Between 1947 and 1956, in eleven caves in the cliffs above Khirbet Qumran on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea, bedouin and archaeologists found the remains of about nine hundred manuscripts — a library hidden in antiquity and left undisturbed for nearly two thousand years. Other manuscripts came from the ravines further south: Wadi Murabba‘at, Naḥal Ḥever, Naḥal Arugot, Wadi Sdeir, and the fortress of Masada. This shelf holds 997 of them, from sixteen sites, in Hebrew and Aramaic, every word parsed: 1,127 pages and 408,035 words.
They matter for two reasons. About a quarter are copies of biblical books — among them a complete scroll of Isaiah copied around 125 BC, a thousand years older than any Hebrew Bible manuscript known before — and they show what the text looked like before the Masoretes fixed it. The rest are the writings of the community that kept the library and of the Judaism around it: rules, hymns, commentaries, calendars, prayers, and apocalypses, most of which no one had read since antiquity.
Manuscripts are catalogued by siglum: the cave number, the letter Q for Qumran, and a number — so 4Q175 is the hundred-and-seventy-fifth manuscript catalogued from Cave 4. A few carry names instead, given them by their editors, and where a manuscript has a recognised name this site prints it beside the siglum. Manuscripts from outside the Qumran caves use their site’s abbreviation: Mur for Wadi Murabba‘at, Mas for Masada, X for a manuscript whose provenance is unknown.
These are damaged manuscripts, and the pages show it honestly. Square brackets mark letters the editors restored rather than read; a bracketed ellipsis stands where a word is lost altogether. Many fragments carry only a few words. Scrolls too long or too fragmented for one page are split into numbered parts.