![]() The presence of these scrolls, which often reflect a sectarian Jewish worldview, indicates the scrolls were hidden by the local Qumran community, not by desperate Temple priests fleeing the Roman destruction of Jerusalem.Ĭave 4, a residential cave in the marl terrace, however, was found littered with thousands of jumbled scroll fragments representing more than 500 separate documents written across a span of nearly three centuries. These natural caves, which penetrate the imposing and darkened limestone cliffs above Qumran, were used to hide many of the longer and more complete Dead Sea Scrolls, including the War Scroll and the Temple Scroll. The residential Qumran caves (with the exception of Cave 4-see below) contained only a smattering of scrolls kept for private study and personal devotion.īeyond the immediate sandstone terrace, however, is another set of Qumran caves. These caves, which were closer to the site and better ventilated, served as residences for Qumran’s inhabitants. The caves closest to the site were chiseled out by hand from the soft, marl sandstone upon which Khirbet Qumran was built. While some scholars have since argued that there is, in fact, no connection between the site of Qumran and the scrolls, scroll scholar Sidnie White Crawford writes in “A View from the Caves” in the September/October 2011 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review that evidence from the Qumran caves proves that de Vaux was right after all.Īccording to Sidnie White Crawford, the Qumran caves where the scrolls were found can be divided into two groups. ![]() Roland de Vaux, one of the original excavators of Khirbet Qumran near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, believed the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the Qumran caves had been written, collected and ultimately hidden away by the Essenes, a Jewish sectarian group that may have established the small, secluded settlement of Qumran in the late second century B.C.E. Where were the Dead Sea Scrolls found and who put them there? Scroll scholar Sidnie White Crawford explores what we can learn about the scrolls from the Qumran caves where they were discovered. ![]()
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