What are the dead sea scrolls?

In the 1940s a Bedouin shepherd threw a stone into a cave in the cliffs above the north-western shore of the Dead Sea, about thirteen miles east of Jerusalem. He heard pottery break. Inside were tall clay jars, and inside the jars were rolls of leather covered in Hebrew writing. He had no idea what he had found. Neither, for a while, did anyone else.

Over the following decade, eleven caves in the same area were emptied. Together they held the remains of somewhere near a thousand manuscripts — a handful of them whole scrolls, most of them fragments. That is what the Dead Sea Scrolls are: the surviving library of a Jewish community that lived at Qumran, copied books, hid them when the Roman army came through in AD 68, and never came back for them.

Much of the library is the community's own material — their rules of life, their hymns, their commentaries on Scripture, the ordinary paperwork of a religious settlement. But a quarter of it is the Bible. Every book of the Old Testament except Esther turned up in the caves in some form, and the copies were made between roughly 250 BC and the middle of the first century AD.

Before 1947, the oldest Hebrew copies of those books that anyone possessed had been made around AD 900. The caves handed scholars copies a thousand years older than anything they had ever seen.

The most important single find was in the first cave. It is a scroll of leather about twenty-four feet long, containing the whole of Isaiah, all sixty-six chapters, copied out around 125 BC. It is the only complete book of the Bible found at Qumran, and it is the oldest complete copy of any biblical book in existence.

This is what made it valuable. Scholars now had Isaiah as it stood a century before Christ, and Isaiah as it stood in the Aleppo Codex, a Hebrew Bible produced by Jewish scribes around AD 930. Between the two lay a thousand years of copying by hand, generation after generation, with no printing press and no way of checking against an original. If the text had drifted, this is where it would show. So they set the two side by side and compared them word by word.

The two are substantially the same book. Most of the differences are spelling — the older scroll writes some words more fully, the way older English wrote shew for show. A small number are real differences in wording, and your Bible footnotes them where they matter. What is not there is the thing a critic would need: no missing chapter, no inserted paragraph, no altered prophecy, nothing that changes what Isaiah said or what it means. A thousand years of copying by hand, and the book barely changed.

Isaiah 53 describes a man who is despised, condemned and killed, and who carries the sins of other people while He dies.

Isaiah 53:3–5 (NKJV)

He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.

Christians have always read that as a description of Jesus, because it describes Him exactly — rejected, silent before His accusers, killed among criminals, buried in a rich man's grave, and bearing the sins of others while He died. The obvious reply is that Christians wrote it that way afterwards, to fit. That is a fair thing to suspect. Documents have been doctored before, and a religion with a motive and a few centuries to work in could have quietly tidied up its own prophecies.

What it cannot do is reach into a sealed jar. The copy in the cave was written more than a century before Jesus of Nazareth was born, hidden in the Judean desert, and left there untouched until a shepherd's stone broke the pottery in 1947. Every hand that might have altered it was long dead before there was anything to alter it towards.

None of this was the shepherd's doing. Men who had never heard of Jesus of Nazareth copied out the account of His death, sealed it in a jar and left it in a cave. It lay there through the fall of Jerusalem, through the rise and collapse of empires, through the whole history of the Church, and came up out of the ground in the century that thought to ask for it. The answer was already in the desert before anyone raised the question.