The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Photo Essay

A new exhibit at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Washington, called Discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls, will include fragments of ten scrolls discovered in Cave 4 and 11 at Qumran. Books of the Hebrew bible to be exhibited include Genesis, Exodus, Ezekial, Psalms and Isaiah; other scrolls will include glimpses of sectarian documents including the Community Rule (a manual of the behavioral strictures of the community at Qumran), the War Rule, a commentary on Hosea, a calendar document and the Pseudo-Ezekiel. Also shown will include facsimiles of Deuteronomy, Aramaic apocryphya, and the Damascus Document. This seemed like a golden opportunity to talk about the scrolls, and to assemble a photo essay, using the photographs provided by the Israeli Antiquities Authority and text information adapted from Jodi Magness's book, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are some 900 fragmented and complete documents recovered in the mid-twentieth century from eleven caves located off the western shore of the Dead Sea in Israel. Some of these caves are natural openings in the rugged limestone and dolomite cliffs; others were carved into the soft marl terrace. Written between 250 BCE and about 68-70 CE, the Dead Sea Scrolls are the earliest copies we have of many ancient Jewish manuscripts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were made from parchment (processed animal hide), although some are of papyrus reed paper and one, known as the Copper Scroll, is of thin sheets of bronze. They are written in Hebrew, for the most part, with about 20 percent in Aramaic (an ancient semitic language spoken by Jews beginning about 900 BCE) and a few in Greek. The alphabets used on the scrolls are mostly Aramaic script, an alphabet adopted by the Jews after the fall of the Kingdom of Judea, about 586 BCE.

Since their discovery, all of the texts have been translated and published. The texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls include 23 of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (the Protestant Old Testament)--Esther is missing. Eight or more copies of several books of the old testament were found, including the Pentateuch, Isaiah, Twelve Prophets, Psalms, and Daniel. The scrolls also include what scholars refer to as sectarian literature--papers that describe the rules, beliefs and practices of the sect which had stored the scrolls, and commentaries on biblical books.

Finally, there are manuscripts that are part of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. The Apocyrpha includes those books which are collected in the Catholic Old Testament (called the Deuterocanonicals) but omitted from the Protestant Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible). Pseudepigrapha are books that were collected in neither version of the Old Testament, but are Jewish religious texts dated from the first centuries BCE and CE.

For More Information

• The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Photo Essay
• The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Library at Qumran, more about the scrolls and the site of Qumran, including sources
• Archaeology of the Dead Sea Scrolls, additional sources on the Qumran Library
• Pacific Science Center Exhibition: Discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls
• The Israeli Antiquities Authority
• Dead Sea Scrolls from Ancient History at About

The exhibit at Pacific Science Center called Discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls runs through January 7, 2007. The photos on this page are all courtesy the Israeli Department of Antiquities. The top photo is of the Community Rule, MS 4Q260-366, written in Hebrew on parchment between 1st century BCE and 1st century CE (photo by Tsila Sagiv). The middle photo is of cooking vessels and jars from the Qumran site (photo by Mariana Salzberg). The bottom photo is of leather sandals found in the Qumran caves (photo by Clara Amit).