Dead Sea Scrolls — The Bible Aloud

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See the scrolls

Photographs of the actual manuscripts found in the caves at Qumran.

The Great Isaiah Scroll unrolled — **The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa-a)**The complete Book of Isaiah — 24 feet of parchment, copied about 125 BC, the oldest complete copy of any biblical book ever found.

Close-up of Hebrew text in the Great Isaiah Scroll, chapter 53 — **Isaiah 53 in the Great Isaiah Scroll**The “Suffering Servant” passage — where the scroll reads “he shall see light,” agreeing with the ancient Greek against the later Hebrew.

The second Isaiah scroll from Cave 1 — **The second Isaiah scroll (1QIsa-b)**Found in the same cave — shorter, and following the traditional Hebrew text even more closely.

The Temple Scroll from Cave 11 — **The Temple Scroll (11Q20)**From Cave 11 — the longest scroll ever found at Qumran, over 26 feet, describing an ideal temple.

Detail of the second Isaiah scroll — **Detail — the scribe’s hand**A close look at the Herodian script — the same hand shapes, copied letter by letter, two thousand years ago.

Cave 1 at Qumran where the first scrolls were found — **Cave 1 at Qumran**Where it all began in the winter of 1947 — a shepherd boy, a tossed stone, and the shatter of ancient pottery.

Photographs via Wikimedia Commons. Scroll images: public domain. Cave photograph: CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Great Isaiah Scroll

Designation: 1QIsa-a — the first scroll recovered from Cave 1, the first cave discovered (1947)
Date copied: about 125 BC — roughly 1,000 years older than the oldest previously known complete Hebrew copy of Isaiah
Size: 24 feet long; contains all 66 chapters of the Book of Isaiah — the oldest complete copy of any biblical book ever found
Agreement: its Hebrew matches the traditional Masoretic Text (the Hebrew behind the King James Bible) about 95%; of its 2,600+ differences, the great majority are spelling
A second Isaiah scroll: A second, shorter copy of Isaiah (1QIsa-b) was found in the same cave and follows the traditional text even more closely

Notable variants: In a few famous places the scroll’s wording differs: in Isaiah 19:18 it reads “the City of the Sun” where the traditional text reads “the City of Destruction” (the NIV, CSB, NLT, and NRSV follow the scroll); and the second half of Isaiah 2:9 with all of 2:10 is absent from the scroll, though present in the traditional text and in other Qumran copies — scholars Martin Abegg, Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich judge those lines a slightly later addition to the book.

About these books

1 Enoch and Jubilees survive complete in the ancient Ethiopic (Ge’ez) Bible, but Hebrew and Aramaic fragments of both were found in the Qumran caves — eleven Aramaic copies of Enoch, fifteen Hebrew fragments of Jubilees — proving these books were read and treasured by the Dead Sea community two thousand years ago. The English here is R. H. Charles’s 1917 translation, in the public domain.

The caves gave us more besides: the Community Rule, the War Scroll, the Thanksgiving Hymns, the Damascus Document, and the Temple Scroll open a window onto the daily life, worship, and hopes of the Qumran community. Their standard modern English translations (Vermes, García Martínez, Wise-Abegg-Cook) remain under copyright — and this reader speaks only words that belong to everyone — so they are honored here in description, not in quotation. If public-domain or Creative Commons translations of these scrolls appear, they will be added to this page.

The English text on this page: the Isaiah passages are the King James Version (1611), public domain; 1 Enoch and Jubilees are R. H. Charles’s 1917 translations, public domain in the United States (via the Internet Sacred Text Archive). Photographs via Wikimedia Commons as credited above.