Qumran, the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls: excavations and visiting

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Bedouin shepherds and a cave (1947)

In late 1946 or early 1947, young shepherds of the Ta'amireh Bedouin tribe, among them Muhammad edh-Dhib, explored a hollow in the cliff while looking for a stray animal. Inside they found jars holding leather scrolls wrapped in linen. Seven scrolls passed through antiquities dealers in Bethlehem: three were bought in November 1947 by Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University, and four, including the Great Isaiah Scroll, by the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan Mar Athanasius Samuel. The cave, since known as "Cave 1", was only officially excavated in 1949, by Roland de Vaux and Gerald Lankester Harding.

Eleven scroll caves, including Cave 4

The find set off a race between the Bedouin and the archaeologists. Between 1952 and 1956, ten more scroll caves were located. The richest, Cave 4, found by the Bedouin in 1952 in the marl terrace directly opposite the ruins, produced thousands of fragments from several hundred manuscripts, about three quarters of the whole collection. Cave 3 held the enigmatic Copper Scroll, Cave 7 a handful of Greek papyrus fragments, and Cave 11, found in 1956, the Temple Scroll and a large Psalms scroll.

Cave 12, found empty (2017)

In February 2017 a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem led by Oren Gutfeld, working with Randall Price of Liberty University, announced the identification of a twelfth cave. It contained broken jars of the Qumran type, wrapping cloth, leather straps and a piece of blank parchment, but no scrolls: two mid-20th-century pickaxe heads showed that it had been looted. The excavators treat it as one of the scroll caves; some specialists remain cautious because no text was found.

• ManuscriptsAbout 900, mostly on parchment
• Date3rd century BC – 1st century AD
• Caves11 scroll caves (1947-1956); Cave 12 empty (2017)
• Richest caveCave 4 (about three quarters of the manuscripts)
• Site managementIsrael Nature and Parks Authority (INPA)

What do the Qumran scrolls contain?

About a quarter of the manuscripts are biblical books: every book of the Hebrew Bible is represented except Esther. The rest are texts related to the Bible (paraphrases, commentaries, books such as Enoch and Jubilees) and writings belonging to a particular group. Most are in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and a few in Greek.

The Great Isaiah Scroll

Found in Cave 1, the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^a) is the only Qumran manuscript preserved almost in full: 17 sheets of parchment stitched together, about 7.34 m long, with 54 columns holding all 66 chapters of the book. Its handwriting places it towards the end of the 2nd century BC (around 125-100 BC), about a thousand years earlier than the oldest complete Masoretic manuscripts known before 1947. Its text is very close to the one handed down later, with many spelling differences and a few differences in meaning. Bought in the United States in 1954 by Yigael Yadin for the State of Israel, it is kept at the Israel Museum.

The community writings

Several scrolls describe an organised group that saw itself as the true Israel: the Community Rule sets out admission, communal meals, purity and rank; the Damascus Document speaks of a "Teacher of Righteousness"; the War Scroll describes a final battle between the "sons of light" and the "sons of darkness"; and the pesharim, such as the Habakkuk Commentary, reread the prophets in the light of the group's own history. The Community Rule explains its withdrawal into the desert with a verse from Isaiah:

"The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God."

Isaiah 40:3 (KJV)

The Gospels apply the same verse to John the Baptist, who preached in the Judean wilderness (Mark 1:3; John 1:23). Links between John the Baptist and Qumran have often been suggested, but no text connects them directly.

Khirbet Qumran: Roland de Vaux's excavations

From 1951 to 1956 Roland de Vaux, director of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem, led six seasons at the ruins with Gerald Lankester Harding of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities. The pottery found in the ruins matched that of the caves, which established the link between the two.

A tower, communal rooms and a "scriptorium"

The main building, square and two storeys high, has a corner tower. De Vaux identified a large hall as a refectory: a room next to it held more than a thousand stacked bowls, plates and cups. From the collapsed upper floor of another room (locus 30) he recovered pieces of plastered tables and benches, along with inkwells, and saw it as a scriptorium, a copying room. The name has stuck, although the room's exact use is debated.

Ritual baths and water management

An aqueduct carried flood water from the wadi to around ten large stepped pools. Several are interpreted as ritual baths (mikvaot); others were ordinary cisterns, and some may have served both purposes. The steps of one of them are split, probably by the earthquake of 31 BC recorded by Josephus.

The cemetery

East of the ruins lies a cemetery of more than a thousand graves, most of them aligned north-south. Only a small number have been excavated: most of the skeletons studied are male, but women and children have also been identified, and some burials may be much later.

Timeline

• 8th–7th century BC — a small Iron Age settlement. De Vaux identified it with the "city of Salt" (Ir ha-Melah) of Joshua 15:62; others prefer Secacah, named in the previous verse.
• 2nd–1st century BC — reoccupation in the Hasmonean period; the exact date (around 130 or around 100 BC) is debated.
• 31 BC — earthquake and fire; the site is later reoccupied.
• Around AD 68 — destroyed by the Roman army during the Great Jewish Revolt (some coins point to a slightly later date).
• AD 132-135 — brief presence of rebels during the Bar Kokhba revolt.

Did the Essenes live at Qumran?

The Essene hypothesis

Ancient writers describe the Essenes as one of the main streams of Judaism in the Second Temple period, alongside the Pharisees and Sadducees. Philo of Alexandria and Josephus put their number at more than 4,000, living in communities, sharing property and careful about purity. Pliny the Elder (Natural History 5.73) places a group of Essenes on the western shore of the Dead Sea, above Engada, that is Ein Gedi. For de Vaux, the match between these texts, the rules in the scrolls and the site's installations (communal rooms, baths, inkwells) pointed to an Essene community. It is still the majority view, often in a qualified form: a settlement linked to the Essene movement, where only some of the scrolls were copied.

Other interpretations

• A villa or estate: Robert Donceel and Pauline Donceel-Voûte, tasked with publishing de Vaux's excavations, saw a wealthy country house, pointing to glass and stone objects.
• A fortified manor: Yizhar Hirschfeld saw Qumran as a Hasmonean fort that became an agricultural estate and trading post, comparable to nearby Ein Feshkha.
• A pottery workshop: Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg, who excavated the site for the Parks Authority from 1993 to 2004, argue that the pools were used to settle clay and that the scrolls, brought from Jerusalem, were hidden in the caves with no link to the inhabitants.
• The libraries of Jerusalem: Norman Golb also held that the scrolls came from Jerusalem and were hidden during the war against Rome.

Visiting Qumran and seeing the scrolls

Qumran National Park

The site is run as a national park by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA). The entrance has a small exhibition and a short film about the discovery, subtitled in several languages. A marked trail, largely wheelchair accessible, runs through the ruins: the tower, aqueduct, stepped pools, refectory and "scriptorium". A viewpoint faces Cave 4, whose openings can be seen in the marl terrace. Entry into the caves is generally not offered to visitors; hiking paths climb towards the cliff and should only be used following the park's directions.

Where to see the scrolls: the Shrine of the Book

The scrolls are not displayed at Qumran. Most of the complete scrolls are kept in Jerusalem, at the Shrine of the Book of the Israel Museum, opened in 1965. Its white roof, shaped like the lid of a scroll jar and designed by Frederick Kiesler and Armand Bartos, faces a black basalt wall, echoing the battle of the "sons of light" against the "sons of darkness". At its centre is a facsimile of the Great Isaiah Scroll; the fragile originals are shown in rotation. Thousands of fragments are held by the Israel Antiquities Authority, which has digitised them in the online Leon Levy library, and the Copper Scroll is in the Jordan Museum in Amman.

Around Qumran

A few kilometres south, the Ein Feshkha (Einot Tzukim) reserve preserves remains contemporary with Qumran. To the north, Jericho and its Hasmonean and Herodian palaces reflect the same regional setting; to the south, Route 90 leads to Ein Gedi and then Masada, where fragments of scrolls related to those of Qumran were also found.