Located on the northwest shores of the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, lies the ancient settlement known as Qumran.

Among the limestone cliffs of this mysterious settlement are eleven caves, which contain the now famous ancient manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Among other informative writings, the scrolls contained every book of the Old Testament, except for the Book of Esther.

After the scrolls were first discovered in 1947, archaeologists began extensive excavations at Qumran, led by a Dominican monk named Pierre Roland de Vaux.

Many scholars concur with de Vaux's position that the ancient settlement of Qumran was the home of a small Jewish sect known as the Essenes.

In studying the structural remains, including a network of aqueducts, several ritual purity baths, spacious meeting halls, and water cisterns, archaeologists estimate the Essenes lived in this desolate community for over 300 years.

The dry, desolate climate surrounding Qumran was crucial in both preserving the ancient manuscripts as well as keeping them hidden for 2,000 years.

With only an occasional passing shepherd, the area surrounding Qumran remained virtually uninhabited since the days of the Essenes.

However, in 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd boy named Muhammad edh-Dhib was searching for his lost goat among the caves, and found much more than he could ever have imagined.

A relative of Muhammad edh-Dhib recounts this amazing discovery.

He saw just this hole.

He took a rock and he throw it inside this hole.

He hear that he broke a jar or a butter inside.

And he climbed from this hole.

He saw the jar, it was broken.

After he threw the rock from outside, he climbed in this hole and he go down to the cave.

He find 47 jar surrounded with this cave.

He find in one jar of them four scrolls inside one jar.

The Bedouin shepherds delivered seven scrolls from the first cave to a Christian antiquities dealer in Bethlehem named Khalil Shahin, also known as Kando.

Soon after, E.L.

Sukenik of Hebrew University acquired three of the scrolls.

In 1949, the remaining four scrolls were sold to Mar Athanasius Samuel of the Syrian Jacobite monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, who eventually brought them to America.

On June 1st, 1954, Samuel ran this ad in the Wall Street Journal, offering the scrolls for sale.

Samuel's ad was brought to the attention of Sukenik's son, Yigael Yadin.

Yadin purchased the four scrolls and returned them to Israel, where they are housed to this day alongside three other scrolls found in Cave One.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered beginning in 1948, represent the oldest text we have of the Bible, as well as sectarian literature as well.

The importance of it is that with the Masoretic text, which underlies our English translation of the Old Testament, the transmission history only went back to the 10th century AD.

With the Dead Sea Scrolls, we close that gap another thousand years.

And if you understand that the Dead Sea Scrolls represent at least 3rd century BC text that we have now in the 1st and 2nd century BC, it goes back even further.

We have almost all of the Old Testament except for the book of Esther, and we have text both in Hebrew, some Aramaic, and even some Greek text,

which give us an amazing confirmation of the accuracy of transmission of the scribes at that time.

About 95% agreement with the Masoretic text in most things.

It's one of the most important manuscript discoveries of all time, because it tells us that the original manuscript has survived in the copies, and that our copy today is substantially the same as the original.

We also have with the sectarian manuscripts information that fills in the background, both in Judaism and in the thinking in terms of messianic and eschatological texts that underlie a lot of the drama of the New Testament, and a lot of even the interpretation of the disciples and Paul as well.

This was something that was of great surprise back in the late 1940s — 1947, winter — when these scrolls were found.

One of the most interesting things is that about one-fifth of all those scrolls that were found — these were biblical texts that we know.

Well, this was really important for us to be able to finally compare some scrolls that existed back at the time of our biblical characters, to compare that with the text that we have today.

Now, in many cases, the text is just exactly the same.

In fact, you have to go through, normally, hundreds of words before you ever find something that you can say is a translatable variant — something that, if we translated it into English, it would have any kind of a slight difference in terms of understanding.

Normally, in those cases, it's something that people would think, well, that's just the difference of the translator.

It's so insignificant.

And because of the fact that most of the scholars that were working on these scrolls that were Bible scholars, they kind of got bored with the work.

It was just, if you wanted to make a concordance of the biblical texts from Qumran, why not just go to the concordances of the Masoretic texts that we have, that we translate our Bibles from today, because it's just so close.

Well, we do in fact have some real gems for the philologists, for the ones who want to study scribal practice, want to see whether it's written in Paleo-Hebrew script or just normal square Aramaic or a Jewish script.

All of these different peculiar differences for each given scroll actually does tell part of the history of the group, and separates them in terms of scribal schools and scribal practice.

We see the development of writing going on there.

It testifies to the meticulous, faithful nature that the scribes used in transcribing these copies generation after generation, centuries before the printing press was ever invented.

The book of Isaiah was found in its entirety, and except for very minor mistakes, deviations, it virtually matches what we have in our Bibles today.

Now, that's not to say that there weren't some scribal errors that crept in.

It doesn't mean that they sometimes didn't spell things differently, and there's enough of that around for us to be able to say, aha, we can work through spelling differences.

But still, in our English Bibles, it won't even show up.