Dead sea scrolls
Dead sea scrollsThe Dead Sea Scrolls are documents of great historical and scholarly value, found in 1947 and later in caves above the North West Dead Sea. Archaeologists have shown that the scrolls stored in jars in the first cave at QUMRAN were written or copied between the 1st century B.C. and the first half of the 1st century A.D. Chief among the scrolls are two copies of the Book of Isaiah, almost 1,000 years older than any Hebrew biblical manuscript previously known. Another important scroll was the so-called Manual of Discipline for an ascetic community, which has been identified with both the ruins at nearby QUMRAN and the Essenes, a Jewish religious sect living an ascetic communal agricultural life in that region between the 2nd century B.C. and 2nd century A.D. Parallels between the Qumran scrolls and the New Testament have led some scholars to suggest a tie between the Essenes and the early Christians, including the much-disputed suggestion that Jesus and John the Baptist may have The Dead been Essenes. More recent work by other archaeologists and biblical scholars has questioned the association of the scrolls with the Qumran ruins and the Essenes.
Here are some facts about the the Dea Sea Scrolls:The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in eleven caves along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea between the years 1947 and 1956. The area is 13 miles east of Jerusalem and is 1300 feet below sea level. The mostly fragmented texts are numbered according to the cave that they came out of. They have been called the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times. Only Caves 1 and 11 have produced relatively intact manuscripts. Discovered in 1952, Cave 4 produced the largest find. About 15,000 fragments from more than 500 manuscripts were found. In all, scholars have identified the remains of about 825 to 870 separate scrolls.The Scrolls can be divided into two categories - biblical and non-biblical. Fragments of every book of the Hebrew canon (Old Testament) have been discovered except for the book of Esther.
There are now identified among the scrolls, 19 copies of the Book of Isaiah, 25 copies of Deuteronomy and 30 copies of the Psalms . Prophecies by Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Daniel not found in the Bible are written in the Scrolls.The Isaiah Scroll, found relatively intact, is 1000 years older than any previously known copy of Isaiah. In fact, the scrolls are the oldest group of Old Testament manuscripts ever found. In the Scrolls are found never before seen psalms attributed to King David and Joshua.There are no...
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