The Great Isaiah Scroll is copied
A scribe copied the whole book of Isaiah onto a leather scroll 24 feet long. Hidden in a cave by the Dead Sea and found in 1947, it is the oldest complete book of the Bible known, a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew manuscripts known before it.
The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God stands forever.
Isaiah 40:8 (World English Bible)
The scroll belonged to a community, probably Essenes, at Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, who had withdrawn from what they saw as a corrupt priesthood in Jerusalem. Their library of more than 900 scrolls, including pieces of every Old Testament book except Esther, lay in the caves until a Bedouin shepherd found the first ones in 1947.
Scholars compared the Isaiah scroll with manuscripts copied a thousand years later and found them remarkably close, differing mostly in spelling and small details. Isaiah 53, the prophecy of the Servant who “was pierced for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5), reads essentially as it does in our Bibles, on a page written well before Jesus was born.
Dating notes
Not in Ussher; the scrolls were found in 1947. Handwriting and carbon dating place the Great Isaiah Scroll roughly 150–100 BC; the date shown is approximate. The Qumran community is often identified with the Essenes, whom Josephus describes, though this is debated.