The 950 manuscripts found in eleven caves around the site of Khirbet Qumran, located at the North-West of the Dead Sea shore, constitute one of the most amazing discoveries of the twentieth century
Following the final publication of the scrolls at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are continuing to discover how complex ancient Judaism was at the turn of the era, far beyond what we had previously imagined.
Indeed, one third of these manuscripts constitute the oldest physical witnesses to the Hebrew Bible; the diversity of versions for the same passages provides new insights into the canonisation process of the Hebrew Bible and a new understanding of the status of these texts within Judaism. The other two thirds present mostly unknown Jewish texts. Many of them deal with the life of a community named in Hebrew yahad, designating a set of groups belonging to the Jewish movement known as the Essenes, already known from the ancient notices of Flavius Josephus, Philo of Alexandria and Pliny the Elder. For other documents, it is difficult to recognize an Essene milieu; they seem to have been composed before the birth of Essenism, yet are also preserved within the Qumran caves. The Qumran manuscripts are therefore not only the so-called library of the Essene movement, as is often said, but also a conservatory of Jewish documents from the final centuries BC. The common point of these texts and their raison d’etre in the caves is their deliberate selection by the Essenes due to the correspondence of the ideas they espoused with Essene doctrine. For example, studies on Judaism and on the Jesus movement have been renewed after the discovery of the Qumran scrolls, especially studies on wisdom, messianism, apocalyptic, eschatology, and belief in an afterlife.Several manuscripts among the new documents discovered in the Qumran caves are particularly concerned with the role of demons[234] in causing illness and the proper way to expel them in order to heal. They often attest to motifs known later in Judaism, such as the relationship between sin, impurity and illness, and the use of an intermediary for exorcism. They also present one of the first Jewish attestations of formulas in the first person and the use of imperatives in spells and incantations. Most of these documents preserved in the Qumran caves do not seem to have been composed by the Essenes; they seem to have circulated among Jewish groups at the turn of era. However, a few manuscripts may be an Essene adaptation of these documents and formulas.