event · E0101
The Dead Sea Scrolls מגילות ים המלח
The library of roughly 900 manuscripts copied between about 250 BCE and the First Revolt and hidden in caves near Qumran — the oldest surviving Hebrew biblical manuscripts, including a complete book of Yeshayahu. Recovered by chance beginning in the winter of 1946/47, they moved the documentary horizon of the biblical text back roughly a thousand years and transformed the study of its transmission. Positioned on the atlas at the era the scrolls themselves lived, per the standing rule: artifacts sit at their existence point, not their discovery.
I. Who
- Hebrew
- מגילות ים המלח
- Also known as
- Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Qumran scrolls
II. When
- Traditional
- c. 3510–3830 AM (the scrolls' own era; found 5707–5716)
- Academic
- c. 250 BCE – 70 CE, deposited by the First Revolt; discovered 1946/47–1956 CE
- Date range
- c. 250 BCE – 70 CE (copied and deposited); discovered 1946/47–1956
- Duration
- ≈320 years
- Precision
- approximate
III. Where
- Places
- Qumran
Why it matters
Before a Bedouin shepherd wandered into a cave near Qumran in the winter of 1946/47, the oldest surviving Hebrew manuscripts of the biblical text were the great medieval Masoretic codices. The scrolls from the eleven caves — among them a complete book of Yeshayahu copied more than two thousand years ago — moved the physical evidence for the text back roughly a thousand years in one stroke. And what they showed cuts both ways, honestly: many scrolls agree closely with the consonantal text the Masoretes would later fix, while others preserve real variety in the late Second Temple period — a direct snapshot of the Tanakh's transmission a millennium before any manuscript previously known.
V. How do we know
| Claim | Evidence | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bedouin shepherds found the first seven scrolls in a cave near Qumran in the winter of 1946/47; by 1956, eleven caves had yielded tens of thousands of fragments of roughly 900 manuscripts, now largely housed in the Shrine of the Book and the Rockefeller Museum collections. | external archaeology | ★★★★★ | |
| The scrolls include fragments of every book of the Tanakh except Esther; the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa), a complete book of Yeshayahu copied around 150–100 BCE, predates the great medieval Masoretic codices by about a thousand years. | archaeology | ★★★★★ | |
| For the story of textual transmission the finds cut both ways: many Qumran biblical manuscripts — and the slightly later Masada and Nahal Hever texts even more so — agree closely with the consonantal text later fixed by the Masoretes, while other Qumran manuscripts preserve real textual plurality (variant editions and readings) in the late Second Temple period.
Standard scholarly synthesis (Tov's classification); suggested cross-claims for the atlas's Tanakh/Yeshayahu text entities, which this workstream does not own.
|
archaeology reconstruction | ★★★★☆ |
Referenced by: Qumran