Paul Calvert spoke with archaeologist Stephen Pfann about their history

There are also another handful of manuscripts, less than 10 manuscripts from Qumran, that are actually of a real different tradition. You might have entire lines of text, half lines of text that are different than what's found in the Bible.

There's another group of manuscripts that no-one, or very few, are daring to call biblical manuscripts, which are of the Torah. There are mainly quotes from the Torah with some additions and some large subtractions. This is what they call re-written Pentateuch.

Stephen Pfann (right ) at cave near Qumran

We do have a number of texts which are questioned whether they are considered really authoritative biblical texts at that time but are indeed not really biblical texts as we know them today. The book of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and one manuscript of the book of Jeremiah are of this tradition, which is probably closer to the Septuagint than it is to the masoretic text, the Hebrew Bible we have today and that's rare. We do expect that the Septuagint itself was based upon the translation of some Hebrew manuscript and this is confirmed on what we have at Qumran, but again it was very few manuscripts and among those manuscripts there are examples of the pre-masoretic tradition. Even in the same cave, for example the great Isaiah scroll, this has a number of variants. It has well over 200 variants in it and the fact is this one is not quite fair because it seems that there was a scribe that was pretty sloppy at times. Then you will find written in between where somebody corrects that, so you have all the little additional crosses and lines through text and things like this within the Isaiah scroll, which makes it interesting and a character all of its own.

A second copy of the book of Isaiah was found in the same jar and it is what we call pre-masoretic. It seems that this Isaiah scroll, the large one, was being corrected over to be like the pre-masoretic. In other words, within the community at Qumran, they tolerated another manuscript and tolerated other scrolls that were a little different. They would be checking both of them. It's like us checking various English translations today, but they were doing this with the Bible. It's seen that their preference was the pre-masoretic, which ends up being our Bible today.

Paul: How important are the Dead Sea Scrolls to a scholar today?

Stephen: The Dead Sea Scrolls are a witness and tremendous confirmation that the biblical text that we have today does represent a text that once existed amongst the Jewish people in the Second Temple period. We also have the ability to study and find out what variants there are that might have influenced certain text traditions that were where various interpretations came from. We would know from studying the Septuagint that there are certain places that were influenced by the Septuagint as opposed to the masoretic text. It is very important to be able to check those out between the Septuagint and the text we have today. It shows for the Greek speaking Jews, that they probably did very little in terms of reading the Hebrew text.

Knowledge has expanded immensely in terms of these biblical texts and for biblical scholars it's probably a dream come true that over 200-250 scrolls were found that were biblical texts from Qumran that we would never imagine that we would ever have before. This is a proper witness as we can see this is the actual text they had in their hands in the Second Temple period during the time of the Bible that we still have in our hands today.

Paul: How old is the scroll of Isaiah and is it the oldest of its kind?

Stephen: The scroll of Isaiah is a nearly complete scroll so this scroll is a really important witness for understanding how scribes wrote their scrolls; when they copy them; how they sometimes copied them properly or not, but with a script that reflects the beginning of the first century BC. We do have a scroll that goes back to the book of Exodus to the late 3rd century. It's fragmentary and not very easy to read. Also we have the book of Samuel, which is one very important late 3rd century scroll. The Isaiah scroll is not the earliest one, in fact it is preceded by little over a century by these other fragmentary ones, but that we have one that is so well preserved that goes back to that date is really why it becomes the star of the show.

Paul: Do some of the scrolls tell us more about the biblical characters?

Stephen: We have a number of scrolls that are called apocrypha's, which are dealing with the lives of the patriarchs; the Genesis apocrypha from cave one. We have the apocrypha of Jeremiah and others which actually deal with those biblical prophets. They have stories about them and things we find in them that are not found anywhere else. We do find interpretations; we have visions and dreams scribed to biblical characters we've never seen before.

These kinds of stories of course are all apocryphal and in many cases don't represent things that we find in the Bible that are said about these characters, but were evidently important enough to be copied and re-copied in several copies of manuscripts being used by the people of the Second Temple period; mainly 1st Century BC - 1st Century AD. A great deal of these texts were actually written in Aramaic and so some of them go back even into the Persian period of the 4th-5th Century BC. Whether you are a lay person or not you like to hear the great stories about the great deeds of the lay people. If you want to find out more about the Levites if you are from a priestly background, you like to read the story about the book of Levi and these kinds of stories. These stories of the people of the past did circulate back in that time and it encouraged them on, depending upon what place they were in Judaism of that day.

We also have the huzzahs, which we find on the doors and the phylacteries, which people wore on their hands and heads. In the case of the door, it was only two scriptures from the book of Deuteronomy that were found on these little scrolls. It was done for the purpose of instruction. They made some of these so that people can hold them in their hands. It has five times the amount of text that the present mezuzahs have in them today. It has the Ten Commandments and the command that you love the stranger in the midst as yourself and treat them as a citizen and these are the actual commandments that people had in the 1st Century on the door posts that they put their hand on. They realised that they had to submit their lives in order to be in sync with their God and to be obedient, to be blessed by Him. We are witnesses to the life of individuals; to the actual pocket scrolls that they carried in their hands that they read from these scriptures during the different feast days.

We have a set of scrolls that are calendars that tell us what diverse calendars they had depending on what faction of Judaism, whether it's Sadducees or whether they are the Essences or others. They would have different calendars and different liturgies set at different times of the year; different feast days. These are all important for knowing and filling out a picture that we didn't have before.