Buried for 2,000 Years: How the Dead Sea Scrolls Confirm Your Bible

A Shepherd, a Stone, and a Jar

According to the most repeated version of the story, a young Bedouin shepherd was looking for a lost goat in the cliffs above the Dead Sea in late 1946 or early 1947 when he threw a stone into a cave and heard something break. Inside were clay jars, and inside the jars were scrolls wrapped in linen. They were written in Hebrew, and nobody had touched them for roughly two thousand years.

Within a decade, search teams had found eleven caves with the remains of hundreds of manuscripts. Among them was a copy of the entire book of Isaiah, more than a thousand years older than any complete Hebrew copy that scholars had known. The discovery was called the greatest manuscript find of the twentieth century, and it has shaped the way people talk about the reliability of the Bible ever since.

The common claim goes like this: the Dead Sea Scrolls prove that the Bible has been copied faithfully for two thousand years, and therefore the Bible we hold is the Bible that was written. Some of that claim is solid. Some of it is overstated. And some of it answers a different question from the one it seems to answer.

This article’s thesis is that the Dead Sea Scrolls show remarkable care in the copying of some biblical books, but also show a Bible that was more varied and more fluid than most readers expect, and that preservation of a text is not the same as proof that what it says is true. On the first point the scrolls strongly support the traditional text. On the second they complicate it. On the third they are silent, as no manuscript can settle questions of miracle or revelation.