Now that the vast majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been published either in individual volumes or in the official series put out by the Clarendon Press of Oxford, the time has come for an assessment of the impact that the scrolls have made. Almost a quarter of the scrolls preserve parts of the Hebrew Bible, and they have revealed much about the reliability of the Masoretic Text (the text of medieval tradition found in the current Hebrew Bible). Some of these biblical texts are very old,