Dead Sea scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are about 1,000 documents. They include texts from the Hebrew Bible. They were found between 1947 and 1979 in eleven caves in and around the Wadi Qumran (near the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea) in the West Bank. The religious and historical texts are very important as they include practically the only known surviving copies of Biblical documents made before 100 CE. They show evidence of many different beliefs and practices within late Second Temple Judaism.