Dead Sea scrolls

The Dead Sea scrolls (Hebrew: מגילות ים המלח) are widely acknowledged to be among the greatest archaeological treasures ever discovered. They comprise roughly 900 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 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 texts are of great religious and historical significance, as they include practically the only known surviving copies of Biblical documents made before AD 100, and preserve evidence of considerable diversity of belief and practice within late Second Temple Judaism.