What are the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Scripture & How We Got ItIn theological review

The short answer

They are a library of ancient Jewish scrolls, copied between the third century BCE and the first century CE and hidden in caves by the Dead Sea, where they were found again from 1947. Among them are the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible, including a complete Isaiah scroll from about 125 BCE, and they show that the text was copied with great care across a thousand years.

The fuller answer

In 1947, shepherds searching caves near the Dead Sea, by the ruins of Qumran, found jars holding leather scrolls. Over the following decade, eleven caves gave up the remains of hundreds of scrolls: copies of nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible, prayers, commentaries, and the rule books of the community that kept them. The Israel Museum dates the scrolls from the third century BCE to the first century CE and presents the finest of them in its Digital Dead Sea Scrolls project.

The prize is the Great Isaiah Scroll, dated about 125 BCE, holding all sixty six chapters of Isaiah. Before Qumran, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts were roughly a thousand years younger. Here was a checkable test of the telephone game theory of the Bible: had the text drifted across a millennium of copying? The scroll showed a text remarkably close to the one in use today, the same prophecies, the same Servant songs, the same words Christians had always read.

The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.”

Isaiah 40:8 (BSB)

The scrolls do not prove every doctrine, and this page will not pretend otherwise. What they prove is transmission: the Old Testament we read is the Old Testament of the second century BCE, copied with great care, not a medieval rewrite. The page on this site called Can we trust the text puts the scrolls alongside the New Testament manuscript evidence.

Sources

Berean Standard Bible (BSB)
Israel Museum, The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls

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Dig deeper

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Has the Bible been changed over the centuries?The text has been copied by hand for centuries, and copyists' slips exist and are openly catalogued. But the message has not been rewritten. We hold manuscripts far older than the printed texts, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they show a text transmitted with remarkable care. Isaiah's promise stands: the word of our God stands forever.How do we know the Bible is God's word?Because the Bible claims it, Jesus treated it that way, and the evidence we can test supports taking the claim seriously. Paul calls all Scripture God-breathed. Jesus said the Scripture cannot be broken, and argued his whole mission out of the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. Christians receive the Bible as God's word on the testimony of the God-man who rose from the dead.Why does the Bible have 66 books?Because those are the books the people of God recognised as carrying his authority: the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms that Jesus himself named, and the writings of his apostles. Thirty nine books of the Old Testament and twenty seven of the New. The number was never a target. It is simply the shape of what was received.Bible Character: IsaiahThe prophet who saw the LORD high and lifted up in the temple, volunteered to be sent, and foretold the child to be born and the servant pierced for our transgressions.How We Got the Bible: Can we trust the text?No originals, many copies, and a thousand-year test: how the text was carried, and what the differences between copies actually are.Answer the question20 flashcards on the questions these answers raise.Can you answer?15 questions, each with its reason and its source.