Dead Sea Scrolls Research Paper

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of texts that were found in eleven caves. They were discovered near the Dead Sea between 1946 and 1956 by Bedouin shepherds and archeologists (Vanderkam, Flint, 2002). There are many different versions of the story and details diverge from one story to another, but there is one version that I found most common in my research. Three men from the tribe of Bedouin named Khalil Musa, Jum’a Muhammad Khalil, and Muhammad Ahmed el-Hamed were tending to their flocks of sheep and goats in the region of Ain Feshka on the northwestern side of the Dead Sea (Lim, 2005). They were looking for a goat who had gone astray and were throwing rocks into the openings to try and find it. They agreed to wait until two days later

They are the Genesis Apocryphon, the War Scroll, the Habbakuk pesher, and the Thanksgiving Hymns (Lim, 2005). There were a total of 11 caves that were searched. After the first seven scrolls were discovered, this caught the eye of John C. Trever, who was the first American scholar to come into contact with the scrolls (Vanderkam, 2002). Out of all the Qumran caves, cave 4 is the most famous because it produced 90 percent of the Dead Sea Scrolls and scroll fragments. Estimates of the number of scrolls found in the caves vary between 800 and 900 manuscripts (Lim, 2005). The Dead Sea Scrolls are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Editing these fragments and scrolls were complicated. Editors separated individual fragments into groups according to language, content, and handwriting (Lim, 2005). There were three methods used to date the Dead Sea Scrolls. These include paleography, Radio Carbon Dating, and archaeology (Trompf, 2002). The scrolls were made of animal skins and also papryus. They are written with carbon-based ink and didn’t have any punctuation. In some cases, there weren’t any spaces in between words. The longest scroll that was found is called The Temple Scroll. This was found in cave 11 and its present total length 26.7 feet (Vanderkam,

It is different because while the other scrolls were written on parchment or papyrus, this scroll was written on two rolls of copper. It isn’t a literary work, but a list of locations at which gold or silver are hidden. It also mentions coins and vessels. It is basically simple directions from known points. It was found in 1952 in Cave 3 (Trompf, 2002). This was not discovered by Bedouin, but by archaeologists, which was rare in that time. When it was found, it had been rolled up into separate scrolls of copper which was too brittle to unroll. Scholars and other experts decided for about five years on how to actually cut the scroll open (Trompf, 2002). They came to the conclusion that they would cut the scroll into 23 strips, each one curved into a half-cylinder. The treasure still remains unfound and there are many different theories that people have about the Copper Scroll. One of these is that the treasure never existed and even if it did, we don’t know who it belonged to or where it came from. Others believed that it refers to the temple treasure, which was hidden before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. There are all just guesses and it may never be discovered who the treasure belonged to and what actually happened to