How were the Dead Sea Scrolls found?

The Dead Sea Scrolls were found by accident. Between November 1946 and February 1947, three Bedouin shepherds, Muhammed edh-Dhib, his cousin Jum'a Muhammed and Khalil Musa, came across caves near Qumran, on the northern shore of the Dead Sea. The cousin spotted the caves, but edh-Dhib was the first to actually fall into one. Inside were seven scrolls stored in jars.

Nobody knew what they were. The Bedouins hung them from a tent pole while they decided what to do. A cobbler and part-time antiques dealer known as Kando took one, and three were sold to another dealer for seven Jordanian pounds, about $28. Seven years later, scrolls from the find were bought in New York for $250,000 and brought to Jerusalem.

By 1956, eleven caves had yielded the remains of 981 different manuscripts, dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE. They include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in Jewish and Christian Bibles. The Great Isaiah Scroll, from about 125 BCE, is around 1,000 years older than any complete Hebrew copy of Isaiah known before.

For historians, the scrolls are a time machine for the text itself. The Isaiah scroll is generally consistent with the traditional Hebrew text, yet it contains more than 2,600 variants, mostly small. Who wrote the scrolls is still debated: a Jewish sect called the Essenes is the classic answer, but some scholars now argue for Jerusalem priests or other groups.