Quotes About Dead Sea Scrolls

The greatest importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls...lies in the discovery of biblical manuscripts dating back to only about 300 years after the close of the Old Testament canon.

5. The kezazah ceremony. In the Jerusalem Talmud and elsewhere in the writings of the sages, we are told that at the time of Jesus the Jews had a method of punishing any Jewish boy who lost his family inheritance to Gentiles. Such a loss was considered particularly shameful, and the horror of that shame is reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are many Aramaic texts from the time of Jesus, so one can get a pretty good idea of what the language of Jesus looked liked.

The best evidence is the fact that this book predates Jesus and gives a multitude of prophecies for him. The Dead Sea Scroll copies of Enoch were found to predate Jesus and belong to the Essenes. This was a group of Jews that broke off from the mainstream and lived in various caves before Jesus was born.

years ago one of the translators working on the original Dead Sea scrolls, Professor Schonfeld, discovered a recurring cipher in some texts. A hidden language, if you like. He called it the Atbash Cipher. Ever heard of it?" Savage nodded. "Sure. I thought it was found in scrolls written in Hebrew." "It seems it may occur in Aramaic texts too.

The Dead Sea Scrolls predated the earliest extant text—Masoretic—by more than a millennium.3 Yet when compared to one another, differences in style and spelling were noted but no significant difference in substance.

For a thousand years after the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, the Jewish holy scriptures - the five parts of the Torah and 19 other holy books - were copied and passed down in the various Jewish communities from generation to generation.

His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls....

The Dead Sea Scrolls contain biblical texts that represent an earlier stage of the transmission of the Hebrew text. They have been consulted, as have been the Samaritan Pentateuch and the ancient scribal traditions concerning deliberate textual changes. The translators also consulted the more important early versions—the Greek Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, the Latin vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, the Aramaic Targums and, for the Psalms, the Juxta Hebraica of Jerome.