Dead Sea Scrolls
Since their discovery in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) contributed some of the most significant resources for understanding Palestinian Judaism during the period of Christian origins. Preserving approximately nine hundred compositions, the Scrolls range in date from about 250BC to the first century AD, an era of crucial concern for NT backgrounds.
The prime importance of the Scrolls is that they have produced copies of major parts of the OT which are a thousand years earlier than the earliest Hebrew copy previous available. Because of Qumran, we now have documents as old as 100 BC or even earlier.
Before the discovery of the Scrolls, the oldest preserved copy of the OT was a manuscript in Leningrad dated to the tenth century AD.
The principal scroll is a copy of the Book of Isaiah, and it had only a very few minor variations; this underlines the essential integrity of the scribal tradition, that a manuscript could be copied over and over again for a thousand years and still preserve an extremely faithful version of the original.
Among the remains of the Qumran library, the most abundantly attested kind of writing includes scriptural texts. Just over two hundred manuscripts from the eleven Qumran caves – approximately 25 percent of the entire collection – are copies of the same books that now appear in the canonical Jewish Scriptures. The Scrolls thus provide remarkably rich and detailed insights into the varied nature of Scripture texts during the period of Christian origins.
They give new information on the history of the Hebrew language, trends in spelling formation of words and pronunciation. The Aramaic manuscripts of Qumran provide the first literary documents in the form of Aramaic used in Palestine in the time of Christ.
The prime importance of the Scrolls is that they have produced copies of major parts of the OT which are a thousand years earlier than the earliest Hebrew copy previous available. Because of Qumran, we now have documents as old as 100 BC or even earlier.
Before the discovery of the Scrolls, the oldest preserved copy of the OT was a manuscript in Leningrad dated to the tenth century AD.
The principal scroll is a copy of the Book of Isaiah, and it had only a very few minor variations; this underlines the essential integrity of the scribal tradition, that a manuscript could be copied over and over again for a thousand years and still preserve an extremely faithful version of the original.
Among the remains of the Qumran library, the most abundantly attested kind of writing includes scriptural texts. Just over two hundred manuscripts from the eleven Qumran caves – approximately 25 percent of the entire collection – are copies of the same books that now appear in the canonical Jewish Scriptures. The Scrolls thus provide remarkably rich and detailed insights into the varied nature of Scripture texts during the period of Christian origins.
They give new information on the history of the Hebrew language, trends in spelling formation of words and pronunciation. The Aramaic manuscripts of Qumran provide the first literary documents in the form of Aramaic used in Palestine in the time of Christ.