🧾 Scroll
Dead Sea Scrolls: the Great Isaiah Scroll
The entire book of Isaiah, copied by hand about 100 years before Jesus — and almost identical to the text we read today.
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- Date
- c. 150–100 B.C.
- Found in
- Qumran Cave 1, near the Dead Sea (1947)
- Where it is
- Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum (Jerusalem)
In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd was looking for a lost goat on the slopes of Qumran, by the Dead Sea, and entered a cave where there were clay jars with leather scrolls. Among them was a scroll over 7 meters long with the 66 chapters of Isaiah, from beginning to end. It received the code 1QIsaᵃ (cave 1 of Qumran, Isaiah, copy "a").
The shape of the letters and carbon-14 tests place the copy in the 2nd century before Christ (the most cited date is around 125 B.C.; studies give ranges between about 200 and 100 B.C.). Until then, the oldest complete Hebrew copies of Isaiah were the Aleppo Codex (c. 930 A.D.) and the Leningrad Codex (1008 A.D.). In other words: the find jumped a thousand years back.
Why it matters: comparing the scroll with the Masoretic text (the basis of our Bibles), the differences are almost always spelling, extra or missing letters, and small copyist details. The meaning of the book is the same — including Isaiah 53, the chapter of the Suffering Servant, which the apostles applied to Jesus. It is a strong testimony that the text was copied with great care for centuries.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, in total, are about 900 manuscripts found in 11 caves between 1947 and 1956, with parts of every book of the Old Testament, except Esther.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brings us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
In the Bible
Sources to check
Text written by the Primitivo Cristão team based on the sources above. Spotted an error? Let us know.