The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea is located in Israel and Jordan, about 15 miles east of Jerusalem. It is extremely deep (averaging about 1,000 feet), salty (some parts containing the highest amount of salts possible), and the lowest body of water in the world. On the western shore of the Dead Sea, about eight miles south of Jericho, lies a complex of ruins known as Khirbet Qumran. It occupies one of the lowest parts of the earth, on the fringe of the hot and arid wastes of the Wilderness of Judaea.

But from that place, members of an ancient Jewish religious community, whose centre it was, hurried out one day and in secrecy climbed the nearby cliffs in order to hide away in eleven caves their precious scrolls. No one came back to retrieve them, and there they remained undisturbed for almost 2,000 years.

In 1947, young Bedouin shepherds, Muhammad edh-Dhib 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. It occurred during the last months of the British mandate in Palestine. 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.

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.

In the 1950s, the Bedouin discovered additional fragmentary scrolls in the caves near Qumran. Subsequently the Jordanian Antiquities Department put together an international publication team to publish and interpret the manuscripts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of fragments from many manuscripts. However, some of the most interesting among them are the Pesher texts. The Pesher texts are strings of interpretations of Biblical verses compiled by the most knowledgeable among the Jews. The word itself is derived from the Hebrew root word p-sh-r, which means, "to explain".

Two medieval manuscripts now known as the Damascus Document (formerly the Zadokite Fragments) were discovered by Solomon Schechter, then of Cambridge University, in the Cairo Genizah in Egypt in the late 19th century. Schechter identified them as authored by a Second Temple-period Jewish sect. Other copies were later found among the Dead Sea Scroll fragments from Qumran.

The Psalms Scroll is one of the longer texts to be found at Qumran; the manuscript was found in 1956 in Cave 11 and unrolled in 1961. Its surface is the thickest of any of the scrolls--it may be of calfskin rather than sheepskin, which was the more common writing material at Qumran. The script is on the grain side of the skin.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Psalms Scroll