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In the winter of 1947, a young shepherd discovered a cave containing clay jars filled with ancient scrolled manuscripts. It turns out that what he had found was one of eleven caves used as an ancient library by the Jewish sect known as the Essenes. These caves were located in an isolated desert community known as Khirbet Qumran. Over the next several years, more than a thousand scrolls were discovered in the network of caves, and they were collectively designated The Dead Sea Scrolls. No less than two hundred of the scrolls were copies of works canonized in the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament. Manuscripts were found for every Old Testament book except Ruth. All told, the discovery at Qumran is perhaps the greatest biblical manuscript discovery in history. And yet, it turns out that the Old Testament scrolls found at Qumran were older than any existing records of the Old Testament texts. Until this discovery, the earliest known Old Testament manuscript was of Codex Leningradensis, which dates to 1008 AD. On the other hand, the Dead Sea Scrolls date back to between 250 BC and 50 AD.
