The Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls
By Misheal Al-Kadhi, from the Arabic Paper
The scrolls and scroll fragments recovered in the Qumran environs represent a
voluminous body of Jewish documents, a veritable "library", dating from the third
century B.C.E. to 68 C.E. Unquestionably, the "library," which is the greatest
manuscript find of the twentieth century, demonstrates the rich literary activity of
Second Temple Period Jewry and sheds insight into centuries pivotal to both
Judaism and Christianity. The library contains some books or works in a large
number of copies, yet others are represented only fragmentarily by mere scraps
of parchment. There are tens of thousands of scroll fragments. The number of
different compositions represented is almost one thousand, and they are written
in three different languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.
The main categories represented among the Dead Sea Scrolls:
•
Biblical
Those works contained in the Hebrew Bible. All of the books of the
Bible are represented in the Dead Sea Scroll collection except Esther.
•
Apocryphal or pseudepigraphical
Those works which are omitted from
various canons of the Bible and included in others.
•
Sectarian
Those scrolls related to a pietistic commune and include ordinances,
biblical commentaries,
apocalyptic visions, and liturgical works.
The Discovery
In 1947, young Bedouin shepherds, searching for a stray goat in the
Judean Desert, entered a long-untouched cave, on the shores of the dead
sea, and
found jars filled with ancient scrolls
. That initial discovery by the
Bedouins yielded seven scrolls and began a search that lasted nearly a
decade and eventually produced thousands of
scroll fragments from eleven
caves
. These scrolls were immediately identified as
the work of a very
devout sect of the Jewish community
that lived centuries before the birth
of Jesus (pbuh).
Hershel Shanks says in his book
Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls:
"Such was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, manuscripts a thousand
years older than the oldest known Hebrew texts of the Bible, manuscripts
