Qumran

31.7415° N, 35.4598° E

Qumran is the site of an ancient Jewish communal centre around which are located many of the caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. It was sacked by the Romans during the First Jewish Revolt sometime in 67 AD.

Remains of the communal center at Qumran. Cave 4 (see below) is located to thre right of the shed at the top right of this photo.

Cave 4, Qumran, one of the caves from
which the Dead Sea Scrolls were recovered.

Located on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea, the centre is believed by most scholars to belong to the Jewish Essene sect that they think was responsible for the production and/or collection of the manuscripts that became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The most common view held by scholars today—especially based on the Cairo Damascus Document or CD—is that these Essenes believed that they were the people of the new covenant spoken of in Jer 31:31. The objective of the community was to provide a space where they could live out their life of discipline under the tutelege of an anointed leader whom they refer to as the Teacher of Righteousness. They practice ritual washing and shared sacramental meals together. They seemed to believe that they live in shadow of the coming of not one, but two messiahs; a priestly one from the line of Aaron and a kingly one from the line of David.

The most recent challenge to this long-standing hypothesis has been issued by archaeologists Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg, who argue that Qumran was a pottery factory, and that there is no essential connection between the activity of the site and the scrolls found in near-by caves ("Back to Qumran: Ten years of Excavations and Research, 1993-2004," in The Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Archaeological Interpretation and Debate, eds. Katharina Galor, Jean-Baptiste Humbert, and Jurgen Zangenberg (Leiden: Brill, 2006)).