The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of more than 900 documents found between 1947 and 1956 in caves near the Dead Sea. Many of the scrolls are copies of texts from the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament. The texts are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Most are on parchment, with some on papyrus. Modern carbon-14 dating and other scientific methods have shown that they were written between 200 BCE and 70 CE.

The Dead Sea Scrolls play a crucial role in assessing the accurate preservation of the Old Testament. With its hundreds of manuscripts from every book except Esther, detailed comparisons can be made with more recent texts.

The Old Testament that we use today is translated from what is called the Masoretic Text. The Masoretes were Jewish scholars who between A.D. 500 and 950 gave the Old Testament the form that we use today. Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, the oldest Hebrew text of the Old Testament was the Masoretic Aleppo Codex which dates to A.D. 935.

After years of careful study, it has been concluded that the Dead Sea Scrolls give substantial confirmation that our Old Testament has been accurately preserved. The scrolls were found to be almost identical with the Masoretic text.