Dead Sea Scrolls

In the winter of 1946–1947, a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad edh-Dhib was looking for a stray goat in the cliffs above the Dead Sea, near the ruined settlement of Qumran. He threw a stone into a cave, heard pottery break, and climbed in to find a row of tall clay jars. Inside were the first of what would eventually be some 972 manuscripts, in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, dating from roughly 250 BC to AD 70. Excavation of eleven caves over the next decade recovered every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther — including the great Isaiah Scroll, the only nearly-complete biblical book preserved from before the destruction of the temple — along with a library of communal rules, prayers, biblical commentaries, and apocalyptic writings of a strict Jewish sect, almost certainly the Essenes. The find pushed the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Old Testament back by roughly a thousand years and confirmed that the text Jews and Christians have used for centuries was already substantially in place during the lifetime of Jesus. The scrolls are now divided between the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem and the Jordan Museum in Amman.