The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ)
The largest and best preserved of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls, found in Qumran Cave 1 in 1947. Its 54 columns contain all 66 chapters of Isaiah, copied about 125 BC.
See the object at imj.org.il ↗The museum’s description of the scroll on its Digital Dead Sea Scrolls site (Internet Archive copy; the site itself is served without https) ↗
The scroll is one of the seven found in the first cave at Qumran in 1947. It is 7.34 metres long and almost complete. The Israel Museum dates it to about 125 BC, roughly a thousand years before the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible known until then.
Its text is close to the traditional Hebrew text, with many differences of spelling and wording. It shows that by the late second century BC the sixty-six chapters of Isaiah were copied as a single book. It cannot show how or when the book was put together, which is the question debated for chapters 40–55; see the Prophecy of Comfort and the Suffering Servant.
Cited in
- about 550 BC to 539 BC, estimated date
- about 150 BC to AD 68, estimated date