Back to: How We Got The Bible
The Back Story and some Facts
– presented by Tim Anderberg
These are the main story highlights and quick facts about the Dead Sea Scrolls
- A young shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib found the cave and scrolls on accident when looking for a lost goat.
- He and his friends didn’t think they were worth much but still took them back with them
- They eventually found their way to Bethlehem and were purchased by a monastery for the Hebrew university in Jerusalem
- Initially, only seven scrolls were found:
- Those scrolls included the Book of Isaiah, Manual of Discipline, a commentary of the Book of Habakkuk, a work of unknown content that later because known as the “Genesis Apocryphon”, a part of the Book of Isaiah, a work entitled “the War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness, and a collection of Thanksgiving Hymns.
- Qumran is the area where these scrolls and others were copied. They date back to roughly second century B.C to First century A.D
- They were placed in the caves for safekeeping
- There have been numerous other scrolls and artifacts discovered since the first discovery between 1946-1948
- In total about 800 scrolls have been discovered in an additional 10 caves near the original cave
- While not all of the scrolls contain information about the old testament, there are still a quite a few that contain fragmentary and even substantial portions of the old testament
- There is evidence and portions of almost each book in the Old Testament found in the scrolls and fragments that have been recovered.
- There are 36 fragments of scroll found that represent the Book of Psalms, with Deuteronomy having 29, Isaiah with 21, Exodus having 17, Genesis with 15.
- There is a scroll dating back to 100b.c that contains the entire book of Isaiah, it is almost an exact copy barring a couple of breaks in the text. This scroll reads almost exactly to the Massoretic text in current Hebrew bibles.
Additional Resources
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS (DSS)
The Essenes
In these caves the Essenes, a Jewish religious sect dating from about 300 BCE to 50 CE (including the time of Christ), housed their library.
This sect formed as a result of controversies related to the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. These disputes prompted the founder of the Qumran sect—known in the scrolls as the “Teacher of Righteousness”—to withdraw from the temple establishment and to establish a community in the desert.
Significance
The greatest importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls lies in the discovery of biblical manuscripts dating back to only about 300 years after the close of the Old Testament canon. That makes them one thousand years earlier than the oldest manuscripts previously known to biblical scholars.
-Philip Comfort
The texts found at Wadi Qumran were all completed before the Roman conquest of Palestine in A.D. 70, and many predate this event by quite some time.
Apart from the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient witnesses to the Hebrew Old Testament that are actually written in the Hebrew language are almost nonexistent. Because of this, the Dead Sea Scrolls may easily be one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time. They take us a thousand years deeper into the history of the Hebrew Old Testament, giving us the ability to assess all the other ancient witnesses with greater understanding.
Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Isaiah scroll has received the most publicity.
Source: Comfort, Philip W.. The Origin of the Bible (pp. 160, 165-166). Tyndale House Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Stats
- Altogether the thousands of manuscript fragments constituted the remains of some 600 (some say 900) manuscripts,
- about 60 percent proto-Masoretic,
- 5 percent pre-Samaritan,
- 5 percent the Hebrew text underlying the Septuagint,
- 30 percent mixed texts.
- entire collection contains fragments of all the books in the Hebrew Bible with the exception of Esther.
During the period 100 BCE–100 CE, the Proto-Masoretic Text began to predominate over the others, and became the so-called official text during the period (70–150 CE). Although it was not a pristine text, it did have a very old post-captivity textual tradition.
Conclusions Relating to Masoretic Texts
The nature and number of these Dead Sea discoveries produced the following general conclusions about the integrity of the Masoretic Text. The scrolls give overwhelming confirmation to the fidelity of the Masoretic Text.
- Millar Burrows, in his work The Dead Sea Scrolls, indicates that there is very little alteration in the text in something like a thousand years.
- R. Laird Harris, in Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible, argues that there is less variation in these two traditions in a thousand years than there is in two of the families of New Testament manuscripts.
- Gleason Archer advocates the integrity of “our standard Hebrew Bible” (i.e., the Masoretic Text) by stating that it agrees virtually word for word with the Isaiah manuscript from Cave 1 in 95 percent of its contents, with the remaining 5 percent being comprised of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling8 that developed in the interim. The vast majority of these do not affect the meaning of the text. And none of them affect any basic Christian doctrine.
- The Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) is the most complete of all the scrolls discovered at Qumran. This scroll includes the entire book of Isaiah and is virtually identical to texts that were copied 1,000 years later than the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Geisler, Norman L; Nix, William E.. From God To Us Revised and Expanded: How We Got Our Bible (pp. 201-203). Moody Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Other Writings Found
Note: Intertestamental refers to the time period between Malachi (OT end) and Matthew (NT begin)
APOCRYPHAL (Intertestamental)
In addition to the biblical manuscripts the discoveries have included Apocryphal works such as Hebrew and Aramaic fragments of Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, and the Letter of Jeremiah. Fragments were also found of Pseudepigraphal books such as 1 Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and the Testament of Levi.
SECTARIAN SCROLLS
Many sectarian scrolls peculiar to the religious community that lived at Qumran were also found. They furnish historical background on the nature of pre-Christian Judaism and help fill in the gaps of intertestamental history.
- Damascus Document
- Manual of Discipline
- Thanksgiving Hymns
- Habakkuk Commentary (gives many details about an apocalyptic figure called the “Teacher of Righteousness” who is persecuted by a wicked priest.)
- Copper Scroll (contained an inventory of some sixty locations where treasures of gold, silver, and incense were hidden. Archaeologists have not been able to find any of it.)
- Temple Scroll (Almost half of the scroll gives detailed instructions for building a future temple, supposedly revealed by God to the scroll’s author.)
Comfort, Philip W.. The Origin of the Bible (p. 164). Tyndale House Publishers. Kindle Edition.