What exactly is in the dead sea scrolls?

What has the Dead Sea Scrolls help us find out?

• after finding them in 1947, how did the scrolls help historians, archeologists and others find out about the bible?

• Answer:

  Before the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls the oldest extant manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible were dated around 1000 C.E. The Dead Sea scrolls enable us to trace the history of the Hebrew text back a thousand more years, even to 200 B.C.E. in some cases. The Qumran caves have yielded manuscripts of every book of the Hebrew Bible but Esther (whose absence may be accidental, or deliberate-since the Hebrew version of Esther does not mention God's name). Although the manuscripts of Isaiah found in Cave 1 are very extensive and in relatively good condition, most of the biblical fragments came from Cave 4, and give us only small portions of text. The bulk of these biblical fragments can be dated to the first century B.C.E. or C.E. Most were written in the familiar Hebrew square script with vegetable or carbon ink on scrolls made out of leather. There are, however, examples of biblical manuscripts written in the paleo-Hebrew or ancient Canaanite script. The biblical manuscripts from Qumran provide an eloquent witness to the variety of Hebrew textual traditions. This textual diversity should not be exaggerated to the point of imagining radically different books of Genesis, Exodus, or whatever. But the Qumran manuscripts make clear that there was no uniform or official version of the Hebrew Scriptures such as the Masoretic Version came to be in Judaism; there is a significant amount of textual variation in the Qumran biblical scrolls. What once had been attributed to the free or poor translation techniques of those who produced the Greek Septuagint or other ancient versions in many cases turned out to be accurate renderings of different Hebrew originals. While the Qumran discoveries provide the earliest evidence for the books that make up the canon of the Hebrew Bible as we know it, it is not clear if and how the people behind the scrolls distinguished between canonical and noncanonical books. The discoveries do show that the books of the Bible were read by these people and regarded as important, but there is no list of canonical books and no obvious external distinctions between biblical and nonbiblical books. There is simply no way of knowing whether the Qumran people had an idea of "canon" in the sense of a fixed list of books regarded as normative, or to what books they might have accorded or refused authoritative status. Second Temple Judaism. Although we cannot know what the Qumran people regarded as canonical Scripture, we do know that their chief texts included the books of our Bible. This is proven not only from the multiple copies of biblical books but also from the different kinds of composition based on the Bible. These include imaginative expansions and paraphrases of biblical narratives (Genesis Apocryphon), "commentaries" showing how biblical prophecies were fulfilled in the life and history of the Qumran community (Pesharim), Aramaic translations and paraphrases of difficult Hebrew texts in the style of what later came to be known as targums (on Job and Leviticus), and biblical and other laws expressed directly by God as the speaker (Temple Scroll). Even in compositions that are not directly based on biblical books, the Hebrew language and style are thoroughly biblical. These people (and other Second Temple Jews) understood creativity as saying "new" things in "old" ways; that is, they used biblical words and phrases in new combinations to express what they regarded as new. If the Qumran scrolls represent the library of a sect of Essenes (or Sadducees-see below, p. 473), then they tell us about a Jewish religious movement around around 70 C.E. the inhabitants of Qumran placed the contents of their library in the hills surrounding the main site for safekeeping as they fled. Allowing that it is dangerous to deduce the beliefs and practices of a group from the contents of its library, the Community Rule (or, Manual of Discipline) looks much like the handbook for the theology and practice of a Jewish "monastic" group. Among the first Cave 1 texts to be published and studied, the Community Rule was quickly assumed to be the rule by which the Qumran people lived. As other "rules" appeared, there were efforts to relate them to the Community Rule and thus to chart the history of the Qumran movement. It is not impossible, however, that these rules applied to different Jewish movements or that they were simply products of religious imagination ("map without territory"). Whatever their origin and use, the rules provide evidence for variety and diversity within Second Temple Judaism. The early document known as 4QMMT details the legal and cultic issues on which "we" differ from those in control of the Jerusalem Temple. Whereas before the discovery of the Qumran scrolls scholars divided Jews into Pharisees and Sadducees, now it is clear that there were many groups and movements in Second Temple Judaism: Pharisees, Sadducees (perhaps several kinds), Essenes, Samaritans, Zealots, Christians, and probably many more. These discoveries in turn inspired a restudy of the so-called Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and a thoroughgoing reassessment of the sociological map of Second Temple Judaism. It is now clear that Judaism not only in the Diaspora but also in the land of Israel was open to Greek influences from the third century B.C.E. onward in the areas of language, economics, military strategy, politics, culture, and even religion. Scraps of ancient Greek biblical texts were found at Qumran, and a first-century C.E. scroll of the Twelve Minor Prophets in Greek was discovered at nearby Nahal Hever. Even Jews as isolated as the Qumran people and their neighbors near the Dead Sea were affected to some extent by Hellenism.