What are the Dead Sea Scrolls, what do they contain, and what is their significance?
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Biblical scholar here. I’ll try a short answer: the Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient documents found at the site of Qumran and other locations in the Judean Desert. Some of these texts are biblical texts written in Hebrew with a few in Greek translation. Others are other ancient Jewish texts such as the book of Jubilees, which is not accepted as authoritative Scripture by Jews or Christians today, apart from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Jubilees and other works like it have been called “rewritten Scripture” since they contain texts found in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament) in expanded or rewritten form (similar to fan fiction). Other texts found at Qumran are commonly called “sectarian” documents, such as the Community Rule, meaning that they were produced by the religious community at Qumran whose beliefs sometimes differed from other branches of ancient Judaism. Almost all of these documents survive in physically fragmented states they but help us to get a better understanding of the development of the biblical text and ancient Judaism.
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