The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in caves along the western shore of the Dead Sea from 1947 to 1956, are considered by many to be the single most important archaeological find of the twentieth century. They comprise about 800 documents, some complete or nearly complete, but most quite fragmentary. In fact about 100,000 fragments have been found in all! Most of the scrolls were found in caves near Qumran, where a community lived which some scholars identify as Essences, a Jewish sect known to have existed elsewhere in Israel during the Second Temple period, which includes the time of Jesus. The scrolls comprise, among other things, the oldest copies of the Bible in existence. The Qumran scrolls date from approximately 250 B.C. to about 65 A.D., and at some other locations to about 135 A.D. This means that the Dead Sea Scrolls give us texts of the Bible, which were copied more than 1000 years earlier than any others were now in existence!
             "In 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd, following a goat that had gone astray, tossed a rock into one of the caves along the seacliffs and heard a cracking sound: the rock had hit a ceramic pot containing leather and papyrus scrolls that were later determined to be nearly twenty centuries old. Ten years and many searches later, eleven caves around the Dead Sea were found to contain tens of thousands of scroll fragments dating from the third century B.C. to A.D. 68 and representing an estimated eight hundred separate works". (See # 5, page 1) These "scrolls" that were discovered came to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in Qumran, a village situated about twenty miles east of Jerusalem on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. These Dead Sea Scrolls are most commonly made of animal skins, but also papyrus and one of copper. They are written with carbon-based ink, from right to left, using no punctuation except for an occasional paragraph indenta...