On the west bank of the Dead Sea there lies a unique arrangement of caves known as the ruins of Khirbet Qumran. This area is one of the lowest parts on earth. The account of the discover are as extraordinary as the scrolls themselves. News of the discovery spread in 1948 from Israeli and American sources.
             In 1947 young Bedouin shepherds who were searching for a stray goat in the Judean Desert, entered a long-untouched cave. Inside they found jars filled with ancient scrolls. That discovery produced seven scrolls and began a search that lasted almost 10 years. After this time had passed, thousands of scroll fragments from eleven caves were found. During this time, archaeologists searched for a community living close to the caves, which might help identify the people who left the scrolls. Soon after their discovery, historical, paleographic, and linguistic evidence, as well as carbon-14 dating, established that the scrolls and the Qumran ruin dated from the third century B.C.E. to 68 C.E. They were confirmed to be very ancient! Coming from the late Second Temple Period, which is the time when Jesus of Nazareth lived. Some might say that this find only contributes to hundreds of other scrolls found in the past, also containing biblical text. Therefore one may ask, "What is the significance of this find?" According to Millar Burrows the importance of the discovery was that, "these scrolls are older than any other surviving biblical manuscripts ever found by almost one thousand years!"
             The Dead Sea Scrolls are collection of about 600 Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts discovered in a group of caves near Khirbat Qumran in Jordan, at the northwestern end of the Dead Sea. The leather and papyrus scrolls, which survive in different states of preservation, came to be discovered in a series of archaeological finds that began in 1947. The creation of these manuscripts has been accredited to members of a previousl...