The New Life of the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of ancient manuscripts discovered (starting in 1947) in a group of caves overlooking the Dead Sea. The oldest of them probably go back to the third century BCE. For various reasons, these texts have only recently been fully published and made available to the general public, so that only now are we starting to learn what they can tell us—about where our Bible comes from, about what Judaism looked like in the centuries leading up to Christianity, and about the way of life adopted by the rather eccentric group of Jews who assembled this ancient collection of writings.