A Few Facts about Qumran and its Scrolls

Last updated on: August 13, 2026 at 1:59 am by Ben Witherington

A Few Facts about Qumran and its Scrolls 2026-08-09T20:57:17-04:00 Ben Witherington

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If there is one aspect of Biblical studies that may have been over-reported and over-studied since about 1947 are the Qumran scrolls, more popularly called the Dead Sea Scrolls (though they did not emerge floating in the Dead Sea, as I have done more than once) and the Qumran community that produced these scrolls. A few generally held conclusions have emerged over the years, for example, probably the Essenes are the ones who retreated to the Dead Sea having gotten fed up with the corruptions in the priesthood and general Jewish leadership, including the Hellenization of the leaders in the Hasmonean period, and set up a base came at the edge of the Dead Sea, awaiting an eschatological climax to human history pitting the sons of light vss. the sons of darkness. If this was a movie you could have called it ‘Apocalypse Then’. The community seems to have been initially founded by ‘The Teacher of Righteousness’ well before the time of John the Baptizer or Jesus, and the community has nothing directly to do with either the Jesus movement or early Christianity, expect that it lasted into the NT era, when Titus’ troops came calling going after the zealots holed up at Masada just south of Qumran, and so 72 A.D. was pretty much the end of the community, with their written assets being stored in numerous caves near the sea in the Judean wilderness. Here are some basic and interesting facts about the scrolls…

There are now more than 900 fragments or whole scrolls found in 11 Caves which have been dated from about 250 B.C. to A.D. 70. Around 608 are written in Hebrew including the famous lengthy Isaiah scroll, and 118 are in Aramaic, and only seven are in Greek, like the fragment above. Surprisingly, only about 33% of these fragments are material from the Hebrew Bible, but the importance of this material can hardly be exaggerated. This material is almost 1,000 years older than some of the medieval Masoretic texts of the Hebrew Bible, and what in general it showed is how very carefully these scrolls were copied over many centuries, even more the Masoretic scholars added vowel pointing and diacritical marks of various sorts. There are an impressive 650 or so manuscripts that contain non-Biblical texts of numerous different sorts. Some of these texts describe rituals and praxis of the Qumran community itself, and some of these documents are not inscribed on papyrus or parchment, for instance the famous Copper Scroll housed in Amman in Jordan.

It is possible that John the Baptizer may have at some point been connected with the Qumran community not least because of his eschatological message about coming divine judgment, his locale in the Judean wilderness, the fact that the famous Isaiah 40 text about ‘the voice crying in the wilderness, prepare a highway for our God in that wilderness’ was applied both to him, and to the Qumran community by some its own adherents.

If you want a helpful introduction to the scrolls, there are many, but one I would recommend is by Peter Flint.

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