History

Iron Age remains at Qumran — pottery and a circular cistern dated to the 8th–7th centuries BC — suggest the plateau was used long before the Essenes arrived. The Essene settlement began around 150 BC, during the reign of the Hasmonean dynasty, possibly as a response to what the group perceived as the corruption of the Jerusalem priesthood. The Essenes were a Jewish sect committed to ritual purity, communal life, and the intensive copying of scripture; the substantial scriptorium identified at Qumran, with its long narrow tables and inkwells still containing dried ink, was where scholars believe the majority of the discovered manuscripts were produced.

In 68 AD, two years before the destruction of Jerusalem’s Second Temple, the Roman Tenth Legion marched through the Jordan Valley. The Essenes apparently hid their library in the surrounding caves — wrapped in linen, sealed in ceramic jars — before the community was destroyed. The jars preserved the manuscripts in the Dead Sea’s hyper-dry climate for nearly two thousand years. On a winter day in 1947, a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad Edh-Dhib, searching for a lost goat on the cliffs above Qumran, threw a stone into a cave opening and heard the sound of shattering pottery. Inside were seven intact scroll jars. He brought the scrolls to a Bethlehem antiquities dealer; within months the significance was recognised. Cave 1 was formally excavated in 1949; over the following seven years, ten more caves yielded material.

Roland de Vaux excavated the settlement itself between 1951 and 1958, identifying the buildings and proposing the Essene identification that became the scholarly consensus. The manuscripts were distributed between Jordan and Israel after the 1967 war; the major scrolls are now divided between the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem and the Jordan Museum in Amman. The publication of all scroll fragments was completed only in 2001, after decades of restricted access that generated considerable controversy.