Historical importance of the Scrolls

Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the most ancient Hebrew manuscripts associated with the Bible were Masoretic texts dating to tenth century CE such as the Aleppo Codex. The biblical manuscripts discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls drive that date back a millennium to the 2nd century BCE. Before this particular breakthrough, the earliest extant manuscripts of the Old Testament have been in Greek in manuscripts such as Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 and Codex Sinaiticus.

According to The Oxford Companion to Archaeology: The biblical manuscripts coming from Qumran, that include at least pieces from every single book of the Old Testament, other than perhaps for the Book of Esther, provide a far older cross part of scriptural traditions than which obtainable to scholars just before.

While some of the Qumran biblical manuscripts are nearly similar to the Masoretic, or traditional, Hebrew text of the Old Testament, some manuscripts of the books of Exodus and Samuel found in Cave Four exhibit dramatic variations in both vocabulary as well as content material. In their own amazing variety of textual variants, the Qumran biblical discoveries have motivated scholars to reevaluate the once-accepted hypotheses of the advancement of the modern biblical text from just three manuscript families: of the Masoretic text, of the Hebrew original of the Septuagint, and of the Samaritan Pentateuch. It is now getting progressively clear that the Old Testament scripture had been extremely smooth till its canonization around A.D. 100.[21]

About 35Masoretic tradition (MT), 5to the Samaritan, with the rest unaligned. The non-aligned fall into a couple of groups, those irregular in agreeing with other known types, and those that diverge considerably from just about all other known readings. The DSS thus form a substantial witness to the mutability associated with biblical texts at this time period. The sectarian texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, most which were formerly unidentified, offer fresh light on a single type of Judaism practiced during the Second Temple period of time.