Dead Sea Scrolls Found in Qumran Caves

A Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad edh-Dhib, searching for a lost goat near the Dead Sea's northwestern shore, threw a rock into a cave and heard pottery shatter. Inside clay jars he found ancient leather scrolls wrapped in linen. Between 1947 and 1956, eleven caves at Qumran yielded roughly 25,000 fragments comprising 981 manuscripts. The collection includes Hebrew Bible texts predating previous manuscripts by a thousand years, and documents from a Jewish community during the Second Temple period.