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The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity is unavailable, but you can change that!

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in caves near the Dead Sea in 1947, are one of the great archaeological finds. They include a treasure trove of unique texts created by the Essene community of Qumran which had formed in the desert to restore Judaism to true biblical faith. They also include the earliest manuscripts of every book in the Hebrew Bible, except for Esther. The writings of this...

Some texts focus on a single topic such as purity/impurity. The texts called Tohorot (Purities) A–C13 deal with people who have gonorrhea, women who are menstruating, men with emissions of semen, unclean vessels, and rules about purity and impurity in connection with the red cow ritual (see Numbers 19). Another set of texts, labeled officially as Ordinances,14 includes rules about produce for the poor, bringing the half-shekel tax once in a lifetime, not annually (as the Pharisees argued),
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