The vast majority of scholars now believe the texts were written, transcribed, and preserved by an isolationist group of Essenes living in Qumran, a small village located about a kilometer from the caves. (The Essenes were one of four major groups of Jews living in Israel at the time, along with the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots.

Prior to their discovery, the oldest known complete copy of the Hebrew Bible was the Leningrad Codex, dating to A.D. 1008. (Originally made in Cairo, Egypt, the name of the Leningrad Codex alludes to its location in the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, known as Leningrad from 1924 to 1991.) We now know the Dead Sea Scrolls date from between about 250 B.C. and A.D. 70. They are thus a full millennium older than the Leningrad Codex. Even more remarkably, the preserved biblical texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Leningrad Codex are virtually identical, demonstrating that written records can show remarkable stability when scribes are ordered to copy texts verbatim.

Several weeks ago, an exhibition called “Dead Sea Scrolls” closed after a nearly six-month run at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where I work as an archaeologist curator. I served as the scientist assigned to the exhibition. My task in that capacity was to train a large and dedicated corps of volunteers, to arrange public presentations by specialist lecturers, and to provide interviews with local and regional media. I’ve been assigned to several such exhibits over the years, and it’s one of the things I love about my job. I get to study some of the coolest archaeological topics out there, even when they aren’t the focus of my own research.

The surprising resilience of ancient writing

I’m not religious, so I approached “Dead Sea Scrolls” with the same degree of intellectual detachment and scholarly curiosity with which I have approached other exhibitions, including “A Day in Pompeii,” “Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed,” and “Traveling the Silk Road.” When I first started working on the “Dead Sea Scrolls” exhibit about a year ago, however, I had a nagging suspicion that this experience was somehow going to be different. I didn’t know why, but I now realize that it led me to a scholarly revelation.

When I entered graduate school as an archaeologist in the late 1980s, I was told in no uncertain terms to discount the narratives from Native American oral history. Why? Largely because of the children’s game of telephone. (If case you’ve forgotten: Get a bunch of kids in a circle. Tell one a secret. Tell her to tell the person next to her. Repeat until you come all the way around the circle. By the time the secret gets back to you, it’s totally changed, if not unrecognizable.) Though it is a compelling and seductive argument by analogy, it’s overly simplistic and belies a fundamental misunderstanding of how oral history actually works in human societies. History is not kept by children playing games. It’s kept by specialists.

If you are the keeper of history in a society that does not have a written language, your job is to preserve the story verbatim. You have to apprentice and train for many years, and you have to go through tests and approval processes before you are deemed qualified to serve as keeper.

What does this have to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls?