What are the Dead Sea Scrolls, what do they contain, and what is their significance?
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At the end of the second world war, a Bedouin shepherd found a bunch of pottery in a network of caves in the archaeological site of Qumran in British Mandatory Palestine as it was at the time. Within that pottery were a number of scrolls that shed light on what religion was like when they were written – from 3rd century BC to 1st century CE.
There are a number of different theories as to who wrote them, but the dating of the texts obviously has a lot of importance for early Christianity and the Abrahamic religions of the same era.
The main source for the Bible that we use today is the Masoretic Text, which dates to the 9-10th century CE. There is a small ethnoreligious group called the Samaritans who have their own canon that is mostly the same but has some significant changes. Samaritan language diverged from other Hebrew forms long ago – probably before the Babylonian captivity and their canon has a lot of references to a holy place in Samaritan religion that isn’t in the Masoretic Text. The DSS include Samaritan canon.
For the most part, the texts do not differ massively, but some parts do, suggesting that some of what Christians call the Old Testament canon was in flux until the second century CE and that a large part of what survived to the traditional Masoretic Text has a fairly high fidelity.
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