Qumran Community

Above the western shore of the Dead Sea, on a marl terrace below the cliffs at Khirbet Qumran, a community of Jewish men withdrew from the corrupted Temple priesthood of Hasmonean Jerusalem and lived a disciplined common life from about 150 BC. They left the city, the Greek world, and (they believed) a Temple whose priests were illegitimate, to study Torah, copy scrolls, hold property in common, and prepare "the way of the LORD in the wilderness" (Isa 40:3 — quoted in their Community Rule). They are almost certainly the Essenes described by Pliny, Josephus, and Philo, though Josephus places Essenes in many towns as well. They followed a solar calendar at odds with the Temple’s lunar one, practised ritual washings, ate communal meals, and looked for two messiahs, one priestly and one royal. The community was destroyed by Vespasian’s troops in AD 68, during the First Jewish Revolt, but before the legions arrived its scribes hid nearly a thousand manuscripts in caves in the cliffs above the settlement. These are the Dead Sea Scrolls, found from 1947 onward — the oldest surviving manuscripts of every Old Testament book except Esther, together with the community’s own writings.