Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Manuscritos do Mar Morto" in Portuguese language version.
[...] I didn't know exactly what the Dead Sea Scrolls were. [...] But since I have come to Israel to get as close as I can to the Bible, I make a visit to the scrolls at the Shrine of the Book. [...] Housed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the shrine consists of [...]. [...] The scrolls, as I have now learned, are a collection of hundreds of texts and fragments of text found in caves at Qumran, on the Dead Sea, during the late 1940s and '50s. (Famously, the first were discovered when Bedouin shepherds chanced on one of the caves.) The scrolls were compiled by an apocalyptic Jewish sect known as the Essenes (or Yahad), which lived in Qumran from the second century B.C. until around A.D. 70. Portions of every Hebrew Bible book except Esther and Nehemiah were found—the glory is a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah. The scrolls also include apocrypha and the sect's own rule books. The Dead Sea Scrolls are by far the earliest versions of biblical text, dating a full 1,000 years earlier than the original Hebrew Bible text used by Jews today. (In other words, the biblical writings in the Dead Sea Scrolls are twice as old as the next oldest Hebrew Bible text. There are Greek translations of the Bible that date from the fourth century A.D., several hundred years after the scrolls.)
