In the winter of 1947, a young shepherd was looking for a lost goat in the cliffs near the Dead Sea. He threw a stone into a dark cave and heard something break. Inside, he found tall clay jars — and in them, old rolls of leather covered with writing.
These were the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth century. Over the next ten years, researchers found thousands of pieces of scrolls in eleven caves near a place called Qumran.
The scrolls are more than 2,000 years old. They include parts of almost every book of the Hebrew Bible. One of them, the Great Isaiah Scroll, is almost complete and is more than seven meters long.
Amazingly, the text is almost the same as the one we read today. You can see some of the scrolls in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Its white roof is shaped like the lid of one of the jars that the shepherd found.