The Qumran Documents (Dead Sea Scrolls)The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls or Qumran Documents is the most important religious discovery of the 20th century. These manuscripts revolutionized the entire field of biblical study and have the capacity to destabilize the mass of Western religious thought as we know it today. For the information in these scrolls, include books of the Hebrew Bible that predate the previous example by a thousand years. The data found in these scrolls allows us to form a historically accurate reconstruction of the formative period of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. By studying the customs and religious practices of the Essene people, we can take a snapshot of the religious and political times in force in the early days of Christianity. In 1947, near the town of Qumran, a young Bedouin shepherd named Mohammed Dib from the T'Amireh tribe left his village in search of a lost goat. He threw a stone into a small cave in a cliff, thinking that the goat had taken refuge inside the cave. When he threw the stone, he heard the sound of breaking pottery. The next day he returned and found the entrance to the cave. Inside the cave he found ten clay jars. Most of the jars were empty and one contained only dirt, but inside the other three he found scrolls. The scrolls he found were made of ancient papyri, stored in jars and wrapped in linen. On a second visit, he found four more scrolls. These scrolls were taken to an antique dealer named Kando in Bethlehem in the hopes that they would be worth something on the black market. Kando bought the four scrolls from the shepherd nicknamed "The Wolf" for about one hundred and ten...... middle of paper ......d so as not to reveal anything to outsiders, even under penalty of death. They must keep all the information contained in their books secret. They have nothing of their own and eat together in common. They did not believe in the practice of animal sacrifice. They also only worked in professions that contributed to peace. They also believed that God was the source of all good but could not be the cause of any evil. The dating of the Qumran community has been established with considerable precision, in part due to coins found near the settlement and dating from the time of John Hyrcanus (103–104 BC). This indicates that settlement began in the second century BC or shortly after. Archaeological findings clearly show that a city existed in Qumran and that a community called the Essenes lived in Qumran from the mid-second century BC until CE.. 68.