Where were the Dead Sea Scrolls found?

The caves of Qumran

Qumran is a ruin on a dry terrace above the Dead Sea, a short drive south of Jericho. The shore below is the lowest land on earth, more than 400 meters below sea level. Behind the ruin rise limestone cliffs full of caves, and in front of the cliffs more caves are cut into the soft marl. Between 1947 and 1956, eleven of them gave up scrolls. Cave 1 held seven scrolls, some stored in tall clay jars. Cave 4, close to the ruin, held the most: thousands of fragments, crumbled on the floor, that took scholars decades to piece together and publish.

The ruin itself was excavated between 1951 and 1956 by Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique in Jerusalem. He found a settlement with ritual baths, a long assembly hall and the same kind of pottery as in the caves. Roman troops destroyed it around AD 68, during the Jewish revolt.

A stray goat and a newspaper ad

The story everyone tells: a young Bedouin shepherd, Muhammad edh-Dhib, went after a stray goat, threw a stone into a cave and heard pottery break. Whatever the details, Bedouin of the Ta’amireh tribe sold the first scrolls through a dealer in Bethlehem. Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University bought three on November 29, 1947, the day the United Nations voted to partition Palestine. The Syrian Orthodox metropolitan Mar Samuel bought four, took them to the United States and, in 1954, advertised them for sale in the Wall Street Journal. Sukenik’s son, the archaeologist Yigael Yadin, bought them through go-betweens for $250,000. The seven now belong to the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

What the scrolls contain

About a quarter are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, and every book is represented except Esther. The Great Isaiah Scroll, more than seven meters long and copied around 125 BC, holds all sixty-six chapters, more than a thousand years older than the oldest complete Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex of 1008. The text is remarkably close to the one in Bibles today, with real differences in places; one Samuel scroll gives Goliath a smaller height, as How tall was Goliath? explains. The rest are a community’s own writings: rules, hymns, commentaries on the prophets, a war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness, and a scroll of copper listing buried treasure.

Who wrote them?

Most scholars connect them with the Essenes, a strict Jewish movement described by Josephus and Philo. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder places an Essene community on the west side of the Dead Sea, above Ein Gedi (Natural History 5.73). The scrolls’ own Community Rule explains why its members went out to the desert, quoting Isaiah.

Prepare the way of Yahweh in the wilderness! Make a level highway in the desert for our God.

The Gospels apply the same verse to John the Baptist, who preached by the Jordan not far to the north (Mark 1:3); see Who was John the Baptist? A minority of historians, following Norman Golb, argue instead that the scrolls came from libraries in Jerusalem, hidden in the caves as the Roman legions approached. Either way, the jars kept their secret for almost two thousand years.