There is a Sound Series, Dead Sea Scrolls: Discovery

Shidonna Raven
2 hours ago
3 min read

ByPhilip R. Davies

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Last Updated: May 22, 2025

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Source: Britannica

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The discoveries at the various sites include a wide variety of texts, but the greatest interest remains with the sectarian writings, which can be classified as follows: (1) rules, or manuals, like the Rule of the Community, describing the dualistic doctrine, constitution, and regulations of the “Union,” as the community owning the scrolls at Qumrān called itself; and the War Scroll, which tells how the “children of light” finally conquer the “children of darkness”; (2) interpretations of biblical texts, such as commentaries on Isaiah, Habakkuk, Nahum, or Psalms; or groupings of texts by topic, such as the Florilegium or the Melchizedek Fragments—all of these typically relate scriptural passages to the sect and its times; (3) liturgical texts, including the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, which focus on angelic worship in the heavenly Temple (anticipating later Jewish mystical traditions), and the Thanksgiving Hymns, which express a powerful anthropology of human depravity redeemed through divine grace; (4) collections of laws, frequently dealing with cultic purity, such as the Halakhic Letter, the Damascus Document, and the Temple Scroll; and (5) ethical tracts (e.g., several sapient works, and the Song of the Sage).

Although heralded as one of the great events in modern archaeology, the discovery of the scrolls is not without controversy. All the manuscripts were placed originally under the control of a small committee of scholars appointed by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities (a responsibility assumed after 1967 by what is now the Israel Antiquities Authority), who, some claim, monopolized access to the scrolls. Most of the longer, more complete scrolls were published soon after their discovery. The majority of the scrolls, however, consists of tiny, brittle fragments, which were published at a pace considered by many to be excessively slow. Even more unsettling for some was the fact that access to the unpublished documents was severely limited to the editorial committee. In September 1991 researchers at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, announced that they had created a computer program that used a previously published concordance to the scrolls to reconstruct one of the unpublished texts. Later that month officials at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, announced that they would allow researchers unrestricted access to the library’s complete set of photographs of the scrolls. With their monopoly broken, the official scholars of the Israel Antiquities Authority agreed to lift their long-standing restrictions on the use of the scrolls. In 2011 researchers from the Israel Museum, which housed the scrolls, collaborated with the American search engine company Google Inc. to publish five of the larger scrolls, including the Isaiah Scroll, online.

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