Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls

MAY 22—For about two centuries around the time of Christ, a religious community committed to purity and Scripture practiced an austere form of spirituality and created libraries in the barren landscape in the hills near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea.

They were dispersed in 68 AD after the Romans cracked down on the Great Revolt of the Jews. But they managed to stash many of their scrolls into jars and tucked them away in many of the caves that dot the hills of the Judean desert.

The scrolls, which came to light in the late 1940s and 1950s, were remarkably well preserved in the arid climate. Subsequent scholarship has shown the Dead Sea Scrolls to be a remarkable find, containing books of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha and the sect’s own works.