Near the foot of the column containing the end of Isaiah 39, the scribe left the remainder of the column blank before beginning chapter 40 at the top of the next. Since the eighteenth century, critical scholarship has divided Isaiah into an eighth-century core and later material from the exile and after, with a major seam at exactly that point, and the blank space is sometimes produced as physical corroboration.
It will not bear that weight. Blank spaces of comparable size occur elsewhere in the scroll where no compositional seam is proposed, and the scribes of the period used such breaks to mark sense divisions of many kinds. What the space shows is that a copyist around 100 BCE perceived a major break between chapters 39 and 40, which is worth knowing, since the narrative of Hezekiah ends there and the voice changes, not that he knew the book had two authors, and not that it does. The compositional argument stands or falls on the content of chapters 40 to 66, their Babylonian setting and their naming of Cyrus, and it neither needs nor gains from the margin. Traditional Jewish and Christian readings hold the book to be the work of the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem throughout; most textual scholars hold it to be composite. The blank column does not adjudicate between them.
The scroll is held by the Israel Museum and housed at the Shrine of the Book, the pavilion in Jerusalem built for the Cave 1 manuscripts and opened in 1965. What visitors see around the central drum is a facsimile; the original is kept in controlled storage, exposure to light being cumulative and irreversible. High-resolution photographs of the whole scroll, column by column, have been published online by the museum, so the manuscript is now more accessible in reproduction than any medieval codex of the same book.