The Dead Sea Scrolls as Biblical Manuscripts (Found 1947-1956)
described in the volume, no text in the public-domain sources
Beyond the sectarian works summarized in Section VII, the caves held about 220 to 230 biblical manuscripts, including at least a fragment of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1 is nearly complete, over seven meters long, and dates to about 125 BCE. Before 1947 the oldest substantially complete Hebrew Bible manuscripts were medieval, the Aleppo Codex of about 930 CE and the Leningrad Codex of 1008 CE; the scrolls pushed the evidence back more than a thousand years. Their combined testimony is double-edged and both halves matter: many manuscripts are remarkably close to the medieval consonantal text, while others preserve genuinely different editions, some agreeing with the Greek Septuagint or the Samaritan Pentateuch against it. Textual standardization, in other words, came after this period rather than before it.
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