Dead Sea Scrolls

• 1. Introduction

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  The Dead Sea Scrolls began with a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib and a fall into a hole in the rock. Sometime between November 1946 and February 1947, he was out with his cousin Jum'a Muhammed and a man named Khalil Musa, near the northern shore of the Dead Sea. The cousin noticed the caves in the hillside. Edh-Dhib was the one who actually dropped into one. Inside were clay jars, and inside the jars were rolled manuscripts. He pulled out a handful and carried them back to his family's camp. Nobody there could have guessed that they held Jewish writing copied as far back as the 3rd century BCE. In the decades that followed, more than fifteen thousand scrolls and fragments would be recovered from the surrounding desert. Who wrote them, and why were they hidden in caves? How did paper-thin parchment last so long in the open air of the Judaean Desert? Why did scholars wait so many years to read them freely? And who has the right to keep them today?

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• 2. Hunting for the Caves

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  By the end of 1948, nearly two years after the shepherds' find, no scholar could say which cave the scrolls had come from. Ovid R. Sellers, who had taken over the American Schools of Oriental Research, tried to enlist the Syrians in the search. He could not afford their price, and the unrest in the country made any large search unsafe.

  The breakthrough came in early 1949, when Jordan allowed the Arab Legion to comb the area. On the 28th of January 1949, a Belgian United Nations observer, Captain Phillipe Lippens, and an Arab Legion captain, Akkash el-Zebn, found the cave again. It became known as Cave 1. Gerald Lankester Harding and Roland de Vaux led a dig there from the 15th of February to the 5th of March 1949. They turned up more scroll fragments, along with linen cloth and jars.

  A second wave of discoveries followed. De Vaux began a full excavation of the Qumran site in November 1951. Within months, the Bedouins found Cave 2, and on the 14th of March 1952 the archaeologists found Cave 3, which held the Copper Scroll. Rising prices pushed both groups to search separately across a stretch of land more than a kilometre long. Cave 11 turned up in 1956 and gave the last fragments found near Qumran.

  Cave 4 outshone all the others. It is really two hand-cut caves, but the fragments were so tangled that they carry a single label. Harding, de Vaux and Józef Milik excavated it from the 22nd to the 29th of September 1952. It produced about 90 percent of all the scrolls and fragments, roughly 15,000 pieces from some 500 texts. Harding began piecing them together and was still at it when he died in 1979. Among the finds were 21 tefillin and 7 mezuzot, the small cases that hold scripture. Nine tiny tefillin strips from the 1952 dig were rediscovered in 2014, after sitting unopened for six decades.

  The smaller caves had their own surprises. Cave 7 gave fewer than 20 Greek fragments, including 7Q5, which later became the subject of heavy speculation. Cave 8 yielded five fragments, plus lamps, jars and the sole of a leather shoe.

  Cave 11 held the longest scroll of all. The Temple Scroll stretches 8.15 metres, and more than half of it concerns the building of the Temple in Jerusalem. Yigael Yadin called it "The Torah According to the Essenes". His friend Hartmut Stegemann disagreed. He saw it as a document of no exceptional importance, noting that no known Essene writing mentions it.

  In February 2017, archaeologists from Hebrew University announced a twelfth cave on the cliffs west of Qumran. It held pickaxes and broken, empty scroll jars. Oren Gutfeld, one of the lead researchers, said: "Although at the end of the day no scroll was found, and instead we 'only' found a piece of parchment rolled up in a jug that was being processed for writing, the findings indicate beyond any doubt that the cave contained scrolls that were stolen." Looters, it seems, had been there first, and John Strugnell, a former chief editor of the scroll editorial team, said that at least four privately owned scrolls from Cave 11 had still not been shown to scholars. One of them, he said, is a complete Aramaic manuscript of the Book of Enoch.

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• 3. Passing Through Many Hands

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  For a while the first scrolls hung from a tent pole in the Bedouins' camp, shown now and then to visitors. During this time the Community Rule was split into two pieces. The shepherds first took the scrolls to a dealer in Bethlehem named Ibrahim 'Ijha. He sent them back as worthless, after someone warned that they might have been stolen from a synagogue. At a nearby market, a Syrian Christian offered to buy them. A sheikh then suggested a cobbler and part-time antiques dealer named Khalil Eskander Shahin, known as Kando. Three of the scrolls were sold to a dealer for seven Jordanian pounds, about 28 dollars at the time.

  The rest were left with a third party, George Isha'ya, a member of the Syriac Orthodox Church. He approached St Mark's Monastery for an appraisal, and the news reached Metropolitan Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, known as Mar Samuel. He suspected the scrolls were ancient and bought four of them. Meanwhile, professors Eleazer Sukenik and Benjamin Mazar of Hebrew University picked up three more on the antiquities market.

  In 1947, John C. Trever of the American Schools of Oriental Research compared the script on the scrolls with the Nash Papyrus, then the oldest known biblical manuscript. He saw similarities. In March 1948, the Arab-Israeli war sent some of the scrolls to Beirut for safekeeping. On the 11th of April 1948, Millar Burrows, head of the Schools, announced the find in a press release.

  Mar Samuel's scrolls ended up for sale through an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal on the 1st of June 1954. A month later, on the 1st of July, they arrived at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Mazar and Yigael Yadin, the son of Sukenik, bought them for 250,000 dollars and took them to Jerusalem.

  The question of ownership did not end there. The scrolls first went to the Palestine Archaeological Museum, which was run by an international board until King Hussein nationalized it in November 1966. After the 1967 war, Israel took over the museum, and the collection moved to the Shrine of the Book. Jordan says the scrolls were taken from its museum by advancing Israeli forces and invokes the 1954 Hague Convention on cultural property. Israel replies that Jordan was an unlawful occupier of the region and never lawfully held them. The Palestinian Authority also claims them. Meanwhile, part of the collection that had been kept in Amman has been on display at The Jordan Museum since 2013.

  Fragments are scattered more widely than most people realize. The Schøyen Collection holds 115, and several American seminaries and universities own a handful each. Fakes have followed the real ones into the market. In 2020 the Museum of the Bible in the United States reported that all 16 supposed Dead Sea Scroll fragments it had acquired between 2009 and 2014 were modern forgeries.

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• 4. Inside the Scrolls

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  About 40 percent of the identified texts are copies of the Hebrew scriptures. Another 30 percent are Second Temple writings that never entered the Hebrew Bible, such as the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, Tobit and the Wisdom of Sirach. The last 30 percent are sectarian works that nobody had ever seen before. They include the Community Rule, the War Scroll and the Pesher on Habakkuk, and they describe the rules and beliefs of one particular group within Judaism.

  Psalms leads the count of biblical books, with 39 copies. Deuteronomy follows with 33, Genesis with 24 and Isaiah with 22. Together the 235 biblical texts make up about 22 percent of the collection. Parts of every book of the Hebrew Bible turned up except one. Esther is missing, perhaps because Qumran's residents frowned on a Jewish queen who married a Persian king, or because the Purim festival is absent from their calendar.

  Before the scrolls came to light, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible were Masoretic texts from the 10th century CE, such as the Aleppo Codex. The scrolls pushed the evidence back more than a thousand years, to the 2nd century BCE. Many scholars expected the comparison to be damaging. Instead, the Great Isaiah Scroll proved strikingly close to later copies. Millar Burrows counted 166 words in Isaiah 53 and found only seventeen letters in question. Ten were spelling, four were small stylistic changes, and the last three formed the word "light" in verse 11.

  Not every text matched so neatly. Manuscripts of Exodus and Samuel from Cave 4 differ sharply in language and content from the traditional version. They suggest that scripture stayed fluid until it was fixed around the year 100 CE. Scholars have also changed their view of the non-biblical works. Many are now thought to have been collected by the community rather than composed by it, and some were written before the Essene period.

  Most of the manuscripts are in Hebrew, estimated at 76 to 79 percent. Aramaic accounts for around 16 to 17 percent and Greek about 3 percent. Smaller shares are written in Nabataean and in cryptic scripts. Elsewhere in the Judaean Desert, finds add Latin from Masada and Arabic manuscripts from Khirbet al-Mird, written in the 7th and 8th centuries CE.

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• 5. Who Wrote Them

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  Two inkwells and plastered elements that looked like tables were found at Khirbet Qumran, and Roland de Vaux called that room the "scriptorium". The discovery was a key support for the idea he and Józef Milik put forward. In their view, the scrolls were written by the Essenes, a Jewish sect living at the site. Eliezer Sukenik, and independently Butrus Sowmy of St Mark's Monastery, had already linked the scrolls to the Essenes before any excavation. For decades, almost every scholar accepted this idea, until the 1990s.

  The argument rests on several points. The Community Rule describes an initiation ceremony strikingly similar to the one the historian Flavius Josephus attributed to the Essenes. Both texts also describe members sharing their property. Qumran has several Jewish ritual baths, which point to an observant community. And Pliny the Elder, writing after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, placed a group of Essenes in a desert community on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, near 'Ein Gedi. According to this theory, the Essenes hid the scrolls during the Jewish Revolt, sometime between 66 and 68 CE, and never came back.

  Some scholars keep the sectarian community but drop the Essene label. Lawrence H. Schiffman proposed in the 1990s that Zadokite priests, or Sadducees, led the group. His best evidence is the document known as 4QMMT, which treats purity laws and a festival calendar the way the Sadducees did in later rabbinic accounts.

  Other ideas reach further. In the 1960s, the Spanish Jesuit José O'Callaghan Martínez argued that the Cave 7 fragment 7Q5 preserves a passage of the Gospel of Mark, at Mark 6:52-53. Robert Eisenman believes some scrolls describe the early Christian community, and he sees the careers of James the Just and Paul the Apostle reflected in them.

  The Jerusalem theory points elsewhere altogether. Karl Heinrich Rengstorf argued in the 1960s that the scrolls came from the library of the Temple in Jerusalem. Norman Golb later suggested several Jerusalem libraries instead. Both pointed to the wide variety of ideas and handwriting in the scrolls as proof against a single small community. The archaeologists Yizhar Hirschfeld, Yizhak Magen and Yuval Peleg add a different reading of the site. They see the ruins of Qumran as a Hasmonean fort reused in later periods.

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• 6. Ink, Hide, and Dating

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  Analysis at a cyclotron at the University of California, Davis, showed that every black ink on the scrolls is carbon black. Most of it came from soot off olive oil lamps, thinned with water, honey, oil or vinegar. Galls were sometimes added to make the ink last, and scribes applied it with reed pens. The red ink was cinnabar, a mercury compound, and it appears only four times in the whole collection.

  Vellum, made from processed animal hide, accounts for roughly 85.5 to 90.5 percent of the scrolls. Papyrus makes up an estimated 8 to 13 percent, and bronze sheets about 1.5 percent. DNA testing by the Israel Antiquities Authority suggests a possible hierarchy of importance. Goat and calf hides seem to carry the more significant texts, while gazelle and ibex were used for less sacred ones. Tests in Sicily on the water signature in the parchment indicate that some of it was made near Qumran.

  In 1950, a piece of linen from one of the caves was radiocarbon tested and returned a date of 33 CE, give or take 200 years. That ruled out the early theory that the scrolls were medieval. Later series of tests were summed up by VanderKam and Flint, who said they give strong reason to think most Qumran manuscripts belong to the last two centuries BCE and the first century CE. Paleographers had reached a similar window by studying the shapes of the letters. Cross and Avigad dated fragments from 225 BCE to 50 CE. Bronze coins found at the associated sites begin with John Hyrcanus, who ruled from 135 to 104 BCE, and run to the First Jewish-Roman War of 66-73 CE.

  A study published in 2025, led by Mladen Popović of the University of Groningen, pushed some dates back further. Radiocarbon tests on thirty scrolls were combined with an artificial intelligence model named Enoch. It was trained on handwriting from 24 of the dated samples and then applied to some 135 manuscripts that had no date. The scroll 4Q114, from the Book of Daniel, now falls between 230 and 160 BCE, as much as 60 years earlier than believed. The study also found that the Herodian style of script reaches much further back than expected. It overlaps with the older Hasmonean style, going back to the 2nd century BCE.

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• 7. Decay and Rescue

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  In the caves, the scrolls survived because of dry desert air, very little airflow and parchment that had never been treated with tanning materials. Once they were removed, the damage speeded up. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, adhesive tape used to join fragments and seal cracks harmed the documents. In 1953, the scrolls moved to the Palestine Archaeological Museum, where the underfunded staff left many fragments pressed between panes of window glass. The glass trapped moisture, and the decay accelerated.

  The Suez Crisis brought another setback. From 1956 to 1957 the collection was kept in the vault of the Ottoman Bank in Amman. Damp air bred mildew, and the glue and paper of the manila envelopes partly destroyed some fragments. By 1958, up to 5 percent of some scrolls had decayed completely. Fragments held by private collectors fared even worse, and large portions had vanished by 1966. Early attempts to remove the tape exposed the parchment to chemicals, including one called "British Leather Dressing", and darkened some of it badly. The scholars John Allegro and Sir Francis Frank were among the first to press for better preservation. Real improvement came in 1991, when the Israel Antiquities Authority opened a temperature-controlled laboratory. Today the fragments rest in acid-free cardboard inside solander boxes.

  Photographs often show more than the originals can now. John C. Trever, an amateur photographer, shot three Cave 1 scrolls on the 21st of February 1948 in both black-and-white and color. Between 1952 and 1967, Najib Albina photographed the sorting and assembly of the scrolls at the museum in Jerusalem. Using infrared film, he made over 1,750 plates, which recorded the fragments before further decay.

  Beginning in 1993, NASA applied multispectral imaging, adapted from its planetary probes, to bring out illegible text. A liquid crystal tunable filter let the camera capture specific wavelengths of light. The project launched a website with Google on the 18th of December 2012 that included about 1,000 of these images. Scientists later turned to genetics. In a 2020 paper in the journal Cell, Tel Aviv University researchers showed that DNA from the parchment can match fragments to each other. It also separated fragments that had been wrongly joined in the past.

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• 8. Locked Archives and Lawsuits

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  The first volume of the official series, Qumran Cave 1, appeared in 1955, prepared by Dominique Barthélemy and Józef Milik. All the writings from Cave 1 were in print between 1950 and 1956, and eight other caves followed in 1963. Cave 4 was a different story. The scrolls were controlled by a small team led by John Strugnell, and most scholars had no access to the texts or even photographs of them. Norman Golb and the writer Hershel Shanks, among many others, campaigned for years for open publication.

  The lock broke in 1991. Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg of Hebrew Union College announced a computer program that rebuilt unpublished texts from published ones. The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, said it would give researchers unrestricted access to its full set of photographs. That same year, the Biblical Archaeology Society released A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, indexed by Robert Eisenman and James Robinson. Soon afterward, the Israel Antiquities Authority lifted its long-standing restrictions. Emanuel Tov became editor-in-chief of the publication project, and between 1990 and 2009 his team produced 32 volumes. The series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, published by Oxford University Press, ended with Volume XL in 2009.

  The facsimile triggered a lawsuit. Elisha Qimron, who had reconstructed about 40 percent of the text known as MMT, sued Shanks, Eisenman, Robinson and the Society for publishing his deciphering without permission or credit. The Jerusalem District Court, with Judge Dalia Dorner, ruled for Qimron. The Israeli Supreme Court, under Aharon Barak, upheld the verdict in 2000. The defendants had to pay NIS 100,000 and hand over their infringing copies. The case drew criticism from copyright scholars in Israel and abroad. It also settled that a deciphered text can carry an individual's copyright, but the scrolls themselves cannot.

  Publishing has since moved on to screens. Martin Abegg tagged the text of nearly all the non-biblical scrolls, and E.J. Brill released them on CD-ROM in 2005 in a six-volume set of 2,400 pages. On the 25th of September 2011, the Israel Museum put its Digital Dead Sea Scrolls site online. Photographer Ardon Bar-Hama and his team shot the scrolls at 1,200 megapixels, using an exposure of 1/4000th of a second to limit harm. The Great Isaiah Scroll, the Community Rule, the Habakkuk Commentary, the Temple Scroll and the War Scroll are now viewable in detail by anyone, at a project cost estimated in 2011 at 3.5 million dollars.

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