Great Isaiah Scroll

Seventeen Sheets, Sewn End to End

The Great Isaiah Scroll came out of the first cave at Qumran in 1947, in the find that started everything else. It is 7.34 metres long and between 22 and 25 centimetres high, seventeen sheets of prepared animal skin stitched together and written in fifty-four columns of Hebrew. Those columns carry all sixty-six chapters of Isaiah. Twenty-one copies of Isaiah were eventually identified among the Qumran manuscripts, which makes it one of the two or three most-copied books in the caves; this is the only one that survived as a book rather than as fragments, and Emanuel Tov notes that it is the longest preserved biblical scroll from the Judean Desert, exceeded only by a non-biblical one, the Temple Scroll — which he measures at 8.148 m where the Israel Museum gives 8.146, the sort of two-millimetre disagreement that comes of measuring a thing that is in pieces.

Its first years out of the cave were commercial rather than archaeological, and the trail is worth following because it is the trail all seven took. The Bedouin sold four of the scrolls to Khalil Eskander Shahin, the Bethlehem antiquities dealer known as Kando, and three to a dealer named Salahi. Kando resold his four — this one, the Habakkuk Pesher, the Community Rule and a fourth so brittle it could not be opened for years — to Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel of St Mark's Monastery in Jerusalem, while E. L. Sukenik of the Hebrew University bought Salahi's three. The archbishop moved his four to a Syrian church in New Jersey at the end of the 1940s — the Israel Antiquities Authority dates the move to 1949 and the Israel Museum to 1948 — and advertised them in the Wall Street Journal of 1 June 1954. The Israel Antiquities Authority reproduces the notice, and it is worth reading whole, its own dating claim included: "The Four Dead Sea Scroll - Biblical Manuscripts dating back to at least 200 BC, are for sale. This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group." Sukenik's son, Yigael Yadin, bought them through an American intermediary for the State of Israel. All seven were reunited in 1955, and the Shrine of the Book was built for them ten years later. The Israel Museum catalogues this one as HU 95.57/27 and has published every column of it online.

Dating It, and Counting the Hands

The conventional date is about 125 BC, argued from the shape of the letters — a formal Hasmonaean hand. Two radiocarbon runs have been done on it: one reported in 1991 gave 199-120 BC, and one in 1995 gave 335-122 BC. Both brackets contain the palaeographic date rather than overturning it, and both are wide. There is also a complication that has nothing to do with antiquity: many scroll fragments were treated with castor oil in the late 1950s to make them easier to read, and K. L. Rasmussen and colleagues showed in 2001 that the standard pretreatment used in those two runs cannot be relied on to remove it, so that any contaminated sample was "most likely reported with ages that are too young by an unknown amount". Their sequel of 2009 runs the other way and is worth knowing about for that reason: it sets out three cleaning protocols that do remove castor oil, recommends one of them, and proposes a list of scrolls to redate so the earlier results can be checked.

Two recent studies have gone at the scroll from the handwriting instead. In 2021 M. Popović, M. A. Dhali and L. Schomaker ran a pattern-recognition analysis over the fifty-four columns and concluded that two scribes wrote it, dividing between columns 27 and 28 — the same point at which the manuscript carries what they call a three-line lacuna at the foot of column 27, and where a new sheet begins. In 2025 the same group published the Enoch model, trained on radiocarbon-dated manuscripts, which dates both halves of this scroll consistently between 180 and 100 BC. Their headline finding was that many Qumran manuscripts are older than palaeography had assumed; this one is not among them. In the earlier of the two papers the same team stated the limits of the method themselves — and stated them as a defence rather than a retreat. The discussion of the variables, they write, "is not to cast doubt on our study's outcome, which remains inherently sturdy, but reminds us that the techniques from pattern recognition and artificial intelligence do not give certainty of identification but statistically proven probabilities that can help the human expert understand and decide between different possibilities."

The Other Isaiah Scroll from the Same Cave

The claim usually attached to this scroll is that it is word for word what we read today, and so proves the text was copied perfectly for a thousand years. The umbrella article on the Dead Sea Scrolls sets out why that is an overstatement, and there is a sharper reason to be careful here. Cave 1 produced a second copy of Isaiah, 1QIsaᵇ, fragmentary but substantial, and it is a good deal closer to the medieval Masoretic text than this one is. E. Tov reports the field's judgement and endorses it: 1QIsaᵇ's readings "were considered to be more or less identical to MT" while 1QIsaᵃ's "were often described as secondary when compared with MT" — and, he adds, "while these statements on the intrinsic value of the texts are correct, neither of these texts is representative of the Qumran scrolls." The two scrolls sat in the same cave and do not agree with each other.

That warning is the sentence worth keeping, and it runs on: "and therefore no generalizations should be made." Because these were the first scrolls published, their features were treated for years as the norm for everything else in the caves, and Tov argues the whole field would look different had the Cave 4 material been published first. One further detail is often pressed into the argument over who wrote the book of Isaiah: chapter 40 begins on the last line of the same column that ends chapter 39, separated by only an ordinary paragraph space, while the scroll's one conspicuous multi-line blank falls at the end of chapter 33. That is a real feature of the manuscript, and this app's introduction to Isaiah lays out what it does and does not carry. A copy made six centuries after Isaiah of Jerusalem shows what a scroll of Isaiah looked like in about 125 BC. It cannot show who composed it.

Scripture references

• Isaiah 53:3-6 — The Suffering Servant, preserved here in a copy from the second century BC
• Isaiah 40:1-5 — Beginning on the last line of the column that ends chapter 39
• Isaiah 33:22 — The chapter at whose close the scroll carries its one multi-line blank, and the handwriting changes
• Luke 4:16-21 — Jesus reading Isaiah aloud in the synagogue, roughly a century and a half after this copy was made

Sources

• Holding institutionThe Israel Museum, Jerusalem — The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls: The Great Isaiah Scroll — The Israel Museum, Jerusalem — Shrine of the Book · The museum's own object record: "Qumran Cave 1", "1st century BCE", "Parchment", "H: 22-25, L: 734 cm", "Accession number: HU 95.57/27", and "The 54 columns contain all 66 chapters". Its column-by-column viewer data gives column 27 as Isaiah 33:1-24, column 28 as 34:1-36:2, and column 32 as 38:8-40:2. Served over http onlySupports: The dimensions, findspot, accession number, and where the scroll's column breaks actually fall
• ScholarshipEmanuel Tov, "The Text of Isaiah at Qumran" — Emanuel Tov, Hebrew University of Jerusalem · In Hebrew Bible, Greek Bible, and Qumran: Collected Essays (TSAJ 121; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 42-56; the author's own copy is freely readable. Source for the twenty-one Qumran copies of Isaiah, the four scrolls Mar Athanasius Samuel took to the United States in 1949 and their 1954 purchase, the 7.34 m length against the Temple Scroll's 8.148 m, both radiocarbon results, and the judgement on 1QIsaᵃ and 1QIsaᵇ quoted in section threeSupports: The acquisition chain, the number of Isaiah copies, the radiocarbon figures, and the comparison with 1QIsaᵇ
• Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority, Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library: Discovery and Publication — Israel Antiquities Authority · The authority's own account of the acquisition: the Bedouin "sold four of the seven scrolls to Kando and three to a second antiquities dealer named Salahi"; Kando "resold the four scrolls to Archbishop Samuel"; in 1949 Samuel moved them "to a Syrian Church in New Jersey"; in 1954 he "places the same four Scrolls up for sale in a Wall Street Journal advertisement" and "Yigael Yadin, son of Professor Sukenik, purchases the four Scrolls through an American middleman, on behalf of the State of Israel". The page reproduces the advertisement itself, dated 1 June 1954, and it is quoted in full in section one; the seven were joined in 1955 and the Shrine of the Book built in 1965. It also notes that the two Bedouin goatherds named in every retelling "claimed to have discovered" the scrollsSupports: The acquisition chain, the 1954 advertisement, and the caution over the finders' names
• ScholarshipM. Popović, M. A. Dhali and L. Schomaker, "Artificial intelligence based writer identification generates new evidence for the unknown scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa)" — Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali and Lambert Schomaker, University of Groningen · PLOS ONE 16:4 (2021), e0249769. Open access. Concludes that "two main scribes, each showing different writing patterns, were responsible for the Great Isaiah Scroll", dividing between columns 27 and 28, where there is "a three-line lacuna at the bottom of column 27" and a change of sheet. Also the source of the caveat quoted in section two, which is quoted with the clause that introduces it: the discussion of the variables "is not to cast doubt on our study's outcome, which remains inherently sturdy, but reminds us that the techniques from pattern recognition and artificial intelligence do not give certainty of identification but statistically proven probabilities"Supports: The two-scribe finding and the location of the division
• ScholarshipM. Popović, M. A. Dhali, L. Schomaker et al., "Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis" — Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali, Lambert Schomaker, Johannes van der Plicht, Kaare Lund Rasmussen, Jacopo La Nasa, Ilaria Degano, Maria Perla Colombini and Eibert Tigchelaar · PLOS ONE 20:6 (2025), e0323185. Open access. "Enoch dates the two halves consistently between 180-100 BCE". The caution quoted in section two is from the same team's earlier paper, not this oneSupports: The 2025 handwriting-model date for this scroll and the authors' own caveat
• ScholarshipK. L. Rasmussen et al., "The Effects of Possible Contamination on the Radiocarbon Dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls I: Castor Oil" — Kaare Lund Rasmussen, Jan Gunneweg, Johannes van der Plicht and colleagues · Radiocarbon 43:1 (2001), 127-132; the publisher's PDF is free. This is the paper that carries the finding, and its abstract states it: "not all oil contamination can be expected to have been removed by the acid-alkaline-acid (AAA) pretreatment", so that the earlier ages "cannot be guaranteed to be correct" and any contaminated sample was "most likely reported with ages that are too young by an unknown amount"Supports: The caveat attached to the 1991 and 1995 radiocarbon results
• ScholarshipK. L. Rasmussen et al., "The Effects of Possible Contamination on the Radiocarbon Dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls II: Empirical Methods to Remove Castor Oil and Suggestions for Redating" — Kaare Lund Rasmussen, Johannes van der Plicht, Gregory Doudna, Frederik Nielsen, Peter Højrup, Erling Halfdan Stenby and Carl Th. Pedersen · Radiocarbon 51:3 (2009), 1005-1022; the publisher's PDF is free. The sequel, and it attributes the AAA finding to the 2001 paper above rather than claiming it: "In Rasmussen et al. (2001), it was shown that the standard AAA pretreatment procedure used in the 2 previous studies dating Dead Sea Scroll samples ... is not capable of removing castor oil from parchment samples." Its own contribution is three protocols that do remove it, a recommendation of the Soxhlet method, and a proposed list of scrolls to redateSupports: That a workable decontamination method exists, and that its authors asked for the earlier dates to be checked
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Isaiah Scroll

Further reading

• The Israel Museum: The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls
• Text & Canon Institute: How Much Can the Most Famous Dead Sea Scroll Prove?
• Wikipedia: Isaiah Scroll

Reflect

Two people copied this scroll, and we do not know either name. Where are you doing careful work that nobody will sign?