In the spring of 1947, a Bedouin shepherd boy named Muhammad edh-Dhib was searching for a stray goat in the cliffs above the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. He tossed a rock into a cave and heard something shatter.
Inside were several clay jars containing ancient scrolls wrapped in linen. He had stumbled onto one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century.
What the Scrolls Are
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of approximately 900 manuscripts discovered in eleven caves at Qumran between 1947 and 1956. They date from roughly 250 BCE to 68 CE — making them nearly a thousand years older than the previously known manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible.
The collection includes:
Biblical manuscripts — every book of the Hebrew Bible is represented except Esther. The most significant is the Great Isaiah Scroll, a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah dating to about 125 BCE — a thousand years older than the previous oldest known Isaiah manuscript.
Sectarian documents — writings from the community that apparently produced or collected the scrolls, including the Community Rule (describing their way of life), the War Scroll (describing an apocalyptic battle between the Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness), the Thanksgiving Hymns, and commentaries on biblical books.
Non-biblical texts — apocryphal texts not included in the standard Hebrew Bible, such as the Book of Jubilees and the Book of Enoch.
Who Made Them
The scholarly consensus is that the scrolls were produced by, or associated with, a sect called the Essenes — one of several Jewish groups living in the late Second Temple period (alongside the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots mentioned in the New Testament).
The Essenes were a separatist community that withdrew from Jerusalem to the desert, practicing strict purity laws, communal ownership of property, and intense study of scripture. They expected an imminent apocalyptic showdown and prepared for it with extraordinary discipline.
What the Scrolls Revealed
The scrolls transformed the study of the Hebrew Bible and early Judaism in several ways:
The text was more stable than expected. When the Great Isaiah Scroll was compared to the standard Hebrew text used by Jews and Christians (the Masoretic Text, compiled around 1000 CE), scholars found remarkable similarity despite a thousand-year gap. The scribal tradition had preserved the text with extraordinary fidelity.
But there were variants. Other scrolls showed different versions of biblical texts — suggesting that in the Second Temple period, the Hebrew Bible was not yet fully standardized. Multiple manuscript traditions coexisted.
Judaism was diverse. The sectarian documents revealed how varied Jewish religious life was in the centuries before and after Jesus. The Essene worldview — dualistic, apocalyptic, expecting an imminent end — was strikingly different from the rabbinic Judaism that became standard after 70 CE. It was also strikingly similar, in some ways, to early Christianity.
New light on Christian origins. The scrolls do not mention Jesus or early Christianity. But they use language and concepts — the Son of God, the New Covenant, the Teacher of Righteousness, the Sons of Light — that appear in the New Testament. This revealed that early Christianity emerged from a Jewish world already saturated with these ideas.
The Scrolls Today
The scrolls are housed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, in a purpose-built facility called the Shrine of the Book. High-resolution digital images of all the scrolls are now publicly available through the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library — one of the most remarkable democratizations of ancient knowledge in history.
What a shepherd boy and a thrown rock unlocked changed everything we thought we knew about the Bible's transmission and the world in which it — and Christianity — took shape.
Traditions Covered