The Dead Sea Scrolls are a huge discovery to most of the historians. This scroll contains 981 texts. They were found in caves know to be 11. Their they found at least 90 percent of the scrolls. These scripts are known to be Hebrew text which now in the present are translated. Even though the script is half torn and the shape is bad. They have only translated some of the text. When did this happen? Who were the ones that found this? This discovery was made by Bedouin shepherd Muhammed Edh-Dhib, his cousin Jum'a Muhammed, and Khalil Muska. They made this discovery in November 1946 and February 1947. They discovered 7 scrolls. Although this scrolls were in bad shapes we can still get an understanding of what was going on.
Some facts about this cave.
-------------------------------Early in September 1948, Metropolitan bishop Mar Samuel brought some additional scroll fragments that he had acquired to Professor, Ovid R. Sellers the new Director of ASOR. By the end of 1948, nearly two years after their discovery, scholars had yet to locate the original cave where the fragments had been found. With unrest in the country at that time, no large-scale search could be undertaken safely. Sellers attempted to get the Syrians to assist in the search for the cave, but he was unable to pay their price. In early 1948, the government of Jordan gave permission to the Arab Legion to search the area where the original Qumran cave was thought to be. Consequently, Cave 1 was rediscovered on 28 January 1949, by Belgian United Nation observer Captain Phillipe Lippens and Arab Legion Captain Akkash el-Zebn. (Found this info here.) A little video of a better understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 981 texts discovered between 1946 and 1956 at Khirbet Qumran in the West Bnks. They were found inside caves about a mile inland from the northwest shore of the Dead sea, from which they derive their name. Nine of the scrolls were rediscovered at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) in 2014, after they had been stored unopened for six decades following their excavation in 1952. The texts are of great historical, religious, and linguistic significance because they include the earliest known surviving manuscripts of works later included in the Hebrew Canon Bible , along with deuterocanonical and extra-biblical manuscripts which preserve evidence of the diversity of religious thought in late Second Temple Judaism.
The texts are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabatean, mostly on Parchment but with some written on papyrus and bronze. The manuscripts have been dated to various ranges between 408 BCE and 318 CE. Bronze coins found on the site form a series beginning with John Hyrcanus (135–104 BCE) and continuing until the First Jewish-Roman War (66–73 CE). The scrolls have traditionally been identified with the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes, although some recent interpretations have challenged this association and argue that the scrolls were penned by priests in Jerusalem, Zadokites, or other unknown Jewish groups. Due to the poor condition of some of the Scrolls, not all of them have been identified. Those that have been identified can be divided into three general groups: (1) some 40% of them are copies of texts from the Hebrew Bible, (2) approximately another 30% of them are texts from the Second Temple Period and which ultimately were not canonized in the Hebrew Bible, like the Book of Enoch, Jubilees, the Book of Tobit, the Wisdom of Sirach, Psalms 152-155, etc., and (3) the remaining roughly 30% of them are sectarian manuscripts of previously unknown documents that shed light on the rules and beliefs of a particular group or groups within greater Judaism, like the Community Rule, the, War scroll the Pesher on Habakkuk and The Rule of the Blessing. (Found this information here.) |