The Dead Sea Scrolls

A collection of roughly 972 Jewish manuscripts discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves near Khirbet Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. The scrolls include copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, pushing the earliest extant Hebrew biblical manuscripts back by roughly a thousand years. The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ), dated to ca. 125 BC, matches the Masoretic Text with remarkable fidelity, providing powerful evidence for the stability of the Hebrew scriptural tradition across centuries.