| | In 1947, young Bedouin shepherds, searching for a stray goat in the
Judean Desert,entered a long-untouched cave and found jars filled
with ancient scrolls. That initial discovery by the Bedouins
yielded seven scrolls and began a search that lasted nearly a decade
and eventually produced thousands of scroll fragments from eleven
caves. During those same years, archaeologists searching for a
habitation close to the caves that might help identify the people
who deposited the scrolls, excavated the Qumran ruin, a complex of
structures located on a barren terrace between the cliffs where the
caves are found and the Dead Sea. Within a fairly short time after
their discovery, historical, paleographic, and linguistic
evidence, as well as carbon-14 dating, established that the scrolls
and the Qumran ruin dated from the third century B.C.E. to 68 C.E.
They were indeed ancient! Coming from the late Second Temple Period,
a time when Jesus of Nazareth lived, they are older than any other
surviving biblical manuscripts by almost one thousand years. | |
