The Dead Sea Scrolls

One reader, Leo, recently asked,

“What are the Dead Sea Scrolls? What do the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal? Why are the Dead Sea Scrolls important to Christians and Jewish people?”

What good questions! The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of documents found in the 1940s through the 1950s in caves near the Dead Sea in Israel. They contain texts written mostly in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Some of the documents are books from our Old Testament. For instance, the Great Isaiah Scroll is one of the most famous biblical books, and it is extremely similar to the copy of Isaiah from nearly 1,000 years later that is used for our modern translations! Other books contain the rules of the specific type of Jews who lived there and preserved the scrolls. One of these is the Community Rule, which is a document that lists a lot of really strict rules.

We think that the Jews who hid these scrolls were Essenes, and we didn’t know a lot about them before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered because the New Testament doesn’t talk about them. But Josephus, an ancient Jewish historian, did. He put them alongside the Pharisees and Sadducees as one of the main sects of Judaism. He said that they avoided all sorts of pleasure and even marriage, instead adopting the children of others to teach.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are important to Christians because, first, their copies of the Old Testament show that the Bible was copied accurately over thousands of years. Second, they teach us more about the world at the time Jesus and the apostles lived and help us understand the New Testament better. For instance, Paul warns against people who shun different types of food and marriage—perhaps the Essene way of life was attractive to some early Christians! But Paul says that everything God created is good, and so we shouldn’t avoid these good things as long as we give thanks to God for them.

The Dead Sea Scrolls also show us that the Jews were expecting the Messiah. They reference someone they call a “Teacher of Righteousness” who would bring about the kingdom of God. They also had writings dealing with the end times, when the Messiah would defeat the enemies of the Jews.

The Essene settlement that preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls was destroyed by the Romans in 68 AD, and the Essenes were either killed or scattered. It’s also possible that some Essenes became Christians. Whatever happened to them, we don’t have any evidence that they survived to the end of the first century. But God used their writings to give us even greater confidence in his Word!

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