Sectarian Texts from Qumran

Stored during the first century BCE or the first century CE, the more than nine hundred manuscripts and fragments discovered in the caves of Qumran, called the Dead Sea Scrolls, provide a wealth of information regarding Judean sectarian life, the history and formation of the texts that would eventually form the Hebrew Bible, early biblical interpretation, and Second Temple–period literature.

The texts themselves suggest that the members of this group withdrew from Jerusalem to the northwestern corner of the Dead Sea, likely in rejection of the authority of Hasmonean Temple administrators. The scrolls provide evidence about their beliefs, which texts they treated as authoritative and formative, their interpretive practices, and their observance of the Torah. Most scholars identify the community to which the scrolls belonged as an extreme subset of the Essene movement.

Qumran scholars distinguish between “sectarian” texts, which reflect the distinctive beliefs and practices of the Qumran community, and “nonsectarian” texts, including biblical manuscripts, which were preserved and copied by members of the sect but were not necessarily composed by them. However, a number of texts that appear to dictate community norms disagree with each other, leading some scholars to suggest that these scrolls may have emerged from more than one group.