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Israel Antiquities Authority
Jerusalem
Israel

Dead Sea Scroll
c.250 BCE–65 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.

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click to zoomFragment of Dead Sea Scroll with the Deuteronomy text of the Ten Commandments  250 BCE65 CE
Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority

 

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.