Biblical manuscripts

Biblical manuscripts, handwritten copies of sacred texts made before printing, are an invaluable historical and religious heritage for understanding the history of the Scriptures. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls between 1947 and 1956 near Qumran revealed 970 Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek manuscripts dating from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD, representing the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible. The Sefer Torah illustrates the traditional rigor of transmission: this sacred manuscript contains 304,805 letters written in Hebrew by a skilled scribe over a period of 18 months, where the slightest error invalidates the entire text. These major discoveries, from the Great Isaiah Scroll to the recent Sassoon codex, continue to enrich our knowledge of the origins of Judaism and Christianity, while testifying to the extraordinary fidelity of their transmission down the centuries.

The Dead Sea Scrolls >

The Dead Sea Scrolls, also known as the Qumran Scrolls, are a collection of parchments and papyrus fragments, mainly in Hebrew, but also in Aramaic and Greek, unearthed mainly between 1947 and 1956 near the site of Qumran, then in Mandatory Palestine (1947-1948), and later in the West Bank.

The oldest manuscripts >

A biblical manuscript is a copy of a text from the Jewish and Christian religions, written before the use of printing. The word manuscript comes from the Latin manus (hand) and scriptum (written), Bible from the Greek βιϐλια (books).

The oldest Torah scrolls >

The Torah scroll, or Sefer Torah, is a sacred manuscript containing the text of the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch. The term is sometimes extended to include all the books of the Tanakh (Old Testament).