Essenes

Qumran caves

The Essenes were a Jewish sect active from roughly 150 BCE to 70 CE, known for strict communal life and intense devotion to scripture.

Living mainly at Qumran, near the Dead Sea, they copied and preserved hundreds of manuscripts. Around 900 fragments and about 200 complete or partial scrolls have been found in 11 nearby caves.

To protect their library during the turmoil of the First Jewish-Roman War, they stored the texts in clay jars, which kept them intact for nearly 2,000 years.

These manuscripts, now called the Dead Sea Scrolls, include some of the oldest known versions of biblical books.