The Dead Sea Scrolls are now available online. You can search by language, by content, by site the scroll was found… how freaking cool is that?
I love technology. I love the internet.
THIS is why the internet was born. Go ahead, amateur Torah students. Read a Torah scroll from 2,300 years ago.
About 230 manuscripts are referred to as “biblical Scrolls”. These are copies of works that are now part of the Hebrew Bible. They already held a special status in the Second Temple period, and were considered to be vessels of divine communication. Evidence suggests that the Scrolls’ contemporary communities did not have a unified conception of an authoritative collection of scriptural works. The idea of a closed biblical “canon” only emerged later in the history of these sacred writings.
Among the Scrolls are partial or complete copies of every book in the Hebrew Bible (except the book of Esther). About a dozen copies of some of these holy books were written in ancient paleo-Hebrew (the script of the First Temple era, not the standard script of the time).
Many biblical manuscripts closely resemble the Masoretic Text, the accepted text of the Hebrew Bible from the second half of the first millennium ce until today. This similarity is quite remarkable, considering that the Qumran Scrolls are over a thousand years older than previously identified biblical manuscripts.
By the way, these are the scrolls that the Palestinians are trying to claim are their heritage–because they were found in a cave in the West Bank. Right. Their heritage. Because the Palestinians are Jews that follow Jewish law. Oh. Wait. No, that would be Israelis. Yeah, go ahead and sue Israel in the ICC for them. That and a dollar….