — The Israel Museum, Jerusalem — Shrine of the Book · The museum's own object label: Qumran Cave 1, 1st century BCE, parchment, H 22-25 cm, L 734 cm, accession HU 95.57/27. Note that this site is served over http onlySupports: The Great Isaiah Scroll's dimensions, findspot, date and accession number
• ScholarshipDiscoveries in the Judaean Desert, 40 volumes — Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955-2009 · The official edition of the scrolls, volume by volume - the publication record behind every claim made about their contents. Print onlySupports: The contents of the corpus, including the two editions of Jeremiah discussed in section three
• ReferenceText & Canon Institute: How Much Can the Most Famous Dead Sea Scroll Prove? — Anthony Ferguson, Text & Canon Institute, Phoenix Seminary · 11 January 2022, read in full. Ferguson's point is the one the third section makes: early scholars stressed how close 1QIsaa is to the Masoretic Text and current scholars stress the differences, and "when one removes the minor differences such as spellings, the text of 1QIsaa is quite close to the Masoretic Text". He gives no count of those differences, and neither does anything else cited hereSupports: The character of the differences between the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Masoretic text in section three
• ScholarshipE. Tov, "The Text of Isaiah at Qumran" — Emanuel Tov, Hebrew University of Jerusalem · In Hebrew Bible, Greek Bible, and Qumran: Collected Essays (Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 42-56; the author's own free copy, read in full. His survey of the literature on 1QIsaa is the basis for the third section's refusal to give a number: he notes that "there is no monograph that analyzes all or most of the readings of the scroll comprehensively", and that E. Y. Kutscher's, which comes closest, "probably mentions all or most of the differences between MT and the scroll, but describes them mainly on the linguistic level"Supports: That no published total of the scroll's differences from the Masoretic text stands behind the ones in circulation
• ReferenceText & Canon Institute: Appreciating the Diverse Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls — Text & Canon Institute, Phoenix SeminarySupports: That some biblical books circulated at Qumran in more than one edition
• ReferenceThe Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) — International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, Chicago, October 1978 · Article X is quoted in full in section three, and was read on this page and cross-checked word for word against a second independent host before being printed. The statement is the reference point for the position these articles are written from; it is cited, not adopted as a creed, and it is the app's business to state its own position rather than to hide itSupports: The evangelical position on inspiration, the autographs, and copies
• Holding institutionDallas Theological Seminary Library, Special Collections: Records of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy — Dallas Theological Seminary Library · Read in full. The library holds the ICBI's own papers and gives the meeting's date and size: "Summit I met in Chicago on October 26-28, 1978. Over 300 Christian leaders, theologians and pastors attended and adopted the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, consisting of nineteen articles with brief exposition." Its scans of the original document are photographs without searchable text, so the wording of Article X is taken from the two hosts above rather than from themSupports: The date, size and form of the meeting that produced the statement
• ReferenceP. Gurry, "What Pastors Should Know about Developments in Textual Criticism" — Peter J. Gurry, Text & Canon Institute; Associate Professor of New Testament, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary · 4 August 2021, read in full. The sentence quoted in section three comes in his opening explanation of what textual criticism is and why it matters, before he turns to what is new, and it is quoted because he concedes the problem before anyone puts it to him. It is not the article's first sentence and the article does not open with it. He is quoted here rather than a critic of the evangelical position for a deliberate reason, stated so a reader can weigh it: the point being made is that this difficulty is not news to the people who hold that positionSupports: That evangelical textual scholars state the difficulty at full strength themselves
• ScholarshipE. J. Epp, "The Multivalence of the Term 'Original Text' in New Testament Textual Criticism" — Eldon Jay Epp, Case Western Reserve University · Harvard Theological Review 92:3 (1999), 245-281. PAYWALLED and NOT opened. It is cited for one thing only, and that thing is its title: that the question "what is the original text?" is one the discipline argues about. No argument of Epp's is stated here, because none was read. The DOI above was checked against Crossref rather than copied from another citation, and it resolves to this article. That is worth saying about a link nobody following the note would ever click · paywalledSupports: That the meaning of "the original text" is itself contested in the field

Further reading

• Text & Canon Institute: How Much Can the Most Famous Dead Sea Scroll Prove?
• Text & Canon Institute: Appreciating the Diverse Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls
• The Israel Museum: The Shrine of the Book
• The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library