The Dead Sea Scrolls: What Was Found in the Caves at Qumran?
Nearly a thousand ancient manuscripts from caves by the Dead Sea, including the oldest copies of Enoch, Jubilees and the Book of Giants.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are the remains of roughly 900 to 1,000 manuscripts found in eleven caves near Qumran between 1946 and 1956. They were copied between about 250 BCE and 68 CE.
In the winter of 1946–47, Bedouin shepherds entered a cave near Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, and found jars holding ancient scrolls. Over the next decade, eleven caves yielded the remains of roughly nine hundred to a thousand manuscripts, most in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and Greek. They were copied between about 250 BCE and 68 CE, when the Romans destroyed the nearby settlement.
About a quarter are books of the Hebrew Bible, a thousand years older than the previous oldest Hebrew copies. The Great Isaiah Scroll is almost complete. Others are community rules and legal texts, hymns, commentaries and apocalyptic texts about a final war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness.
For the story of the Watchers, the scrolls were revolutionary. They contained Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch, showing the book was centuries older than many had thought; many copies of Jubilees; the Book of Giants, lost for a millennium; and the Genesis Apocryphon. One Deuteronomy scroll preserved the older reading "sons of God" in Deuteronomy 32:8. The Copper Scroll, engraved on metal, lists dozens of hiding places of gold and silver. Whether real or symbolic, none of its treasure has been found. The scrolls are now held mainly by the Israel Museum and the Israel Antiquities Authority, which has photographed them for public viewing online.
One scroll is written on sheets of copper and lists more than sixty places where huge amounts of gold and silver were supposedly hidden.
Scholars still debate who owned the scrolls, most often identified with the Essenes, but agree they are Jewish religious texts, not records of any contact beyond human authors.
