Qumran Introduction

Qumran — The Wilderness Library

An orientation to the scrolls of the Judean desert

Among the caves above the Dead Sea, near the ruins of Qumran, were found the remains of an ancient library: scrolls and thousands of fragments, hidden away in the first century and recovered in the twentieth. They are the oldest surviving witnesses to much of the Hebrew Scriptures, and they preserve a great body of writings besides — rules, hymns, prayers, wisdom, commentary, and visions of the end.

The collection appears to belong to a community that withdrew into the wilderness to keep, as they believed, the true covenant, under priestly leadership and a strict discipline, awaiting the visitation of God. Their own writings speak of a Teacher of Righteousness, of opponents called the Wicked Priest and the Seekers of Smooth Things, of the sons of light and the sons of darkness, and of a war and a judgment to come.

How the Qumran witnesses are filed in this project

The biblical manuscripts from the caves are treated as textual witnesses to the books of Scripture, and are described under the Ancient Textual Witnesses. The non-biblical scrolls are restored as witnesses in their own right. The longer rules and scrolls — the Community Rule, the Damascus Document, the War Scroll, the Temple Scroll, and others — are filed under their own names. The shorter and fragmentary texts — the rules of blessing, the prayers, the hymns, the wisdom pieces, the pesharim, and the additional psalms — are restored individually, and gathered in the fragmentary indexes.

Where a text survives only in broken pieces, it is restored as a fragmentary witness, with the breaks honestly marked, and is not made to appear whole.