Great Isaiah Scroll

The scroll, designated 1QIsa-a, was among the first group of manuscripts taken from Cave 1 near Qumran in 1947 and sold through an antiquities dealer in Bethlehem; it was eventually acquired for Israel along with three others of the original seven. It is written on parchment in seventeen sheets stitched together, about 7.3 metres extended, and carries the entire book of Isaiah in fifty-four columns, with only small lacunae. No other biblical scroll from the caves approaches it for completeness.

The hand is a Hasmonean formal script. Dating rests on two independent methods that agree: palaeography places it at roughly 125 to 100 BCE, and radiocarbon testing has returned ranges consistent with that, a 1995 Arizona measurement giving 202 to 107 BCE. Palaeography remains the tighter of the two.

The manuscript is not a pristine object. It is the work of more than one scribe, with a change of hand around the midpoint. Corrections were made both by the original copyists and by later readers: letters cancelled with dots, words inserted above the line, whole passages added in the margins, and a substantial omission in chapter 40 supplied vertically down the side of a column. Paragraph divisions, sense breaks and occasional marginal marks whose meaning is not agreed are visible throughout.

It is, in other words, a used copy rather than a display scroll, and its wear at the beginning and along the edges suggests it was handled. That makes it evidence not only for the text of Isaiah but for how a text was copied, corrected and read in Judaea in the last century BCE.

Before 1947 the oldest complete Hebrew witnesses to Isaiah were medieval: the Cairo Codex of the Prophets, the Aleppo Codex of the tenth century, the Leningrad Codex of 1008 CE. The scroll pushed the evidence back about a thousand years at a stroke, and the question everyone asked was whether the medieval text would survive the comparison.

It largely did. The consonantal text of 1QIsa-a corresponds closely to the Masoretic Text, and the differences, though numerous, are overwhelmingly small. That result, that a text copied by hand for a millennium had been transmitted with this degree of stability, is the single most important finding from the scroll, and it should be stated without exaggeration in either direction.

The caveats are real and interesting. The scroll's orthography is markedly fuller than the Masoretic, using vowel letters far more freely, with distinctive spellings of pronouns and common words, so that the two look different on the page before any variant is counted. There are hundreds of differences of spelling, grammatical form and word order, occasional additions and omissions, and a scattering of readings that make better or worse sense than the Masoretic.

A minority of variants agree with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text, which matters because it shows the Greek translators were sometimes working from a Hebrew text that genuinely differed rather than translating loosely. The best-known instance is at the end of Isaiah 53:11, where the scroll and the Greek both have the servant seeing light, a word absent from the Masoretic Text and now printed in many modern translations. A second, less complete Isaiah scroll from the same cave, 1QIsa-b, stands closer to the Masoretic Text than the great scroll does, so the caves attest more than one textual profile.

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.