THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD
The Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
How were the first scrolls discovered, in 1947? There are different
versions of the story. One of the most common accounts is that a young
Bedouin shepherd, looking for a lost goat, peered into the opening of
a cave and threw a stone inside. The sound it made, as if it had struck
a piece of pottery, intrigued the shepherd. When he entered the cave,
he found seven ancient scrolls stored in jars-scrolls
from which the three fragments displayed here are drawn.
That was only the beginning. Between 1947 and 1956, thousands of
fragments would be found by Bedouin and archaeologists in eleven
caves located near the ruins at Qumran.
Most of the scrolls were copied between the 1st century BCE and the 1st
century CE, although some are even older. These scrolls are much more
ancient than the earliest preserved copies of the Hebrew Bible, dating
from the 9th and 10th century.
The text of the scrolls is remarkably close to the Bible as we know
it today, evidence of the care with which the scribes copied
the texts by hand onto pieces of parchment that were then stitched
into scrolls or, in rarer cases, onto papyrus.
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Cave no.4 at Qumran.
Photo © Michel Lambert
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