The Dead Sea Scrolls at 70

What Have We Learned?

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered between 1947 and 1956. After an initial flurry of excitement, the scrolls went into a period of quiet withdrawal. When I entered the field in the 1960s, only a few of the scrolls had been published. Those were the ones that were preserved in the Israel Museum that, in 1965, built a home for them known as the Shrine of the Book. A small number of the many texts discovered in the early 1950s while the West Bank was under Jordanian administration had subsequently appeared. I was fascinated by the study of the scrolls, a then little-known and underappreciated group of documents.

Read the rest of the article from the Jewish Tribune.