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The Great Isaiah Scroll: A Whole Book from Qumran

In the archive

Held
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Shrine of the Book), 1QIsaᵃ
Date evidence
c. 150–100 BCE (palaeography); radiocarbon ranges into the 4th–2nd centuries BCE
Era
Era IV · The Axial Age
In the archive
Second Temple Judaism · Pre-exilic Israel

In 1947 Bedouin shepherds took a handful of leather scrolls from a cave above the Dead Sea (V02). One of them, when unrolled, turned out to be a complete book of the Bible: the prophet Isaiah, all 66 chapters, in 54 columns on seventeen sheets of parchment sewn end to end. It is 7.34 metres long. Before 1947 the oldest complete manuscripts of Isaiah in Hebrew were medieval, from around 1000 CE. This scroll was about a thousand years older.

Unroll the Isaiah scroll

Two of its verses in the consonantal Hebrew of the standard text, as a scroll carries them: no vowel signs, read from the right.

Isaiah 2:4

וכתתו חרבותם לאתים

וחניתותיהם למזמרות

לא ישא גוי אל גוי חרב

ולא ילמדו עוד מלחמה

They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

The scroll itself often spells words more fully, adding vowel letters: it writes לוא for לא, for example.

Isaiah 40:8

יבש חציר

נבל ציץ

ודבר אלהינו

יקום לעולם

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand for ever.

The scroll leaves three blank lines after chapter 33, dividing the book into two halves, a feature scholars have linked to how Isaiah was copied and arranged.

Study the object

The Israel Museum publishes high-resolution images of the scroll in its Digital Dead Sea Scrolls project.

The holding institution's own viewers

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The scroll

  • Known as 1QIsaᵃ ("Cave 1, Isaiah, copy a"). It is one of the seven original Dead Sea Scrolls, bought in 1947 by the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan Athanasius Yeshue Samuel and acquired for Israel in 1954.
  • Palaeography dates it to about 150–100 BCE. Radiocarbon tests have given ranges reaching back into the fourth to second centuries BCE. It is the best preserved of the biblical scrolls.
  • It is displayed, in facsimile, around the central drum of the Shrine of the Book; the original is shown only rarely, to protect it.

How close to the Bible we read?

This is what made the scroll famous. Compared with the Masoretic text of the medieval codices, such as the Aleppo Codex (V38):

  • The wording is overwhelmingly the same. Most differences are in spelling: the scroll often writes vowel letters that the later text leaves out, for example לוא for לא.
  • There are also real variants, a few thousand in all counting spelling, including changed words, added or missing phrases and scribal corrections. Most are small; a handful affect meaning.
  • A second Isaiah scroll from the same cave, 1QIsaᵇ, is closer still to the Masoretic text.

So the scroll shows both remarkable stability over a thousand years of copying and that the text was not yet fixed letter by letter in the second century BCE. Believers and sceptics sometimes each quote only half of this.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The divine name. Scribes treated the name of God with special care. In some Qumran scrolls it is written in palaeo-Hebrew letters (see V02); in this scroll it appears in square script, and in places a scribe's corrections show hesitation over how to write divine titles.

Marks in the margins. The scroll carries marginal signs whose meaning is not certain: some may mark passages of special interest to the community, others may be reading aids.

A book in two halves. The scribe left three blank lines after chapter 33, and the second half was written differently. Scholars have linked this to how Isaiah was copied, and it connects with the long-standing view that the book grew in stages ("First", "Second" and "Third" Isaiah), although the gap falls at chapter 33, not at chapter 40 where that scholarly division usually begins.

Connections

Second Temple Judaism (ch10) and Pre-exilic Israel (ch07), where the prophet Isaiah belongs. Compare the Dead Sea Scrolls (V02), the Copper Scroll (V10) and the Aleppo Codex (V38).

✦ The evidence, honestly

What's well supported by the evidence

  • A complete Hebrew scroll of Isaiah, 7.34 m, 54 columns, from Qumran Cave 1, dated by palaeography to c. 150–100 BCE.
  • Its text is very close to the medieval Masoretic text, with frequent spelling differences and a smaller number of genuine variants.

What is not supported

  • That it shows the biblical text was unchanged letter for letter. It does not.
  • That it shows the text was unreliable or heavily rewritten. It does not show that either.

What's genuinely open

  • The meaning of its marginal marks and of the gap after chapter 33.
  • How the scroll's scribes worked: studies using handwriting analysis have argued for two scribes with very similar hands.

Sources

The scroll

Studies

  • M. Popović, M. A. Dhali and L. Schomaker, "Artificial intelligence based writer identification generates new evidence for the unknown scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa)", PLOS ONE 16.4 (2021), https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0249769
  • E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (3rd edn, Fortress, 2012)
  • E. Ulrich and P. W. Flint, Qumran Cave 1.II: The Isaiah Scrolls, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 32 (Oxford, 2010)

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/great-isaiah-scroll.html

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