Until 1947, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts of Isaiah dated from around AD 1000. Then a shepherd's stone, tossed into a cliff cave, cracked a pottery jar holding a scroll a millennium older. Set beside the medieval text it was startlingly familiar: the differences are overwhelmingly spelling and small wording variants, almost none touching meaning. A book had crossed a thousand years of hand-copying essentially intact.
- What it is
- A complete Hebrew scroll of the book of Isaiah on 17 stitched parchment sheets, over 7 metres long
- Date of artifact
- c. 125 BC
- Discovered
- Cave 1, Qumran, near the Dead Sea, 1947 (Bedouin shepherds; the caves were later systematically excavated)
- Where it is now
- Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
- Related to
- How faithfully the text of the Hebrew Bible was copied across a thousand years
- Scripture
- Isaiah 1–66
What this find showsThe text of Isaiah read today is substantially the text read before the time of Jesus — the scribal transmission of the Hebrew Bible was extraordinarily careful.
What it does not proveFaithful copying says nothing about when Isaiah was composed or whether its prophecies are true; and the Qumran library as a whole also shows some biblical books circulating in variant editions.
Sources & further reading