A Goat, a Cave, and a Jar of Scrolls

A shepherd looking for a lost goat is credited with finding the most significant biblical manuscript discovery of the twentieth century, entirely by accident.

A goat, a cave, and a jar of scrolls

In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd reportedly searching for a stray goat threw a stone into a cave opening near Qumran and heard it strike pottery, leading to the discovery of ancient scrolls stored in clay jars, an accidental find that eventually led to the recovery of hundreds of manuscripts and fragments from multiple nearby caves over subsequent years.

Manuscripts centuries older than anything comparable

The scrolls include the oldest known surviving copies of large portions of the Hebrew Bible by many centuries, most famously a nearly complete Isaiah Scroll, along with sectarian religious texts, giving scholars direct manuscript evidence of biblical text transmission far earlier than any previously available source and confirming a high degree of textual stability across the intervening centuries.

As this entry's companion article covers

The unresolved scholarly debate over exactly who occupied the settlement at Qumran itself, including the once-dominant but now contested identification of the residents as the Essene sect, is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.