Overall, the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate that the text of the Old Testament has been accurately copied and preserved over thousands of years. Thankfully, we have enough ancient texts that we are able to determine what is the original of each book of the Old Testament. Most of the differences are due to spelling, word choice, misunderstanding of a number, or the omission of a word or phrase. These scrolls, primarily written in Hebrew, are extremely significant because they contain copies of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament from over 1100 years before the Masoretic text, and yet are about 95% identical in most books. In fact, every book of the Old Testament except Esther has been discovered so far among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Archaeological excavations at the caves and the site of Qumran were quickly undertaken, and hundreds of ancient manuscripts dating back to as early as about 300 BC were discovered. But then, in 1946 the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by accident in a cave near the Dead Sea by a Bedouin shepherd. However, the oldest of these Masoretic Text manuscripts were only from the 10th century AD, so the oldest copies of the Old Testament were from the Septuagint, or Greek translation of the Old Testament done in the 3rd century BC. The English translations of the Old Testament that most people had in their Bibles was until recently based on the “Masoretic Text,” which is represented by very old Hebrew manuscripts that were preserved by dedicated followers of Judaism. The ancient manuscripts of the Bible that we have today are copies of the originals, but research and new discoveries have continued to demonstrate that these copies have accurately preserved the text of the various books of the Bible over the centuries. In the New Testament, the Gospel of Matthew may have been the first written, while the book of Revelation was certainly the last. In the Old Testament, the books of Moses (the Pentateuch or Torah) and probably Job are the earliest, while the books of Zechariah and Malachi are the latest. What we call the “Bible” (Greek scrolls/books) is a collection of books and writings spanning over 1500 years, written primarily in Hebrew and Greek, and divided into a Hebrew Bible “Old Testament” and the Greek “New Testament” (ca. Many of these ancient Biblical texts have been discovered through archaeological excavations in Egypt and in caves near the Dead Sea, while others were handed down and preserved in libraries of monasteries. The Bible, however, was primarily written on parchment (animal skin) with ink, or in some cases on papyrus.
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In Egypt, stone inscriptions, painted walls of tombs and temples, and papyrus were the preferred mediums for similar writings. In Mesopotamia, thousands of clay tablets have been preserved which record historical events, religious beliefs, economic and social practices, and technology.
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Among these documents are historical sections which recorded people, places, and events, giving us detailed insights into the past. Many ancient documents have survived millennia. While archaeology provides a great deal of information and physical evidence, much of it also needs to be interpreted in a historical framework and with ancient texts to help us decipher events, architecture, and artifacts.