The Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran

Where is this? It's in Qumran. Qumran? I don't remember ever reading about Qumran. It is south of Jericho, the oldest city in Israel.

At first, what got into my mind was, we were to embark on a long hot walk, for I see a vast desert in front of me, covered with what seem to me, lined-up ruins, piles of rubble and deep large holes. So what is this exactly?

But then I started to see it in totality, before me is an immense beauty . . . the mountains and the as they say "the deep blue sea" plus that aura of an ancient place, of great age relating both to history and wisdom. There were even date trees and the story of the "Bedouin" finding the scrolls of old.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1946 and 1956 in eleven caves in and around the ruins of the ancient settlement of Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea.

The texts are of great religious and historical significance, as they include the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical and extra-biblical documents and preserve evidence of great diversity in late Second Temple Judaism. They are written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, mostly on parchment, but with some written on papyrus.

These manuscripts generally date between 150 BCE and 70 CE. The scrolls are traditionally identified with the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes, though some recent interpretations have challenged this association and argue that the scrolls were penned by priests in Jerusalem, Zadokites, or other unknown Jewish groups.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are traditionally divided into three groups: "Biblical" manuscripts (copies of texts from the Hebrew Bible), which comprise roughly 40% of the identified scrolls; "Apocryphal" or "Pseudepigraphical" manuscripts, which comprise roughly 30% of the identified scrolls; and "Sectarian" manuscripts like the Community Rule, War Scroll, Pesher on Habakkuk, and the Rule of the Blessing, which comprise roughly 30% of the identified scrolls.

In the winter of 1946–47, Muhammed edh-Dhib and Ahmed Mohammed (two Bedouin shepherds of the Ta'amireh tribe) discovered the caves, and soon afterwards the scrolls.

John C. Trever reconstructed the story of the scrolls from several interviews with the Bedouin.

Source: Wikipedia

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