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In 1946 or 1947, a Bedouin goatherd found a number of ancient texts in a cave overlooking the Dead Sea and the ruins of the town of Qumran in the West Bank.

- Daniel Weiss

Searches over the next decade yielded around 900 mostly fragmentary ancient Jewish texts in 11 different caves. These texts, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, are among the greatest archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. Written primarily on parchment and papyrus, they date from between the third century B.C. and the first century A.D.. and include almost all of the Hebrew Bible, texts related to it known as Apocrypha, and the writings of a Hebrew sect thought to have been based at Qumran, most likely the Essenes. The texts offer valuable insights into debates about Jewish law and ritual—as well as messianic speculation—in the period after the composition of the Hebrew Bible and before the rise of Christianity Blank parchment fragments and Rabbinic Judaism.