by Daniel Mcclellan

Created on: April 24, 2008

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a designation assigned to a collection of almost 900 ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts collected from numerous locations around the northern shores of the Dead Sea. They were written primarily on leather, but some scrolls were of papyrus and even copper. Most of the scrolls were found in caves near Qumran, an ancient settlement believed to be the home of the Essenes, an ancient ascetic and apocalyptic branch of Judaism that grew critical of Jerusalem's priesthood a century or two before the Common Era. The scrolls contain a wide variety of texts, including legal texts, eschatological texts, temple texts, a treasure map, apocryphal books, and every book from the Hebrew Bible except Nehemiah and Esther. The scrolls date from around 200 BCE to about 70 CE.

The scrolls were first discovered in 1947 by a group of Bedouins. The story has long circulated that a shepherd was throwing rocks into caves to try to locate a lost sheep when he heard a crash that turned out to be a pot shattering. This story represents the most popular of several apocryphal accounts shared about their discovery, but it is not accurate. According to the Bedouins' own account, they did indeed throw a rock into a cave opening, but they were investigating the caves hoping to find treasure. They often explored caves in search of gold. They moved on, intending to return to complete the investigation. The youngest of the three, Muhammad "the Wolf," returned by himself a few days later and entered the cave. He found several empty jars and some leather rolls, which he took with them. The scrolls changed hands several times over the following weeks and months, and it was quite some time before scholars recognized the antiquity of the scrolls and their worth.

When the scholarly community descended upon the northern shores of the Dead Sea they employed local workers to help them collect scrolls, but they paid them by the fragment, which sadly inspired several of the workers to tear entire texts to pieces to collect more money. The scrolls were assigned to leaders in the field of Hebrew Bible scholarship for publication in the series Discoveries in the Judean Desert, but translation and publication moved slowly. Scrolls were later reassigned to other scholars, and publication of the scrolls, both biblical and otherwise, have steadily proceeded since then. Many scrolls have yet to be published.

The value of the Dead Sea Scrolls can hardly be calculated, but several considerations

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