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Dead
Sea Scroll
c.250 BCE65 CE
The
Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of around 800
fragmented ancient Hebrew manuscripts, discovered
between 1947 and 1956 in caves near the ancient
settlement of Qumran, on the shores of the Dead
Sea, near Jerusalem. The scrolls comprise, amongst
other things, the oldest copies in existence of
the Hebrew Bible, which Christians know as the
Old Testament. The Qumran scrolls date from approximately
250 BCE to about 65 CE, and give us texts of the
Bible that were copied more than 1000 years earlier
than any others now extant.
The
most commonly accepted scholarly opinion is that
the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are written in Hebrew,
Aramaic and Greek, belonged to the library of
an ascetic, monastic and separatist Jewish sect
called the Essenes, who had retreated to Qumran.
It is generally agreed that the Qumran community
died out in 68 CE. Scrolls related to those found
at Qumran were also found at Masada, the Herodian
fortress taken over by Jewish Zealots after the
fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and finally taken by
the Romans in 73 CE. All of these scrolls are
of great interest to both Jews and Christians.
They represent a non-Rabbinic form of Judaism,
and also contain many important parallels to the
stories of Jesus, although none of the scrolls
contain any explicit mention of Jesus or any other
New Testament figure.
Apart
from the biblical and apocryphal texts preserved
at Qumran, the most original writings are sectarian.
These include the community rules (or Manual
of Discipline), ordinances, calendars, apocalyptic
visions and liturgical texts. The scrolls have
also enabled scholars to gather an immense amount
of information on how the Bible was written and
how it was transmitted from generation to generation.
The
scroll exhibited here consists of six columns,
one of them only partially preserved. The manuscript,
written in the characteristic script of the Herodian
period (second half of the first century BCE),
includes the partial text of the Ten Commandments.
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