Dead Sea Scrolls

The initial discovery by Bedouin shepherd Muhammed edh-Dhib, his cousin Jum'a Muhammed, and Khalil Musa took place between November 1946 and February 1947.[17][18] The shepherds discovered seven scrolls housed in jars in a cave near what is now known as the Qumran site. John C. Trever reconstructed the story of the scrolls from several interviews with the Bedouin. Edh-Dhib's cousin noticed the caves, but edh-Dhib himself was the first to actually fall into one (the cave now called Cave 1). He retrieved a handful of scrolls, which Trever identifies as the Isaiah Scroll, Habakkuk Commentary, and the Community Rule, and took them back to the camp to show to his family. None of the scrolls were destroyed in this process.[19] The Bedouin kept the scrolls hanging on a tent pole while they contemplated what they should do with them, periodically showing the scrolls to their people. At some point during this time, the Community Rule was split in two. The Bedouin first took the scrolls to a dealer named Ibrahim 'Ijha in Bethlehem. 'Ijha returned them, saying they were worthless, after being warned that they might have been stolen from a synagogue. Undaunted, the Bedouin went to a nearby market, where a Syrian Christian offered to buy them. A sheikh joined their conversation and suggested that they take the scrolls to Khalil Eskander Shahin, "Kando", a cobbler and part-time antiques dealer. The Bedouin and the dealers returned to the site, leaving one scroll with Kando and selling three others to a dealer for seven Jordanian pounds (approximately $28, or $367 in 2022 dollars).[19][20] The original scrolls continued to change hands after the Bedouin left them in the possession of a third party until a sale could be arranged.

In 1947 the original seven scrolls caught the attention of John C. Trever of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), who compared the script in the scrolls to that of the Nash Papyrus, the oldest biblical manuscript then known, and found similarities between them. In March the 1948 Arab–Israeli War prompted the move of some of the scrolls to Beirut, Lebanon for safekeeping. On 11 April 1948, Millar Burrows, head of the ASOR, announced the discovery of the scrolls in a general press release.

Early in September 1948, Metropolitan bishop Mar Samuel brought some additional scroll fragments that he had acquired to professor Ovid R. Sellers, the new director of ASOR. By the end of 1948, nearly two years after the discovery of the scrolls, scholars had yet to locate the original cave where the fragments had been found. With unrest in the country at that time, no large-scale search could be safely undertaken. Sellers tried to persuade the Syrians to assist in the search for the cave, but he was unable to pay their price. In early 1949, the government of Jordan granted permission to the Arab Legion to search the area in which the original Qumran cave was believed to exist. Consequently, Cave 1 was rediscovered on 28 January 1949 by Belgian United Nations observer captain Phillipe Lippens and Arab Legion captain Akkash el-Zebn.[21]

A view of the Dead Sea from a cave at Qumran in which some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered

The rediscovery of what became known as Cave 1 at Qumran prompted the initial excavation of the site from 15 February to 5 March 1949 by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, led by Gerald Lankester Harding and Roland de Vaux.[22] The Cave 1 site yielded discoveries of additional Dead Sea Scroll fragments, linen cloth, jars, and other artifacts.[23]

In November 1951, Roland de Vaux and his team from the ASOR began a full excavation of Qumran.[24] By February 1952, the Bedouin had discovered 30 fragments in what was to be designated Cave 2.[25] The discovery of a second cave eventually yielded 300 fragments from 33 manuscripts, including fragments of Jubilees and the Wisdom of Sirach written in Hebrew.[23][24] The following month, on 14 March 1952, the ASOR team discovered a third cave with fragments of Jubilees and the Copper Scroll.[25] Between September and December 1952, the fragments and scrolls of Caves 4, 5, and 6 were discovered by the ASOR teams.[24]

With the monetary value of the scrolls rising as their historical significance was made more public, the Bedouins and the ASOR archaeologists accelerated their search for the scrolls separately in the same general area of Qumran, which was more than one kilometer in length. Between 1953 and 1956, de Vaux led four more archaeological expeditions in the area to uncover scrolls and artifacts.[23] Cave 11 was discovered in 1956 and yielded the last fragments to be found in the vicinity of Qumran.[26]

Caves 4–10 are clustered in an area lying in relative proximity 150 m (160 yd) from Khirbet Qumran, while caves 1, 2, 3 and 11 are located 1 mile (1–2 kilometres) north, with Cave 3 the most remote.[27][28]

In February 2017, Hebrew University archaeologists announced the discovery of a new 12th cave.[29] There was one blank parchment found in a jar, but broken and empty scroll jars and pickaxes suggest that the cave was looted in the 1950s.[30]

In March 2021, Israeli archaeologists announced the discovery of dozens of fragments bearing biblical text, written in Greek, from the books of Zechariah and Nahum. This group of findings is believed to have been hidden in a cave between 132 and 136 CE during the Bar Kokhba revolt.[31] However, a 10,500-year-old basket hewn of woven reeds was also discovered in the Muraba'at caves in the Nahal Darga Reserve. Other discoveries included the remains of a child wrapped in cloth dated to around 6,000 years ago, and a cache of coins from the days of the Bar Kochba revolt.[32]

In 2021, more scrolls were discovered by Israeli authorities in a different cave near the Dead Sea called the Cave of Horror.[33][34]

• 
  Dead Sea Scroll 175, complete, Testimonia, from Qumran Cave 4, the Jordan Museum in Amman
• 
  Dead Sea Scroll 28a from Qumran Cave 1, complete, the Jordan Museum in Amman
• 
  The War Scroll, found in Qumran Cave 1.
• 
  A portion of the second discovered copy of the Isaiah Scroll, 1QIsa^b.
• 
  Part of Dead Sea Scroll 28a from Qumran Cave 1. The Jordan Museum, Amman
• 
  Dead Sea Scroll, Pesher Isaiah, from Qumran Cave 4. The Jordan Museum, Amman
• 
  Dead Sea Scroll 175, Testimonia, from Qumran Cave 4. The Jordan Museum, Amman
• 
  Dead Sea Scroll 109, Qohelet or Ecclesiastes, from Qumran Cave 4. The Jordan Museum, Amman
• 
  Dead Sea Scrolls at the Jordan Museum in Amman
• 
  Strips of the Copper Dead Sea Scroll at the Jordan Museum, from Qumran Cave 3, 1st century CE
• 
  Strip 11 of the Copper Dead Sea Scroll, from Qumran Cave 3, Jordan Museum
• 
  Strip 15 of the Copper Dead Sea Scroll, from Qumran Cave 3, Jordan Museum
• 
  Strip 13 of the Copper Dead Sea Scroll, from Qumran Cave 3, Jordan Museum
• 
  Strips 1 and 2 of the Copper Dead Sea Scroll, from Qumran Cave 3, Jordan Museum
• 
  Dead Sea Scroll 109, Qohelet or Ecclesiastes, from Qumran Cave 4, the Jordan Museum in Amman
• 
  Dead Sea Scroll 109, Qohelet or Ecclesiastes, from Qumran Cave 4, at the Jordan Museum in Amman
• 
  Dead Sea Scroll, Pesher Isaiah, from Qumran Cave 4, the Jordan Museum in Amman
• 
  Dead Sea Scroll 175, Testimonia, from Qumran Cave 4, the Jordan Museum in Amman
• 
  Detail, Dead Sea Scroll 175, Testimonia, from Qumran Cave 4, the Jordan Museum in Amman
• 
  Dead Sea Scroll 28a from Qumran Cave 1, the Jordan Museum in Amman
• 
  Part of Dead Sea Scroll 28a from Qumran Cave 1, the Jordan Museum in Amman
• 
  Part of Dead Sea Scroll 28a from Qumran Cave 1, at the Jordan Museum in Amman
• 
  Dead Sea Scroll fragment 5/6HEV PS found in the Cave of Letters at Nahal Hever

The view among scholars, almost universally held until the 1990s, is the "Qumran–Essene" hypothesis originally posited by Roland Guérin de Vaux[55] and Józef Tadeusz Milik,[56] though independently both Eliezer Sukenik and Butrus Sowmy of St Mark's Monastery connected scrolls with the Essenes well before any excavations at Qumran.[57] The Qumran–Essene theory holds that the scrolls were written by the Essenes, or by another Jewish sectarian group, residing at Khirbet Qumran. They composed the scrolls and ultimately hid them in the nearby caves during the Jewish Revolt sometime between 66 and 68 CE. The site of Qumran was destroyed and the scrolls never recovered. A number of arguments are used to support this theory.

• There are striking similarities between the description of an initiation ceremony of new members in the Community Rule and descriptions of the Essene initiation ceremony mentioned in the works of Flavius Josephus, a Jewish-Roman historian of the Second Temple period.
• Josephus mentions the Essenes as sharing property among the members of the community, as does the Community Rule.
• During the excavation of Khirbet Qumran, two inkwells and plastered elements thought to be tables were found, offering evidence that some form of writing was done there. More inkwells were discovered nearby. De Vaux called this area the "scriptorium" based upon this discovery.
• Several Jewish ritual baths (Hebrew: מקוה, miqvah) were discovered at Qumran, offering evidence of an observant Jewish presence at the site.
• Pliny the Elder (a geographer writing after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE) describes a group of Essenes living in a desert community on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea near the ruined town of 'Ein Gedi.

Qumran–Sectarian theories are variations on the Qumran–Essene theory. The main point of departure from the Qumran–Essene theory is hesitation to link the Dead Sea Scrolls specifically with the Essenes. Most proponents of the Qumran–Sectarian theory understand a group of Jews living in or near Qumran to be responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls, but do not necessarily conclude that the sectarians are Essenes.

A specific variation on the Qumran–Sectarian theory emerged in the 1990s that has gained much recent popularity is the work of Lawrence H. Schiffman, who proposes that the community was led by a group of Zadokite priests (Sadducees).[58] The most important document in support of this view is the "Miqsat Ma'ase Ha-Torah" (4QMMT), which cites purity laws (such as the transfer of impurities) identical to those attributed in rabbinic writings to the Sadducees. 4QMMT also reproduces a festival calendar that follows Sadducee principles for the dating of certain festival days.

Spanish Jesuit José O'Callaghan Martínez argued in the 1960s that one fragment (7Q5) preserves a portion of text from the New Testament Gospel of Mark 6:52–53.[59] This theory was scrutinized in the year 2000 by paleographic analysis of the particular fragment. However, this faced some contention, and O'Callaghan's theory remains an area of great dispute. Later analyses in 2004 and 2018 lent credence to O'Callaghan's original assertion.

Robert Eisenman has advanced the theory that some scrolls describe the early Christian community. Eisenman also argued that the careers of James the Just and Paul the Apostle correspond to events recorded in some of these documents.[60]

Some scholars have argued that the scrolls were the product of Jews living in Jerusalem, who hid the scrolls in the caves near Qumran while fleeing from the Romans during the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.[61] Karl Heinrich Rengstorf first proposed in the 1960s that the Dead Sea Scrolls originated at the library of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.[62] Later, Norman Golb suggested that the scrolls were the product of multiple libraries in Jerusalem, and not necessarily the Jerusalem Temple library.[63][64] Proponents of the Jerusalem origin theory point to the diversity of thought and handwriting among the scrolls as evidence against a Qumran origin of the scrolls. Several archaeologists have also accepted an origin of the scrolls other than Qumran, including Yizhar Hirschfeld[65] and more recently Yizhak Magen and Yuval Peleg,[66] who all understand the remains of Qumran to be those of a Hasmonean fort that was reused during later periods.

Parchment from a number of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been carbon dated. The initial test performed in 1950 was on a piece of linen from one of the caves. This test gave an indicative dating of 33 CE plus or minus 200 years, eliminating early hypotheses relating the scrolls to the medieval period.[67] Since then two large series of tests have been performed on the scrolls themselves. The results were summarized by VanderKam and Flint, who said the tests give "strong reason for thinking that most of the Qumran manuscripts belong to the last two centuries BCE and the first century CE."[20]^: 32

Analysis of letter forms, or palaeography, was applied to the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls by a variety of scholars in the field. Major linguistic analysis by Cross and Avigad dates fragments from 225 BCE to 50 CE.[68] These dates were determined by examining the size, variability, and style of the text.[69] The same fragments were later analyzed using radiocarbon dating and were dated to an estimated range of 385 BCE to 82 CE with a 68% accuracy rate.[68]

The scrolls were analyzed using a cyclotron at the University of California, Davis, where it was found that all black ink was carbon black.[70] The red ink on the scrolls was found to be made with cinnabar (HgS, mercury sulfide).[71] There are only four uses of this red ink in the entire collection of Dead Sea Scroll fragments.[71] The black inks found on the scrolls are mostly made of carbon soot from olive oil lamps.[72] Honey, oil, vinegar, and water were often added to the mixture to thin the ink to a proper consistency for writing.[72] Galls were sometimes added to the ink to make it more resilient.[72] In order to apply the ink to the scrolls, its writers used reed pens.[73]

The Dead Sea Scrolls were written on parchment made of processed animal hide known as vellum (approximately 85.5–90.5% of the scrolls), papyrus (estimated at 8–13% of the scrolls), and sheets of bronze composed of about 99% copper and 1% tin (approximately 1.5% of the scrolls).[73][74] For those scrolls written on animal hides, scholars with the Israeli Antiquities Authority, by use of DNA testing for assembly purposes, believe that there may be a hierarchy in the religious importance of the texts based on which type of animal was used to create the hide. Scrolls written on goat and calf hides are considered by scholars to be more significant in nature, while those written on gazelle or ibex are considered to be less religiously significant in nature.[75]

In addition, tests by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Sicily, Italy, have suggested that the origin of parchment of select Dead Sea Scroll fragments is from the Qumran area itself, by using X-ray and Particle-induced X-ray emission testing of the water used to make the parchment that were compared with the water from the area around the Qumran site.[76]

Two of the pottery jars that held some of the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran

Two Dead Sea Scrolls jars at the Jordan Museum, Amman

The Dead Sea Scrolls that were found were originally preserved by the dry, arid, and low humidity conditions present within the Qumran area adjoining the Dead Sea.[77] In addition, the lack of the use of tanning materials on the parchment of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the very low airflow in the Qumran caves also contributed significantly to their preservation.[78] Some of the scrolls were found stored in clay jars within the Qumran caves, further helping to preserve them from deterioration. The original handling of the scrolls by archaeologists and scholars was done inappropriately, and, along with their storage in an uncontrolled environment, they began a process of more rapid deterioration than they had experienced at Qumran.[79] During the first few years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, adhesive tape used to join fragments and seal cracks caused significant damage to the documents.[79] The government of Jordan had recognized the urgency of protecting the scrolls from deterioration and the presence of the deterioration among the scrolls.[80] However, the government did not have adequate funds to purchase all the scrolls for their protection and agreed to have foreign institutions purchase the scrolls and have them held at their museum in Jerusalem until they could be "adequately studied".[80]

In early 1953, they were moved to the Palestine Archaeological Museum (commonly called the Rockefeller Museum)[81] in East Jerusalem and through their transportation suffered more deterioration and damage.[20]^: 63–65 The museum was underfunded and had limited resources with which to examine the scrolls, and, as a result, conditions of the "scrollery" and storage area were left relatively uncontrolled by modern standards.[20] The museum had left most of the fragments and scrolls lying between window glass, trapping the moisture in with them, causing an acceleration in the deterioration process. During a portion of the conflict during the 1956 war waged by Israel, Britain and France against Egypt, the scrolls collection of the Palestine Archaeological Museum was stored in the vault of the Ottoman Bank in Amman, Jordan.[82] Damp conditions from temporary storage of the scrolls in the Ottoman Bank vault from 1956 to the Spring of 1957 led to a more rapid rate of deterioration of the scrolls. The conditions caused mildew to develop on the scrolls and fragments, and some fragments were partially destroyed or made illegible by the glue and paper of the manila envelopes in which they were stored while in the vault.[82] By 1958 it was noted that up to 5% of some of the scrolls had completely deteriorated.[80] Many of the texts had become illegible and many of the parchments had darkened considerably.[20][79]

Until the 1970s, the scrolls continued to deteriorate because of poor storage arrangements, exposure to different adhesives, and being trapped in moist environments.[79] Fragments written on parchment (rather than papyrus or bronze) in the hands of private collectors and scholars suffered an even worse fate than those in the hands of the museum, with large portions of fragments being reported to have disappeared by 1966.[83] In the late 1960s, the deterioration was becoming a major concern with scholars and museum officials alike. Scholars John Allegro and Sir Francis Frank were among the first to strongly advocate for better preservation techniques.[20] Early attempts made by both the British and Israel Museums to remove the adhesive tape ended up exposing the parchment to an array of chemicals, including "British Leather Dressing," and darkening some of them significantly.[20] In the 1970s and 1980s, other preservation attempts were made that included removing the glass plates and replacing them with cardboard and removing pressure against the plates that held the scrolls in storage; however, the fragments and scrolls continued to rapidly deteriorate during this time.[79]

In 1991, the Israeli Antiquities Authority established a temperature-controlled laboratory for the storage and preservation of the scrolls. The actions and preservation methods of Rockefeller Museum staff were concentrated on the removal of tape, oils, metals, salt, and other contaminants.[79] The fragments and scrolls are preserved using acid-free cardboard and stored in solander boxes in the climate-controlled storage area.[79]

Nine tiny phylactery slips were rediscovered by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) in 2014, after they had been stored unopened for six decades following their excavation in 1952. The IAA is preparing to unroll the phylacteries or tefillin once a safe procedure has been decided upon.[84][85]

The first individual person to photograph a portion of the collection was John C. Trever (1916–2006), a biblical scholar and archaeologist, who was a resident for the American Schools of Oriental Research.[20]^: 68 He photographed three of the scrolls discovered in Cave 1 on 21 February 1948, both on black-and-white and standard color film.[20]^: 26[86][87] Although an amateur photographer, the quality of his photographs often exceeded the visibility of the scrolls themselves as, over the years, the ink of the texts quickly deteriorated after they were removed from their linen wrappings.

A majority of the collection from the Qumran caves was acquired by the Palestine Archaeological Museum. The museum had the scrolls photographed by Najib Albina, a local Arab photographer trained by Lewis Larsson of the American Colony in Jerusalem,[88] Between 1952 and 1967, Albina documented the five-stage process of the sorting and assembly of the scrolls, done by the curator and staff of the Palestine Archaeological Museum, using infrared photography. Using a process known today as broadband fluorescence infrared photography, or NIR photography, Najib and the team at the museum produced over 1,750 photographic plates of the scrolls and fragments.[20]^: 68[89][90][91] The photographs were taken with the scrolls laid out on animal skin, using large format film, which caused the text to stand out, making the plates especially useful for assembling fragments.[20]^: 68 These are the earliest photographs of the museum's collection, which was the most complete in the world at the time, and they recorded the fragments and scrolls before their further decay in storage, so they are often considered the best recorded copies of the scrolls.[92]

A previously unreadable fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls photographed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory using digital infrared technology. Translated into English it reads: "He wrote the words of Noah."

Beginning in 1993, the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration used digital infrared imaging technology to produce photographs of Dead Sea Scrolls fragments.[93] In partnership with the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center and West Semitic Research, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory successfully worked to expand on the use of infrared photography previously used to evaluate ancient manuscripts by expanding the range of spectra at which images are photographed.[94] NASA used this multi-spectral imaging technique, adapted from its remote sensing and planetary probes, in order to reveal previously illegible text on fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.[94] The process uses a liquid crystal tunable filter in order to photograph the scrolls at specific wavelengths of light and, as a result, image distortion is significantly diminished.[93] This method was used with select fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls to reveal text and details that cameras that take photographs using a larger light spectrum could not reveal.[93] The camera and digital imaging assembly was developed specifically for the purpose of photographing illegible ancient texts.[95]

On 18 December 2012[96] the first output of this project was launched together with Google on the dedicated site Deadseascrolls.org.il.[97] The site contains both digitizations of old images taken in the 1950s and about 1000 new images taken with the new NASA technology.[98]

Scientists with the Israeli Antiquities Authority have used DNA from the parchment on which the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments were written, in concert with infrared digital photography, to assist in the reassembly of the scrolls. For scrolls written on parchment made from animal hide and papyrus, scientists with the museum are using DNA code to associate fragments with different scrolls and to help scholars determine which scrolls may hold greater significance based on the type of material that was used.[75] In a paper published in 2020 in the journal Cell, researchers from Tel Aviv University have shown that ancient DNA extracted from the ancient scrolls can be used to sort different scroll fragments not only based on the animal species but also based on variations in the nuclear genome of individual fragments. This effort enabled the researchers to match different fragments to each other based on their genetics and separate fragments which were falsely connected in the past.[99][100]

In partnership with Google, the Museum of Jerusalem is working to photograph the Dead Sea Scrolls and make them available to the public digitally, although not placing the images in the public domain.[101] The lead photographer of the project, Ardon Bar-Hama, and his team are utilizing the Alpa 12 MAX camera accompanied with a Leaf Aptus-II back in order to produce ultra-high resolution digital images of the scrolls and fragments.[102] With photos taken at 1,200 megapixels, the results are digital images that can be used to distinguish details that are invisible to the naked eye. In order to minimize damage to the scrolls and fragments, photographers are using a 1/4000th of a second exposure time and UV-protected flash tubes.[101] The digital photography project was estimated in 2011 to cost approximately 3.5 million U.S. dollars.[102]

Scholars assembling Dead Sea Scrolls fragments at the Rockefeller Museum (formerly the Palestine Archaeological Museum)

Some of the fragments and scrolls were published early. Most of the longer, more complete scrolls were published soon after their discovery. All the writings in Cave 1 appeared in print between 1950 and 1956; those from eight other caves were released in 1963; and 1965 saw the publication of the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11. Their translations into English soon followed.

Publication of the scrolls has taken many decades, and delays have been a source of academic controversy. The scrolls were controlled by a small group of scholars headed by John Strugnell, while a majority of scholars had access neither to the scrolls nor even to photographs of the text. Scholars such as Norman Golb, publishers and writers such as Hershel Shanks, and many others argued for decades for publishing the texts, so that they become available to researchers. This controversy only ended in 1991, when the Biblical Archaeology Society was able to publish the "Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls", after an intervention of the Israeli government and the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA).[112] In 1991 Emanuel Tov was appointed as the chairman of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, and publication of the scrolls followed in the same year.

The majority of the scrolls consist of tiny, brittle fragments, which were published at a pace considered by many to be excessively slow. During early assembly and translation work by scholars through the Rockefeller Museum from the 1950s through the 1960s, access to the unpublished documents was limited to the editorial committee.

The content of the scrolls was published in a 40-volume series by Oxford University Press between 1955 and 2009 known as Discoveries in the Judaean Desert.[113] In 1952 the Jordanian Department of Antiquities assembled a team of scholars to begin examining, assembling, and translating the scrolls with the intent of publishing them.[114] The initial publication, assembled by Dominique Barthélemy and Józef Milik, was published as Qumran Cave 1 in 1955.[113] After a series of other publications in the late 1980s and early 1990s and with the appointment of the respected Dutch-Israeli textual scholar Emanuel Tov as editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project in 1990 publication of the scrolls accelerated. Tov's team had published five volumes covering the Cave 4 documents by 1995. Between 1990 and 2009, Tov helped the team produce 32 volumes. The final volume, Volume XL, was published in 2009.

In 1991, researchers at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg, announced the creation of a computer program that used previously published scrolls to reconstruct the unpublished texts.[115] Officials at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, led by Head Librarian William Andrew Moffett, announced that they would allow researchers unrestricted access to the library's complete set of photographs of the scrolls. In the fall of that year, Wacholder published 17 documents that had been reconstructed in 1988 from a concordance and had come into the hands of scholars outside of the International Team; in the same month, there occurred the discovery and publication of a complete set of facsimiles of the Cave 4 materials at the Huntington Library. Thereafter, the officials of the Israel Antiquities Authority agreed to lift their long-standing restrictions on the use of the scrolls.[116]

After further delays, attorney William John Cox undertook representation of an "undisclosed client", who had provided a complete set of the unpublished photographs, and contracted for their publication. Professors Robert Eisenman and James Robinson indexed the photographs and wrote an introduction to A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which was published by the Biblical Archaeology Society in 1991.[117] Following the publication of the Facsimile Edition, Professor Elisha Qimron sued Hershel Shanks, Eisenman, Robinson and the Biblical Archaeology Society for copyright infringement for publishing, without authorization or attribution, his decipherment of one of the scrolls, MMT. The District Court of Jerusalem found in favor of Qimron in September 1993.[118] The Court issued a restraining order, which prohibited the publication of the deciphered text, and ordered defendants to pay Qimron NIS 100,000 for infringing his copyright and the right of attribution. Defendants appealed the Supreme Court of Israel, which approved the District Court's decision, in August 2000. The Supreme Court further ordered that the defendants hand over to Qimron all the infringing copies.[119] The decision met Israeli and international criticism from copyright law scholars.[120][121][122][123][124]

In November 2007 the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation commissioned the London publisher, Facsimile Editions Limited, to produce a facsimile edition of The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIs^a), The Order of the Community (1QS), and The Pesher to Habakkuk (1QpHab).[125][126] The facsimile was produced from 1948 photographs, and so more faithfully represents the condition of the Isaiah Scroll at the time of its discovery than does the current condition of the real Isaiah Scroll.[125]

Of the first three facsimile sets, one was exhibited at the Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition in Seoul, South Korea, and a second set was purchased by the British Library in London. A further 46 sets including facsimiles of three fragments from Cave 4 (now in the collection of the National Archaeological Museum in Amman, Jordan) Testimonia (4Q175), Pesher Isaiah^b (4Q162) and Qohelet (4Q109) were announced in May 2009. The edition is strictly limited to 49 numbered sets of these reproductions on either specially prepared parchment paper or real parchment. The complete facsimile set (three scrolls including the Isaiah Scroll and the three Jordanian fragments) can be purchased for $60,000.[125]

The facsimiles have since been exhibited in Qumrân. Le secret des manuscrits de la mer Morte at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France (2010)[127] and Verbum Domini at the Vatican, Rome, Italy (2012).[128]

The text of nearly all of the non-biblical scrolls has been recorded and tagged for morphology by Martin Abegg, Jr., the Ben Zion Wacholder Professor of Dead Sea Scroll Studies at Trinity Western University located in Langley, British Columbia, Canada.[129] It is available on handheld devices through Olive Tree Bible Software - BibleReader, on Macs and Windows via emulator through Accordance with a comprehensive set of cross references, and on Windows through Logos Bible Software and BibleWorks.

The text of almost all of the non-biblical texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls was released on CD-ROM by publisher E.J. Brill in 2005.[130] The 2,400 page, 6-volume series, was assembled by an editorial team led by Donald W. Parry and Emanuel Tov.[131] Unlike the text translations in the physical publication, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, the texts are sorted by genres that include religious law, parabiblical texts, calendrical and sapiental texts, and poetic and liturgical works.[130]

High-resolution images, including infrared photographs, of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are now available online on two dedicated websites.

On 19 October 2010, it was announced[132] that Israeli Antiquities Authority would scan the documents using multi-spectral imaging technology developed by NASA to produce high-resolution images of the texts, and then, through a partnership with Google, make them available online free of charge,[133] on a searchable database and complemented by translation and other scholarly tools.

Two silver scroll-shaped amulets dated c. 600 BCE and containing portions of the Priestly Blessing from the Book of Numbers were excavated in Jerusalem at Ketef Hinnom.

On 25 September 2011 the Israel Museum Digital Dead Sea Scrolls site went online.[134][135] It gives users access to searchable, high-resolution images of the scrolls, as well as short explanatory videos and background information on the texts and their history. As of May 2012, five complete scrolls from the Israel Museum have been digitized for the project and are now accessible online: the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Community Rule Scroll, the Commentary on Habakkuk Scroll, the Temple Scroll, and the War Scroll.

There are 225 biblical texts included in the Dead Sea Scroll documents, or around 22% of the total, and with deuterocanonical books the number increases to 235.[140][141] The Dead Sea Scrolls contain parts of all but one of the books of the Tanakh of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament protocanon. They also include four of the deuterocanonical books included in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles: Tobit, Sirach, Baruch 6 (also known as the Letter or Epistle of Jeremiah), and Psalm 151.[140] The Book of Esther has not yet been found and scholars believe Esther is missing because, as a Jew, her marriage to a Persian king may have been looked down upon by the inhabitants of Qumran,[142] or because the book has the Purim festival which is not included in the Qumran calendar.[20]^: 180 Listed below are the most represented books, along with the deuterocanonicals, of the Bible found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the number of translatable Dead Sea texts that represent a copy of scripture from each biblical book:[143][144]

The majority of the texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls are non-biblical in nature and were thought to be insignificant for understanding the composition or canonization of the biblical books, but a consensus has emerged which sees many of these works as being collected by the Essene community instead of being composed by them.[148] Scholars now recognize that some of these works were composed earlier than the Essene period, when some of the biblical books were still being written or redacted into their final form.[148]

Arrangements with the Bedouin left the scrolls in the hands of a third party until a profitable sale of them could be negotiated. That third party, George Isha'ya, was a member of the Syriac Orthodox Church, who soon contacted St Mark's Monastery in the hope of getting an appraisal of the nature of the texts. News of the find then reached Metropolitan Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, better known as Mar Samuel. After examining the scrolls and suspecting their antiquity, Mar Samuel expressed an interest in purchasing them. Four scrolls found their way into his hands: the Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^a), the Community Rule, the Habakkuk Pesher (a commentary on the book of Habakkuk), and the Genesis Apocryphon. More scrolls soon surfaced in the antiquities market, and Professor Eleazer Sukenik and Professor Benjamin Mazar, archaeologists at Hebrew University, soon found themselves in possession of three, The War Scroll, Thanksgiving Hymns, and another, more fragmented, Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^b).

Four of the Dead Sea Scrolls eventually went up for sale in an advertisement on 1 June 1954, The Wall Street Journal.[155] On 1 July 1954, the scrolls, after delicate negotiations and accompanied by three people including the Metropolitan, arrived at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. They were purchased by Professor Mazar and the son of Professor Sukenik, Yigael Yadin, for $250,000 (approximately $2,700,000 in 2022 dollars[156]), and brought to Jerusalem.[157]

Since 2002, many forgeries of Dead Sea Scrolls have appeared on black markets.[158]

In 2020, the Museum of the Bible in the United States (also known as Green Collection – Green Family) reported that all 16 purported "Dead Sea Scroll fragments" they had acquired between 2009 and 2014[159][160] were in fact modern forgeries.[161][162]

The official ownership of the Dead Sea Scrolls is disputed among Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. The debate over the Dead Sea Scrolls stems from a more general Israeli–Palestinian conflict over land and state recognition.

There are three types of documents relating to the Dead Sea Scrolls in which copyright status can be considered ambiguous; the documents themselves, images taken of the documents, and reproductions of the documents. This ambiguity arises from differences in copyright law across different countries and the variable interpretation of such law.

In 1992 a copyright case Qimron v. Shanks was brought before the Israeli District court by scholar Elisha Qimron against Hershel Shanks of the Biblical Archaeology Society for violations of United States copyright law regarding his publishing of reconstructions of Dead Sea Scroll texts done by Qimron in A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls which were included without his permission. Qimron's suit against the Biblical Archaeology Society was done on the grounds that the research they had published was his intellectual property as he had reconstructed about 40% of the published text. In 1993, the district court Judge Dalia Dorner ruled for the plaintiff, Elisha Qimron, in context of both United States and Israeli copyright law and granted the highest compensation allowed by law for aggravation in compensation against Hershel Shanks and others.[176] In an appeal in 2000 in front of Judge Aharon Barak, the verdict was upheld in Israeli Supreme Court in Qimron's favor.[177] The court case established the two main principles from which facsimiles are examined under copyright law of the United States and Israel: authorship and originality.

The court's ruling not only affirms that the "deciphered text" of the scrolls can fall under copyright of individuals or groups, but makes it clear that the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves do not fall under this copyright law and scholars have a degree of, in the words of U.S. copyright law professor David Nimmer, "freedom" in access. Nimmer has shown how this freedom was in the theory of law applicable, but how it did not exist in reality as the Israeli Antiquities Authority tightly controlled access to the scrolls and photographs of the scrolls.[176]