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About Ancient Artifacts: The Dead Sea Scrolls (Unabridged)

In the mid-20th century, one of the most important religious discoveries of all time was made in a series of caves near the Dead Sea, which had hidden remnants of nearly 1,000 texts, some of which were included in the Hebrew Bible and others which were extra-biblical. In addition to being the oldest surviving copies of such documents, the mixture of languages and different kinds of papers helped shed light on the people in the region at the time, making the Dead Sea Scrolls vitally important to the world's major religions. The impact that these scrolls have had on the fields of biblical studies and the history of Second Temple Judaism can hardly be overstated. As The Oxford Companion to Archaeology put it, "The biblical manuscripts from Qumran, which include at least fragments from every book of the Old Testament, except perhaps for the Book of Esther, provide a far older cross section of scriptural tradition than that available to scholars before. While some of the Qumran biblical manuscripts are nearly identical to the Masoretic, or traditional, Hebrew text of the Old Testament, some manuscripts of the books of Exodus and Samuel found in cave four exhibit dramatic differences in both language and content. In their astonishing range of textual variants, the Qumran biblical discoveries have prompted scholars to reconsider the once-accepted theories of the development of the modern biblical text from only three manuscript families: the Masoretic text, the Hebrew original of the Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch."