A ruin on a marl terrace above the north-west shore of the Dead Sea, and the most consequential archaeological site in the study of the Bible. Between 1947 and 1956, eleven caves here yielded roughly nine hundred manuscripts — the DEAD SEA SCROLLS — including fragments of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, copied between about 250 BC and AD 68. Before Qumran, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible was the Leningrad Codex of AD 1008; the scrolls moved the evidence back a thousand years at a stroke. ⚠ What they mostly show is stability: the text had changed remarkably little. But not everywhere — and the GREAT ISAIAH SCROLL (1QIsa-a), a nearly complete Isaiah copied about 125 BC, is the single most important witness, because at Isaiah 53:11 it reads 'he will see LIGHT' where the Masoretic text has no object at all, agreeing there with the Septuagint against the later Hebrew tradition. The settlement is usually associated with a Jewish sectarian community, often identified with the Essenes, though that identification is argued rather than settled.