The Dead Sea Scrolls are about a thousand years older than the next-oldest Hebrew Bibles

In 1947, a shepherd searching caves near Qumran on the Dead Sea stumbled on jars of ancient manuscripts. Over the next decade, some 15,000 fragments emerged - the remains of 800 to 900 separate scrolls.

They are genuinely old. The texts date from roughly the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, before the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE. Among them are partial or complete copies of nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible (only Esther is missing).

The Qumran scrolls are over a thousand years older than previously identified biblical manuscripts.

Before this find, the oldest known Hebrew copies dated to around the 10th century CE. The scrolls vaulted that record back by roughly a millennium - and their close agreement with later texts gave scholars a rare window onto how faithfully scripture was copied across the centuries.