In 1947 an Egyptian boy found some scrolls wrapped in linen cloth and leather. Scrolls were hidden in one of the numerous caves of the desert near Dead Sea.
The boy’s discovery was considered to be one of the greatest findings as these scrolls opened the new stage in one of the most powerful world religions. The scrolls were not always complete, but the biggest part of them is composed of fragmentary texts or documents of different kinds and they date approximately from the end of the third century B.C. to the seventh or eighth century A.D. The documents are Biblical manuscripts that are believed to be the most ancient copies of the Old Testament. Excluding the book of Esther, we find that all the Old Testament is represented in the documents of Qumran. The mentioned manuscripts gave us a better understanding in what concerns the history of texts related to the bible during the period of the Second Temple.
The scrolls found in the caves are early copies of biblical books which were written in the Hebrew and Aramaic languages, they include chants, prayers, pseudepigrapha, which are Jewish writings that are related to ancient personalities of the bible, such as Enoch or the patriarchs, and documents, as experts believe, correspond to the beliefs of a specific Jewish society that was present at the location of Qumran.
The Essenes, the community that is supposed to have written the scrolls, had an unbelievable capability of correctly predicting the events of the future. They also had a special philosophy different than any other.
The amount of information that the Dead Sea Scrolls carried on to us is enormous. Today, we have a better understanding in what concerns the important time periods of the history of Judaism.
