The narrative treats the scrolls not as the beginning of a history, but as its culmination. This is almost the reverse of their usual treatment. Since the first scrolls were found by Bedouins in 1947 in caves near the Dead Sea, they have inspired extraordinary drama and debate.

Before their discovery, the earliest known texts of the Hebrew Bible were from about 1,000 years after these scrolls were written. In the caves were over 800 scrolls and fragments, including Hebrew biblical texts before they were canonized, all written during a 200-year period of ferment in which the Israelite religion was about to be shattered by exile in A.D. 70, as Christianity was emerging. They showed how consistent transmission of these texts was, how many possibilities there were for interpretation and how fundamental the texts had already become.

The Bible’s first five books, for example, possessed a special status: a fragment of Leviticus shown here is written using an ancient paleo-Hebrew script, affirming the text’s antiquity. Other scrolls on display (which will be rotated to minimize light damage) include minor prophets in Greek translation, apocalyptic prophecies and the regulations of an unidentified religious community. Excavations of a site near the caves — Qumran — have suggested that such a community lived there during the period when the scrolls were written, perhaps in the first century B.C.

One hypothesis about Qumran was that its inhabitants were Essenes or proto-Christians, and that the scrolls describe the first stirrings of that new religion, evident in their messianism and references to the “Son of God.” This view became orthodoxy as a small group of scholars retained almost ruthless control over many scrolls for almost 40 years.

During the last two decades, though, the debate has become more diverse, as the scrolls have been made available. (This discussion may now become more widespread, since, as the exhibition notes, Google is digitizing the scrolls and putting them on the Internet at dss.collections.imj.org.il/.) Meanwhile, hypotheses proliferate. What was Qumran? A fortress? Pottery factory? Repository for the Jerusalem temple’s library? Were the scrolls written by Qumran scribes?