Dead Sea Scrolls

Relationship to the Bible

The term "Dead Sea Scrolls" does not appear in the Bible. It refers to a collection of handwritten copies of ancient Jewish literature, including the Bible. A manuscript is a book copied by hand before the invention of printing. Because these documents contain many manuscripts of the Old Testament, they are a key resource for studying how the biblical text has been transmitted.

Discovery and Contents

According to the usual account, a Bedouin shepherd first found scrolls stored in jars in a cave near Qumran in 1947. By 1956, additional documents had been recovered from eleven caves in the Qumran area. Counting fragments, the finds have been catalogued as some 900 documents. In a broader sense, the term "Dead Sea Scrolls" is sometimes extended to documents found at other sites around the Dead Sea, such as Masada.

The documents fall into three broad categories.

• Biblical manuscripts: These make up roughly one quarter of the total. Manuscripts or fragments of nearly every book of the Old Testament except Esther have been found. The most notable is the Great Isaiah Scroll, which preserves almost the entire book of Isaiah.
• Community documents: These include the Community Rule, which sets out regulations for the community's life, and the War Scroll, which depicts a war at the end of days. There are also writings such as the Habakkuk Commentary (Pesher Habakkuk), which interpret the biblical text by applying it to events of the authors' own time.
• Non-canonical literature: These are manuscripts or fragments of works such as Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus).

Significance for the Bible as a Whole

Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament were copies of the Masoretic Text dating from around the tenth century AD. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide manuscripts roughly a thousand years older. Apart from some differences, the Great Isaiah Scroll largely agrees with the Masoretic Text.

Some manuscripts, however, attest different readings.

• One manuscript of 1 Samuel gives the height of Goliath as "four cubits and a span" rather than the Masoretic Text's "six cubits and a span." This reading agrees with the Septuagint.
• One manuscript of Jeremiah reflects a shorter edition close to that of the Septuagint.

With regard to the New Testament, the scrolls serve as evidence for the diversity of Judaism during the intertestamental period. Themes such as the contrast between light and darkness and the expectation of the Messiah also appear in them. One document, drawing on Isaiah 61:1–3, states that in the messianic age the sick will be healed and the dead raised. This passage is often compared with Luke 7:22.

Interpretations and Issues

• Identity of the community: Many scholars associate the group that produced the scrolls with the Essenes. Other scholars understand the relationship between this group and Qumran differently.
• Textual transmission: Conservative scholars and churches regard the Dead Sea Scrolls as evidence that the Old Testament text was faithfully transmitted over a long period. This point is also cited in discussions of biblical inerrancy. In the field of textual criticism (the comparison of manuscripts to recover the original text), scholars also emphasize the scrolls as evidence that multiple textual traditions coexisted at the time, the Masoretic Text being one of them.
• The question of the canon: The discovery of non-canonical books alongside biblical ones does not settle whether those books belong to the canon. Protestants do not regard Tobit and Sirach as canonical, whereas the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church include these books in the Bible.
• Claims the scrolls do not directly support: Some have claimed that a Greek fragment from Cave 7 is part of the Gospel of Mark, but this is a minority view among scholars. Claims that John the Baptist or Jesus Christ came from the Qumran community are likewise speculation rather than anything the scrolls state directly. Delays in publication also gave rise to allegations that the documents were being deliberately suppressed. Most such claims lost their force after the full body of material was made public in the early 1990s.

In Korean Churches

In sermons and Bible studies in Korean churches, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Great Isaiah Scroll in particular, are frequently cited as an example of the Bible's accurate transmission over many centuries.