Overview

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a library of roughly 900 to 1,000 ancient Jewish manuscripts, recovered from eleven caves near Qumran on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956. Written for the most part on parchment, with some papyrus and one text on copper, they date from about the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE and are the oldest substantial body of Jewish scripture and religious writing to survive from antiquity.

They fall into three broad groups. Roughly a quarter are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, among them the Great Isaiah Scroll, a nearly complete manuscript a thousand years older than any Hebrew Bible previously known. A second group consists of other Jewish works of the period, apocrypha, wisdom texts, expansions of biblical stories. The third and most distinctive group are the "sectarian" writings, such as the Community Rule and the War Scroll, that lay out the beliefs, discipline and expectations of a strict Jewish movement. Together they transformed the study of the Hebrew Bible's text and of Judaism on the eve of Christianity. The best-preserved are displayed at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem.