Sites and Insights: Dead Sea secrets at Kumran
By WAYNE STILES
03/14/2011 13:26
...In 1947, the same year that the United Nations voted to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, a Bedouin shepherd tossed a rock in a cave, allegedly looking for a lost sheep. (Why—or how—a sheep would ever wander in that rocky area makes little sense.) Regardless, what he found in the cave made biblical history. Or rather, confirmed it.
Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars despaired of ever finding Hebrew manuscripts that predated our oldest copies from the tenth century AD. The manuscripts found at Kumran, however, dated from the third century BC to AD 70 and included copies of every Old Testament book except Esther. In other words, this discovery moved back our oldest text of the Hebrew Bible by about 1,000 years!...
...Comparing these biblical scrolls to the standard Hebrew Masoretic text has proven the remarkable precision in the copying of Scripture. In other words, the Hebrew Bible we read today is the same one those in the first century read...
Story link: http://www.jpost.com/Travel/AroundIsrael/Article.aspx?id=209489 (http://www.jpost.com/Travel/AroundIsrael/Article.aspx?id=209489)