Israel - Day 6 - Qumran

Qumran is mostly famous due to the discovery of the dead sea scrolls.  But Qumran was a community of people believed to be a Jachad settlement.  The Jachad people were a religious community that lived off the land eating whatever they could find including bugs & wild honey.  The studied & annotated/wrote scriptural texts all day long stopping only to eat.  The remains of this community are still here.  Some believe that John the Baptist was part of this community at one time, but nobody knows for sure.

But the reason Qumran is famous is the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950's by Bedouin shepherds by accident.  2 boys happened upon a cave in the side of the rock & one threw a rock inside & heard it shatter something.  Inside they found pottery jars with scriptural texts inside.  Once one cave was found, archaeologists looked for more & they discovered 11 total.  15 scrolls found are legible & in ok shape to research, but there were over 900 other scrolls found that were broken down into nearly 15,000 fragments of paper that needed to be pieced together again.  These scrolls were written anywhere between 3BC-1AD & are written in the Aramic, Greek, & Hebrew languages.  

None of the original scrolls remain in Qumran, they are scattered throughout the world in museums.  But there were a lot of replicas on display at the museum here so we could see what they may have looked like & how the pages of the scrolls were sewn together.

The Dead Sea Scrolls contained at least part every book of the bible except Esther.  One of the biggest finds in the scrolls was the great scroll of Isaiah & all his writings.

The "lots" cave is where they found "lots" of scroll fragments.  The book of Isaiah was found in this cave as well.  It contained the most scrolls out of the 11 caves.

Lorien fell in love with this goofy hat & had to buy it!
She now has a banana hat from Qumran, Israel.

We ate lunch here at Qumran.  We all packed sandwiches since we knew it was going to be a busy day of sightseeing.  We knew we had to get things done quickly if we wanted to see Gethsemane before it closed so we thought packing lunches would help us be fast.  The kids loved our little picnic on the ruins of a full on ancient civilization.  I thought it was pretty cool too!