Can somebody explain what they are and their significance?They are frequently linked with the Knights Templar but I really don‘t know what the Scrolls were or their purpose.Can anybody help?Any information would really be helpful.No rude comments though.Please Thank You!
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a set of Jewish texts found by an Arab on the shores of the Dead Sea shortly after World War II ended. While at first it was speculated they might lead to revisions in the text of the Bible, as they were made public (very slowly. I read one of the first public books reprinting and discussing some of them -- it was published in 1963 when I was 8 and I think I read it 4 years later) it became clear that traditional textural scholarship was excellent and what was most illuminating about these scrolls was their depiction of a non-Christian Jewish sect from about the time of the ferment which Jesus began His ministry in, which provided a new perspective on the concepts of Late Temple Judaism. This sect was known as the Essenes. I'm of two minds about the Templar connection. On the one hand I am a Christian with longstanding interest in Esoteric subjects. Templars of course interest me. On the other hand I am well aware of how much lore has been taken by both Orthodox and Esoteric Christians out of Judaism and other traditions, with the original contexts edited for political ends. One repeated example of this would be the Qabballah which in the last 200 years we have had both Eliphas Levi's version and Dion Fortune, neither of which seem especially orthodox. That is why I regard a Templar/Essene connection with strong skepticism.
Sometime in late 1946 or early 1947, Bedouins discovered some ancient leather manuscripts in a cave on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. Over the next decade ten more caves in the general area of Wadi Qumran were also found to contain ancient manuscripts. These Hebrew and Aramaic documents, now called the Dead Sea Scrolls, are the literary remains of an ancient Jewish sect that once lived at Qumran. Most scholars now identify this sect with the Essenes. Archeologists have determined that Qumran was inhabited roughly between 130 b.c. and a.d. 68. This means that the Dead Sea Scrolls were being written in the period just before, and perhaps even during, the lifetime of Christ. Naturally, the scrolls add greatly to our knowledge of the “theological climate” of the time. Both biblical and nonbiblical writings are found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Fragments of every book of the Old Testament except Esther have been found at Qumran, including more or less complete copies of Isaiah, Psalms, and an Aramaic text of Job. The importance of these biblical manuscripts is that they are about a thousand years older than the oldest previously known manuscripts of the Old Testament. Because the biblical manuscripts among the scrolls show relatively little change from the Old Testament that has come down to us, the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm the basic reliability of the Old Testament as we know it, at least as far back as the beginning of the Christian era.
