In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd found jars of manuscripts in a cave above the northwestern shore. Eleven caves eventually yielded fragments of some nine hundred scrolls, including a complete Isaiah a thousand years older than any Hebrew biblical manuscript then known, copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, and a body of sectarian literature, the Community Rule, the War Scroll, the pesher commentaries, describing a group that called itself the sons of light and kept a calendar different from the Temple's.
The settlement at Qumran beside the caves has been argued over ever since. Jodi Magness' archaeological study defends the standard reading, that it housed a sectarian community, probably Essene, whose numerous stepped pools served ritual immersion; other scholars have proposed a fortified farm or a villa, with the scrolls brought from Jerusalem for safekeeping before the revolt of 66. The dispute is about the site rather than the texts, whose importance for the study of Second Temple Judaism and of Christian origins is not contested.
The sea itself is disappearing. Diversion of the Jordan and industrial evaporation ponds have dropped the surface by more than thirty metres since 1960; sinkholes open along the retreating shore each year, and the access roads to some archaeological and monastic sites have had to be moved. Proposals to feed it from the Red Sea have been studied for decades without being built.