First page Back Continue Last page Overview Graphics
- Overwhelmingly, the Dead Sea Scrolls relate to Jewish religious texts, to the Jewish people, in the land of Israel.
- The Dead Sea Scrolls are most likely to relate to different Jewish groups, and were hidden by different people at different times, for different reasons, but mostly as a result of trying to preserve what could be preserved, as the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and the later destruction of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, became more and more inevitable.
- The majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls are written in Hebrew, because preserving the Hebrew Bible was of prime importance.
- Both Hebrew and Aramaic are heavily represented in the non-Biblical scrolls, indicating the importance of both these languages in the lives of religious Jews in New Testament times.
- The very small number of Greek scrolls, and the comparative lateness of those scrolls, shows that Greek was just not a language that was heavily used by mainstream, religious Jews at this time.