Manuscript
Great Isaiah Scroll
Also known as 1QIsaᵃ · 1Q Isa-a · Qumran Isaiah Scroll
The oldest substantially complete Hebrew manuscript of the book of Isaiah; found at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
dead-sea-scrollstextual-criticismold-testament
Overview
Great Isaiah Scroll(Late 2nd century BCE (c. 125 BCE))— Cave 1, Qumran, near the Dead Sea
The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ) is one of the seven Dead Sea Scrolls originally discovered in 1947 in Cave 1 at Qumran, near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. It is the oldest substantially complete Hebrew manuscript of any biblical book known; it contains all 66 chapters of Isaiah. Paleographic analysis places it in the late 2nd century BCE. It is written on 17 sheets of parchment stitched into a single scroll about 24 feet long. The text it preserves is broadly consistent with the much later Masoretic Text used as the basis of all printed Hebrew Bibles, while also containing many orthographic variants and a handful of substantive differences — providing a landmark case-study for the transmission of the Hebrew biblical text across roughly a millennium. It is now held at the Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and has been made freely available online by the Israel Museum in a high-resolution digital facsimile.
Manuscript Details
- Date
- Late 2nd century BCE (c. 125 BCE)
- Language
- Hebrew
- Script
- Square Hebrew (Aramaic square script)
- Material
- Parchment
- Current location
- Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
- Discovery year
- 1947
- Discovery location
- Cave 1, Qumran, near the Dead Sea
- Contains books
- Isaiah
- Tags
- dead-sea-scrolls · textual-criticism · old-testament
Significance
The Great Isaiah Scroll is arguably the single most important manuscript for the study of the transmission of the Hebrew Old Testament. Before its discovery, the oldest substantially complete Hebrew biblical manuscripts were medieval (the Aleppo Codex and Leningrad Codex, c. 10th century CE). 1QIsaᵃ predates those by over a thousand years, yet its text corresponds very closely to them — powerful evidence for the stability of the Masoretic text tradition. It also provides early manuscript witness to some of the Christian tradition's most-cited messianic prophecy passages, including Isaiah 7:14, 9:6, and 52:13–53:12.
Where this witness is read
Great Isaiah Scroll is one of the manuscripts named in the places your Bible carries a footnote. Each passage below shows what this witness reads and the case each way.