Paul Calvert spoke with archaeologist Stephen Pfann about their history

Discovered by Bedouin shepherds in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls are of incredible significance for both scholars and those from the Jewish and Christian communities. Found in Qumran on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea they continue to spark debate. To hear the background to this historic find, Paul Calvert spoke with Stephen Pfann, an archaeologist from the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem.

Paul: What books of the Bible are in the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Stephen: About one fifth of all the scrolls found at Qumran are biblical scrolls. In fact in cave two, nearly half of the 30-35 scrolls that were found were actually biblical books. That particular individual or group was primarily interested in the Bible.

We have within these caves different assortments that we would call biblical texts, which include real manuscripts and Torah scrolls that were written for religious reading; ones that were written in a script that was known as Paleo-Hebrew, which was the old First Temple period script going back to the time of the kings. These are very special scrolls.

There are also scrolls that are more for reading. Some of them have notes written into the side, like the Isaiah scroll from cave one. There were also scrolls that have commentary written into them in the text, like the Habakkuk commentary and many others that were written in order that the people could read the Bible and then read a comment on it at the same time. There are also Targums, which are Aramaic versions of the Bible. There were three of those that were found and that was intended so that people could read it in a more easily understood language. Aramaic would be used by many of the common people. Then there is also a set of scrolls that are written on very small pieces of parchment; these are phylacteries and mezuzahs. According to the command of scripture, these words had to be written on your doors and they found about a dozen or more of these mezuzahs at Qumran and then also phylacteries, that people wore these scriptures on their arms and on their foreheads.

We don't have many combined scrolls with texts on; biblical books where you would have several books in one scroll. There are some scrolls of the Torah. I don't believe that it's thought that any of these scrolls really concluded the entire Torah. It would just be massive, but some of them did include at least two books of the Torah. Those are very common there at Qumran and of course to all the Jewish people of that period, the Torah was central. It doesn't matter which group, the Torah was central to their doctrine and they had to interpret that with their lives.

We also have the most common book of the Torah, which is the book of Deuteronomy. That is commanded to be put on their door posts and it's also put on their foreheads. It's also commanded to be read every year by the leader at the feast of Sukkot and Tabernacles. Then among the prophets, the book of Isaiah is the most prevalent because it is full of many details concerning the life and the nation of Israel and their view toward the future. It is considered to be of very high authority among many groups. Then there's also the book of Psalms, which is by far the most common biblical book found at Qumran because of the worship and because lay people would use the book of Psalms for interpreting scripture. It was considered to be prophetic.

From the liturgical standpoint it was the priesthood that was supposed to lead people in prayer. We can separate out lay libraries from priestly libraries at Qumran based upon the content. If they have a lot of liturgy and if they have many copies of the book of Psalms, then we know that this basically is a priestly library. If it has one of the five megillot/scrolls, the pocket scrolls, which are small, they're about five inches tall, that were carried around during the feast days and read by the laity, if you find these in a cave along with other things that seem to be of lay interest, including rule books, then you know you have something that goes back to a lay library. We find that the lay people will have the book of Ruth, Lamentations, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, which are read at different feasts of the year. The book of Esther was added to that, but there is no copy of the book of Esther that was found at Qumran. It may come out yet, some fragment of that will be found.

Until recently there was no book of Nehemiah. Then in the last few years in a conference we saw a new picture of a new scroll fragment that was being put on the market by a collector and it is a genuine scroll. The book of Nehemiah is there. There's just a small fragment of the book of Nehemiah, a small fragment of the book of Chronicles, three very small fragments of the book of Ezra; if the wind got a little bit brisk around that day we may have thought they didn't have those books either. There are many fragments that are probably lost, especially the papyrus fragments, which could blow very easily like leaves in the wind. Those little fragments are precious and we probably have much less because they weren't excavated properly by actual archaeologists.

Paul: So these books of the Bible actually confirm that the Bible is true? Are they changed in the years gone by?

Stephen: The picture that we have from Qumran is that we have biblical texts that are about one in 10 or five are almost identical to the text that we have in our Hebrew Bibles. This is with some exceptions of some scribal errors leaving letters out or wrong substituted letters, that kind of thing, where you have added vowel letters to the script. The things that are perhaps differences are differences in spelling and not really in content.

Also the vast majority of the scrolls are what they call the Palestinian Biblical text tradition in which there are a number of variants in terms of words here and there. Let me give you an example from the book of Daniel, which is one of the scrolls that I worked on. It's from Daniel chapter 2; there is a prayer where Daniel says, "May the name of God be praised". In this particular text it says, "May the Great name of God be praised". For most people reading that in their English translation, they would never see the differences they are reading through, but it's a variant that's there.

When the ram goes off in different directions in Daniel chapter 8, in our present text he goes off in three different directions. In the text that is in Qumran, he goes off in four different directions, north, south, east and west, so it is something that there is small variance in this that we call the Palestinian tradition.

The tendency is that there are so few, or I would say almost no theological value or differences that we are talking about, even in that tradition, that we have almost nothing to be concerned with, but it's still very interesting in terms of the history of the text.