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Until the middle of the twentieth century, the Hebrew Bible was known from medieval Jewish codices that gave one-sided information on the content of the Bible, because at that time the only text that was current was the Masoretic Text (MT, for which see 2). The full spectrum of information on the Hebrew text of the Bible thus was not available, since in antiquity several additional forms were current in Israel. The MT is a rich text, enriched by several layers of data in the early Middle Ages (vowels, cantillation marks, and Masorah), and was the basis for an elaborate corpus of Jewish and non-Jewish Bible interpretation. Hundreds of Masoretic manuscripts were known, but the differences between them are so slight that all these manuscripts must be described as belonging to one large manuscript family.

The idea that MT was the only surviving Hebrew text from antiquity came to an end in the middle of the twentieth century (1947) when a very large treasure trove of Hebrew scrolls was found in the Judean Desert, mainly at Qumran, dating from the period around the turn of the Common Era (250 BCE–70 CE for Qumran). The following were the major areas in which new gains were made when contrasted with the past:

1. The Bible text was written in scrolls, and not in codices, as in the Middle Ages (this was also known from rabbinic literature).

2. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, they contained single Bible books, although some scrolls contained all of the Minor Prophets and two or more books of the Torah.

3. The text of the Bible was unvocalized, written with spaces between the words. At that time the text was divided into paragraphs, like the Masoretic Text, but not into verses, since that division was initially oral.

4. Around the turn of the era the text of the Bible was known in many textual forms, usually described as »textual variety.« This situation differed completely from the situation from the first century CE onwards when MT was the only Hebrew text used.

5. While the Samaritan Pentateuch, another ancient text of the Hebrew Bible, was known from copies prepared from the early Middle Ages onwards, it was a surprise that early forerunners of that text, not yet sectarian, were found among the Qumran scrolls. (The Samaritan Pentateuch contains the text of the Torah written in a special version of the early Hebrew script, preserved for centuries by the Samaritan community. It is a Samaritan, sectarian text, but it goes back to a Jewish text, from which it differs very little in its consonantal form.)

6. It was a surprise to find among the Qumran scrolls texts that were written in a completely different Hebrew spelling system, such as the large Isaiah scroll.

7. It was also a surprise to find in the Judean Desert sites such as Masada, Wadi Murabbaʿat, Wadi Sdeir, and Naḥal Ḥever texts that are virtually identical with the consonantal text of the medieval Masoretic texts. These were named proto-Masoretic by scholars.

8. All the textual peculiarities of MT beyond the letters were confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls: division into paragraphs (although not in the same places as MT), dotted letters, parenthesis signs known from the Masorah as »inverted nunim,« suspended letters, etc. The only feature of MT that has no equal in the early manuscripts is that of the Ketiv-Qere notations. By way of explanation, MT contains more than 1,500 instances in which tradition instructs the readers to abandon the texts that is written [Ketiv,] and to read instead the text indicated [Qere].

9. Thousands of details in manuscripts (also known as »readings« or »variants«) not known previously help us to better understand the biblical text, often pertaining to matters of substance.

10. The scrolls provide much background information on the technical aspects of the copying of biblical texts and their transmission in the Second Temple period.

11. The reliability of the reconstruction of the Vorlage of the ancient translations, especially the LXX, is supported much by the Qumran texts, since several Hebrew texts or details in the texts foreshadow the text of the LXX (see § 4.).

These are some of the major contributions of the new finds of the scrolls that we will now describe in some detail.

The main site of biblical manuscripts in the Judean Desert is in the vicinity of Khirbet Qumran, some 15 km south of Jericho near the Dead Sea. There, remnants of some 950 biblical and non-biblical scrolls, once complete, were found in eleven caves. Excavations in 2017 revealed a twelfth cave, now empty because it had been looted, but probably it housed texts as well. The texts deposited in these caves probably had been collected by the members of the Qumran community who had previously held them within one of the community buildings. The community members used some or all of these texts, some privately and some in community gatherings, but we possess no information regarding the exact role of these texts in the daily life of the community over a period of almost two hundred years—from the time of the settlement probably around 100 BCE until the destruction of the site in 73 CE. The term library is often used for this collection, mainly for the texts found in cave 4, but it would probably be more appropriate to consider the caves as text-depositories.

A striking feature among these manuscript finds is the large percentage of the Scripture scrolls, some 25% among the total scrolls found at Qumran. It is more difficult to calculate the statistics for the Judean Desert sites; if the Scripture scrolls are compared only with the literary texts, they comprise 65%. In absolute numbers, we now calculate the total number of the Qumran fragments as 950 and those of biblical books as 242.

The Bible had a very central place in the Qumran community. Indeed, the community made a special effort to collect all the Scripture texts in their midst, as well as other compositions they considered authoritative. The calculation of 242 biblical scrolls includes the phylacteries (tefillin) and mezuzot. We count fragments of 210–212 biblical scrolls from Qumran together with 25 tefillin and 7 mezuzot.⁶⁷ The number of copies of the individual books shows the differing levels of interest of the Qumran covenanters in them. Note the exceptionally numerous copies of Genesis (23–24), Deuteronomy (32), Isaiah (21), and Psalms (36).

The Qumran corpus also contained a large group of compositions that were directly based on Scripture (catalogued as follows in the Dead Sea Scrolls Reader):⁶⁸ parabiblical texts (120 texts) and exegetical texts such as pesharim (sectarian exegetical commentaries), and general commentaries (34).

Concerning the central place of Scripture in the community that lived in Qumran, we learn from the Rule of the Community (1QS 6:6) that one third of the night was spent in studying Scripture, and wherever ten people were present, a person well-versed in Scripture needed to be among them. It therefore does not surprise us that this community made an effort to bring as many copies of the Hebrew Bible to Qumran as possible. As a result, all the canonical books of the Old Testament are represented at Qumran with the sole exception of the Book of Esther. The lack of Esther, no doubt, should be attributed to coincidence.⁶⁹

Among the Qumran scrolls, fragments of twelve biblical scrolls written in the paleo-Hebrew script have been found. The ancient Hebrew script was in use from the tenth century BCE until it was gradually replaced with the Aramaic or square script in the third century BCE, but afterwards it continued to be used. In any event, at a later time it is theorized that the ancient Hebrew script was revived because of nationalistic reasons and some biblical scrolls were written in that script. The writing in this script was preserved for the most ancient biblical books, the Torah and Job—note that the latter is traditionally ascribed to Moses (b. BB. 14b). Paleographical analysis suggests that these texts do not belong to the earliest group of Qumran scrolls.

The first system used for dating scrolls was that of paleography (dating on the basis of an analysis of the handwriting), and this is still our major resource for dating. At the same time, at an early stage in the study of the scrolls, Carbon-14 examinations of the leather and papyrus fragments became instrumental in determining their dates, usually supporting paleographical dating. The paleographical dates applied to the documents range from 250 BCE to 68 CE for the Qumran texts,⁷⁰ from 50 BCE to 30 CE for the Masada texts, and from 20 BCE to 115 CE for the texts from Wadi Murabbaʿat, Wadi Sdeir, Naḥal Ḥever, and Naḥal Ṣeʾelim.

The earliest Qumran biblical fragments postdate the authorship of the latest biblical books by several centuries. However, 4QDan^c and 4QDan^e containing portions of the second part of the book, were probably copied between 125 and 100 BCE, not more than sixty years after the completion of the final editing stage of that book. As early as the DSS are, they are relatively late in the development of the Bible books, so that they do not contain testimony to several questions on which scholars would like to receive answers, such as the question whether Isaiah 40–66 was written by an author different from the one who composed Isaiah 1–39. Likewise, the DSS contain no answer to questions relating to the documentary hypothesis relating to the composition of the Pentateuch.

The main interest in the biblical scrolls pertains to their content. The first striking fact is the dichotomy of the evidence from the Judean Desert. There is a basic difference between the scrolls found in Qumran and the ones found in the other sites in the Judean Desert, discussed above. It is a striking fact that all the 25 texts that were found in the Judean Desert at sites other than Qumran display almost complete identity with the medieval texts. Since the medieval manuscripts differ slightly from one another, it would be best stated that several of these Judean Desert scrolls are virtually identical with codex L(eningrad) of MT. This identity can be seen also in an examination of the En-Gedi scroll, agreeing with codex L in all of its details, see § 2.1.1. The consonantal framework of MT changed very little over the course of one thousand years.

However, the Qumran texts are characterized by a broad variety of texts. It appears that scribes freely inserted changes in the text, thus creating slightly different, and sometimes much different, copies. The proto-Masoretic text does not feature in Qumran, as that derived from a different social milieu, that of the proto-rabbinic and later Pharisaic circles. Instead, in Qumran we find (1) Masoretic texts that are a little more removed from the strict Masoretic content. We name them »MT-like« such as 4QJer^a and 1QIsa^b. (2) There are a few texts that resemble the text that later became the basis of the Samaritan sect, the Samaritan Pentateuch. These texts are named pre-Samaritan texts and they do not yet contain the sectarian Samaritan readings. (3) Likewise, there are a few texts that resemble the Hebrew text from which the LXX was translated. (4) But most of the texts were free creations of scribes that cannot be grouped into any cluster. I have named them »non-aligned« or »independent.«

The coexistence of the different categories of texts in the Qumran caves is noteworthy. The fact that these different texts were found in the same caves reflects a textual plurality at Qumran, and because several groups of texts could not have been written at Qumran, their textual plurality reflects a situation elsewhere in Israel between the 3^rd century BCE and the 1^st century CE. While no solid conclusions can be drawn about the approach of the Qumran sectarians to the biblical text, it is safe to say that they paid no special attention to textual differences such as those described here. For one thing, no specific text was preferred in their sectarian writings, and a composition like 4QTestimonia (4Q175) shows this situation eminently. In this composition, each of the biblical sections adduced reflects a different textual pattern: Exod 20:21 (a pre-Samaritan text combining MT Deut 5:28–29 and 18:18–19 as in SP), Num 24:15–17 (undetermined character), and Deut 33:8–11 (very close to the non-aligned scroll 4QDeut^h). Likewise, the Scripture quotations in the sectarian writings follow different textual forms.

In view of this plurality, we ought to ask ourselves which copies carried authority, some or all, and for whom? For the Qumran community, the various Scripture texts were equally authoritative since, as far as we know, its members paid no attention to textual differences between these texts. Most likely, in the centuries for which the Dead Sea Scrolls provide evidence the biblical text was known in different ways not only in Qumran but in all of Israel. Bible manuscripts derived from individuals and religious groups. As far as we know, these groups embraced texts but did not shape them, that is, none of the groups mentioned above inserted their theological views into their Scripture manuscripts.