Qumran

Two different levels of certainty meet at Qumran, and it is worth keeping them apart.

The scrolls. From 1947 onward, some nine hundred manuscripts were recovered from eleven caves near the site, including copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, a thousand years older than any previously known, alongside sectarian rule-books, hymns and commentaries. Their value to the study of the Bible and of Second Temple Judaism is not in dispute; they are the manuscript find of the century.

The settlement. What is disputed is the ruin beside the caves. Roland de Vaux, who excavated in the 1950s, read it as the communal home of a celibate ascetic sect, usually identified with the Essenes of Josephus and Pliny, who withdrew to the desert to keep a purity they thought the Jerusalem priesthood had lost. He pointed to a room he called a scriptorium, to many ritual immersion pools, and to a cemetery of austere single graves.

The alternatives. Other scholars have read the same stones as a fortified estate, a pottery works or a country villa, and have asked whether the scrolls were written here at all, rather than carried out from Jerusalem and hidden in the caves before the Roman advance of 68 CE that destroyed the site. There is no consensus. The atlas treats the Essene reading as the leading hypothesis and marks it as such, rather than presenting a contested interpretation as a settled fact.

A shepherd looking for a lost goat is credited with finding the most significant biblical manuscript discovery of the twentieth century, entirely by accident.

A goat, a cave, and a jar of scrolls

In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd reportedly searching for a stray goat threw a stone into a cave opening near Qumran and heard it strike pottery, leading to the discovery of ancient scrolls stored in clay jars, an accidental find that eventually led to the recovery of hundreds of manuscripts and fragments from multiple nearby caves over subsequent years.

Manuscripts centuries older than anything comparable

The scrolls include the oldest known surviving copies of large portions of the Hebrew Bible by many centuries, most famously a nearly complete Isaiah Scroll, along with sectarian religious texts, giving scholars direct manuscript evidence of biblical text transmission far earlier than any previously available source and confirming a high degree of textual stability across the intervening centuries.

As this entry's companion article covers

The unresolved scholarly debate over exactly who occupied the settlement at Qumran itself, including the once-dominant but now contested identification of the residents as the Essene sect, is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.