Qumran: latest inquiry

Abstract

One of the most dusty intellectual topics in the field of textual criticism in recent years, certainly refers to the so-called Dead Sea scrolls. As he is well known, it is a set of scrolls whose existence had been unknown until 1947; year in which a Bedouin shepherd discovered by chance (like all great finds) a parchment hidden inside a cave in the desert of Jordan. As this parchment was acquired at a good price in a market close to that region, it began among the inhabitants of that region during 1951 and 1956, a real hunt for "rolls", which would culminate in the compilation of some 15,000 fragments, belonging to 15 different manuscripts, and whose study has been given dozens of Hebrew philologists, until they concluded that these texts were confiscated and hidden by the legions of Vespasian (during the first century of our era) to a community of inhabitants settled on the margins of the Dead Sea, which by the austerity of its rules and customs, has led specialists to believe that it was a sect known by the name of the Essenes.