The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of manuscript fragments that at the time of their discovery were found to be around 1,000 years older than the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible - also known as the Tanak, or the Old Testament. In 1947, some scrolls of Biblical texts were discovered in a cave in Qumran, and since then, a vast array of scrolls have been recovered from the surrounding area. The Leon Levy Digital Library has high-resolution photo archives of almost all of the scrolls except those kept in private collections. Although they have been transcribed, translated, and discussed at length in academia, scholarly resources are copyrighted material, which cannot be republished in this free tool. Instead, this website relies on freely-available permissively-licensed transcriptions of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
That brings us to the purpose of this website: to provide a high-level analysis of the differences between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the traditional Masoretic text, and to visualize facts and figures about the Dead Sea Scrolls in an engaging way. More details about the two tools provided on this site are listed below.
For each verse which contains a difference in reading, the text critical edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls and footnotes provided by thewaytoyahuweh.com are compared side-by-side with the traditional Masoretic text made availible by tanach.us. The text critical edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls combines all of the fragments into the single best reading and supplements any missing words with what the Masoretic text says. Variations between the fragments - both with each other and the Masoretic - are provided in the footnotes.
ExploreInteractive charts and graphs allow you to explore the following metrics: