The Historian and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Probably no recent archaeological discovery has attracted such general attention as the finding some thirteen years back, in caves near the Dead Sea, of the first of what today are generally known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. We may reduce the issues to the very simplest terms. The earliest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible hitherto known dated from about the year 900; we were now confronted with texts of a great part of it that are something like a thousand years older. (We may overlook the querulous voice of perpetual opposition which dismisses the documents as “medieval forgeries”.)

Moreover, we formerly knew Palestinian Jewish history at the time only, or almost only, from the highly partisan writings of Josephus and incidental details in the New Testament; now a whole corpus of Hebrew literature dating to this period suddenly became available.