The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of about 850 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, which were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves near Qumran, a fortress northwest of the Dead Sea in Israel (in historical times part of Judea). They were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, sometime between the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD. The texts are important as being practically the only Jewish Biblical documents from that period, and because of what they can tell about the political and religious context.

Also see other discoveries