The Dead Sea Scrolls

by Terry Wane Benton

Dead Sea Scrolls – 250BC to AD70

Photo by Lux Moundi. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathanjj/8246948498

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 980 Hebrew documents found in the Qumran limestone caves between 1947 and 2017. Most of the texts are written on parchment. About 40% were copies from the Old Testament. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest Hebrew-language manuscripts of the Bible were Masoretic texts dating to the 10th century AD, such as the Aleppo Codex. The biblical manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls push that date back over one thousand years. The Dead Sea Scrolls have demonstrated that the Old Testament was accurately transmitted during this interval. This indicates that the Old Testament we have today is a very accurate copy of the Old Testament's original text (autograph).

This means no large-scale changes happened to the Bible, as previously surmised. The reliability of the Bible keeps being verified and supported by what is discovered in the ground, which preserves the truth of the past. A visit to the Museum in Jerusalem shows the remarkable display as one of the most important finds in history. Further, the Isaiah scroll shows that it was not tampered with to make it sound like Isaiah 53 fits Jesus. These scrolls were preserved from before Jesus to no more than 40 years after Jesus left Earth. It was too early for men to alter the texts to make them sound favorable to the doctrine of atonement by a special Servant of God instead of the usual animal sacrificial ways of the Law. A Servant was being “bruised for our iniquity,” and that was there in the Jewish Bible before Jesus and Christianity ever came on the scene. That is “the arm of the Lord” and the scrolls verify the amazing plan of God Almighty!