Dead Sea Scrolls

A young Bedouin shepherd tended sheep in a remote mountainous area near the Dead Sea. He came upon a small opening to a cave. Cautious about entering its dark interior, he threw a stone into the cave and was startled to hear clay pots breaking. He crawled inside and found scrolls in the broken pots. He and his cousin took the scrolls to show the family, selling them to a Bethlehem antiquities dealer. When the scrolls were later offered for sale in the Wall Street Journal, a Jewish archaeologist stepped forward to authenticate the scrolls, purchase them, and launch an excavation into the area where the scrolls were found. An estimated nine hundred scrolls have been found in twelve separate caves. Either these scrolls were left by a community of scribes called Essenes who hid the scrolls in caves to protect them from advancing Roman armies or they were stored there by Jerusalem priests who knew the conquest of the holy city was imminent. Parts of every book in the Old Testament, except Esther, are contained in the scrolls. This startling discovery predates the earliest known texts of the Old Testament by more than a thousand years.
Why does it matter to us as Christians? The Dead Sea Scrolls give substantial confirmation that the Old Testament has been authentically preserved. We can trust the veracity of Holy Scripture. Scribes included prayers and hymns to accompany their tedious scroll copying. The following prayer by a scribe was included in the collection of biblical Psalms: