Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran

Qumran is the location in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. But what are the Scrolls and what do they contain?

Those Scrolls – about 900 of them - are some of the only known surviving copies of Biblical documents. The scrolls are dated between 150 B.C. - 70 A.D.

A piece of one of the Dead Sea scrolls

The scrolls include at least parts of every book of the Old Testament, and usually the writings are almost identical to the traditional Hebrew scripts of the bible.

However, some of the scrolls contain changes from the traditional script. The scrolls were found in 11 caves in the northwestern shoreline of the Dead Sea closest to Qumran.

One of the caves at Qumran.

Qumran is believed to have been a settlement of a Jewish mystical sect called Essenes. The scrolls, which were discovered in 1947 by an Arab shepherd, are believed to have been the Essenes library.

Today, you will be able to find the majority of the Scrolls in the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.