The Judean Desert scrolls come to light

In ten years the remains of hundreds of manuscripts were taken out of eleven caves.

Before this find, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible was the Aleppo Codex—the work of the masoretes of Tiberias, early tenth century. Anything older was known only through quotations and translations. And then, in dry caves above the Dead Sea, copies were found that had been written a thousand years before the codex.

How it happened. The first cave was found by chance by a Bedouin of the Ta'amireh tribe looking for a stray animal, at the turn of the year 5707. The scrolls went to antiquities dealers in Bethlehem, and from there along two different paths: three were bought by Professor Eliezer Sukenik, four came to an archbishop of the Syrian church and were taken to America. Seven years later they were put up for sale by an advertisement in an American newspaper, and Yigael Yadin, Sukenik's son, bought them back for the state; in 5715 all seven were together. The other caves were sought and found between 5711 and 5716—scholars and Bedouin racing each other. Cave 4 yielded about three quarters of all the material, not as scrolls but as tens of thousands of fragments.

What was found there. Parts of every book of the Bible except Esther. Beside them, the writings of the community that lived at Qumran: its rule, its commentaries on the prophets, its calendar. And apart from Qumran, at other sites in the desert: at Wadi Murabba'at, letters from the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt; at Masada, seven biblical scrolls from the fortress itself.

What it means for the text. Precision is needed here, because the lie runs in both directions. The Great Isaiah Scroll—the only one preserved whole, all sixty-six chapters—differs from the masoretic text in more than two and a half thousand places. Does that mean the text changed? Look at what the differences are: full or defective spelling, word order, a prefix, the form of a name. The meaning holds. A thousand years of copying by hand—and the book is the same book. That is the true conclusion from the find, and it is stronger than either simplification: both "not one letter changed" and "the text was different."

What the scrolls did not show. The writings of the Qumran community are not part of Jewish tradition and never were: they are the books of a movement that vanished. That this community were the Essenes is held by most scholars, but it is a supposition, not a settled matter: the word "Essenes" does not occur in the scrolls themselves.