The Dead Sea Scrolls (1947–2009)

Between 1946 and 1947, Ta'amireh Bedouin herders found scrolls sealed in jars in the first of the caves near Qumran, on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. The manuscripts passed through the Bethlehem antiquities dealer Khalil Iskander Shahin, known as Kando, and scattered into several collections before scholars assessed what had been found.

Location: Qumran, West Bank

In November 1947 the Hebrew University archaeologist Eleazar Sukenik secretly purchased three of the scrolls and identified them as manuscripts of the Second Temple period — the oldest biblical manuscripts then known. He announced the find publicly in 1948, as war spread through Jerusalem, and the scrolls' age and script immediately made them a subject of international scholarly attention.

Location: Jerusalem

In February and March 1949 Roland de Vaux and G. Lankester Harding conducted the first scientific excavation of the discovery cave, recovering further fragments and establishing the archaeological context of the finds. The excavation linked the manuscripts to the nearby ruins of Khirbet Qumran and set the pattern for the decade of fieldwork that followed under the Jordanian Department of Antiquities.

Location: Qumran, West Bank

In September 1952 Bedouin discovered Cave 4, which held roughly 15,000 fragments from some 520 manuscripts — the largest trove of the find and the source of most of the published corpus. The fragments were taken to the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem, where an international editorial team began the long task of assembling and publishing them.

Location: Qumran, West Bank

In July 1954 the archaeologist Yigael Yadin arranged the purchase of four scrolls from the collection of the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan Samuel through a Wall Street Journal classified advertisement headed "The Four Dead Sea Scrolls." The purchase brought key manuscripts to Hebrew University in Jerusalem and ended their long circulation through the private antiquities market.

Location: Jerusalem

By 1956 eleven caves had yielded manuscripts, ending with Cave 11, which produced the Temple Scroll, the longest of the scrolls; the catalogued corpus reached 981 manuscripts. Nearly all of the fragments were eventually housed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, while other Judaean Desert finds entered the collections in Amman.

Location: Qumran, West Bank

After the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel took control of East Jerusalem and with it the Palestine Archaeological Museum, where the scrolls were held. Jordan and the Palestinian Authority dispute Israeli custody of the collection on territorial, legal, and humanitarian grounds, noting that the scrolls were found under Jordanian administration, while Israel's claims rest on the manuscripts' significance in Jewish history and heritage; the dispute has continued in international forums.

Location: East Jerusalem

In September 1991 the Huntington Library in California released its complete set of scroll photographs to any scholar who asked, breaking the near-monopoly of the small official editorial team that had controlled access for decades. The editorial team defended restricted access as necessary for careful publication, while critics charged that the delay had held back scholarship for a generation; the same year Israel began releasing its own photographs and publication accelerated.

Location: San Marino, California, United States

In 2009 Oxford University Press completed Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, the forty-volume official edition of the scrolls begun in the 1950s, and the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library made high-resolution images of the manuscripts freely available online. Scholarly debate continues over who wrote the scrolls: the long-accepted theory that they belonged to the Essene sect has been challenged by proposals involving Jerusalem priests and other Jewish groups.

Location: Jerusalem and Oxford