The Dead Sea Scrolls are found

In the winter of 1946 to 1947 a Bedouin shepherd, Muhammad edh-Dhib, found clay jars containing ancient scrolls in a cave near Qumran, on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea. Eventually, between 1947 and 1956, fragments from about 900 manuscripts were found in eleven caves, dating from the third century BC to the first century AD. They include the oldest known copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible, a thousand years older than any other, and sectarian texts of a Jewish community. They showed that the biblical text had been transmitted with great accuracy.

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