The Pentateuch
The History 1500-1300 B.C
The relatively large number of biblical manuscripts found in the caves around Qumran underscores the important role of the Hebrew Scriptures in ancient Judaism. Of the nearly 900 manuscripts found, around 210 scrolls, or approximately 25 percent of the library, were copies of biblical books (Ulrich, Biblical Qumran Scrolls). Copies of every book in the traditional Hebrew Bible were discovered, with the exception of the book of Esther and possibly Nehemiah (following today’s division of Nehemiah as a separate book from Ezra).
These individual copies of the Bible date to roughly 250 BC–AD 50, with most having been copied in the century around the turn of the millennium. They are thus the earliest substantial copies of the Hebrew Scriptures in existence today. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible (the Leningrad Codex) was from AD 1008. The biblical material from the Judaean Desert is over 1,000 years earlier than these medieval copies of the Hebrew Bible, offering a source of highly significant comparative evidence for the history of the biblical text. Additionally, the biblical scrolls from Qumran are several hundreds of years older than the surviving ancient Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible (fourth century AD and beyond). These early copies of the Hebrew Bible from Qumran address many questions scholars had asked about the quality of the biblical text that had been copied and recopied by many different hands over such a long period of time.