Scribal Production and Literacy at Qumran

The study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the site of Qumran entails at times a narrative of a “poor intellectual community” of wise and pious scribes and sages—in other words, a scribal centre humming primarily with manuscript production, study, and even composition of new texts.1 The creators of the Scrolls are regarded as a collective society, still bordering somewhere near the proto-monastic, characterised by exceptional levels of literacy. The unusually high literacy attributed to the Qumran community is reminiscent of that attributed to other social pockets whose written outpourings were preserved by the accident of history such as the workman’s village of Deir al-Medina in Egypt. The Scrolls are a collection of between 700 and 900 manuscripts, dating from the mid-third century BCE to mid-first century CE. The scrolls tell us about the activities of writing and reading in early Judaism, about religious thought, biblical interpretation, and the early Jewish literary spirit.2 The collection is associated with the archaeological site of Khirbet Qumran on the western shore of the Dead Sea due to the geographical and chronological proximity of the twelve caves in which the Scrolls were found and inhabitation of the site during the same era. Locating the provenance of the Scrolls with Qumran is not beyond dispute, it is close to scholarly consen-sus.3 The Scrolls some of the earliest manuscript witnesses to the Hebrew Bible, offering a glimpse into the life of an early Jewish movement living along the Dead Sea. These manuscripts present a useful material-textual example of the rich religious and literary variety of Judaism before the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE.