The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 931 documents discovered over a half century ago in a region of the Judean desert in what is today called the West Bank. The scrolls date from different periods—as early as 300 BC to AD 40—and were hidden in caves along the edge of the Dead Sea. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is the greatest literary and archaeological discovery of our time. The scrolls are not the original documents that make up the Hebrew Bible (the