In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib threw a stone into a cave above the western shore of the Dead Sea and heard pottery break. What he had stumbled into was the first of eleven caves near the ruins of Qumran that would, over the following nine years, yield the most important biblical manuscript discovery of the modern age. The texts date from roughly the third century BCE through the first century CE — the Second Temple period, the world of the New Testament’s earliest horizon.
The contents fall into several major categories. About a third of the ~900 manuscripts are biblical — copies, in part or whole, of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther. The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) is a complete copy of Isaiah dated to roughly 125 BCE. These biblical manuscripts predate the previously oldest Hebrew witnesses (the Masoretic Text manuscripts of the 9th–10th centuries CE) by more than a thousand years; the close agreement between the Qumran texts and the later Masoretic tradition confirms the substantial integrity of the Hebrew text’s transmission across that long interval.
A second large body is the sectarian writings of the community that seems to have lived at Qumran — community rules (the Community Rule, the Damascus Document), biblical commentaries (the pesharim), liturgical texts (the Hymn Scroll), and apocalyptic works (the War Scroll). The identification of the Qumran community has long been debated; the consensus has favored a separatist Jewish group, often identified with the Essenes described by Josephus and Pliny, though other proposals remain in play. A third significant body is the pseudepigraphal material — fragments of Enoch (in Aramaic), Jubilees, and other Second Temple Jewish works otherwise known only in late translations.
For Latter-day Saint readers the Scrolls have several points of interest. The Isaiah material is especially valued: a complete Isaiah scroll substantially predating the Masoretic tradition, and broadly consistent with it, lends weight to the Isaiah text quoted at length in the Book of Mormon. The Enoch fragments confirm the antiquity of an Enoch tradition the Pearl of Great Price expands.