The Great Isaiah Scroll
A copy of Isaiah made more than a century before Jesus
Between late 1946 and early 1947, Ta'amireh Bedouin shepherds working the cliffs above the Dead Sea found clay jars in a cave near Qumran. One of the scrolls inside was a complete copy of the book of Isaiah. It is now called the Great Isaiah Scroll, catalogued as 1QIsaa (Qumran, Cave 1, the first Isaiah scroll), and it is kept at the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The story of the whole Qumran find is told on Where the Old Testament Came From; this page stays with the one scroll.
How old it is
Two independent methods date it. The handwriting places it at about 150 to 100 BC. Radiocarbon tests on the scroll gave two possible calibrated ranges: 356 to 291 BC (24 percent likely) or 250 to 103 BC (76 percent likely). The round figure usually given is 125 BC. On any of these numbers the scroll was copied more than a century before Jesus was born, and it had been sitting in its jar for generations when He read from Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth.
How closely it matches
Before 1947 the oldest complete Hebrew copies of Isaiah were the Masoretic manuscripts, from about AD 930 to 1008. The Great Isaiah Scroll is roughly a thousand years older. It contains all 66 chapters in the same order as our Bibles. It also has more than 2,600 small differences from the Masoretic text, most of them in spelling and grammar, and a few that change the sense of a line. Both halves are true and both matter: the differences show that ancient copying was done by people, and the agreement shows that those people copied with great care. Across a thousand years, it is still the same book.
Isaiah 53, a century before the cross
The chapter Christians read on Good Friday is in the scroll. "But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5). The Hebrew word the King James renders "wounded" is mecholal, from a root meaning to pierce through, which is why most modern translations say "pierced." The Servant is silent before his accusers, "as a lamb to the slaughter" (53:7); "he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death" (53:9).
One reading in the scroll is worth knowing. The King James follows the Masoretic text in verse 11: "He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied" (53:11). The Great Isaiah Scroll, and the Greek Septuagint with it, read that after the travail of his soul he "shall see light." That is why some modern Bibles print "[the light of life]" in brackets. The Servant is pierced, crushed, silent, and buried, and afterwards he sees light. The scroll is one of the witnesses for that line.
The New Testament asks the question this chapter always raises. An Ethiopian official was reading it in his chariot and asked Philip, "of whom speaketh the prophet this? of himself, or of some other man?" (Acts 8:34). "Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus" (8:35). The full argument from prophecy is set out on Fulfilled Prophecy.
What it shows
That the book of Isaiah, including chapter 53, was written down and copied long before Jesus was born, so it cannot have been composed or adjusted after the crucifixion to fit it. That the Hebrew text of Isaiah was handed down with remarkable care for a thousand years. That the book was already one book by about 125 BC: the scroll shows no break at chapter 40. It does have a gap of three blank lines after chapter 33, and some scholars think two scribes wrote the two halves; that is a fact about how the copy was made, not about where the book divides.
What it does not show
It does not prove by itself that Isaiah 53 speaks of Jesus; that is a question of reading the text, not of dating the parchment. It does not settle who wrote the later chapters of Isaiah, only that they were joined to the earlier ones by this time. And the caves held more than one family of Old Testament text, and books that were never counted as Scripture, so the scrolls do not show a single fixed text everywhere.
Where scholars divide
On the date, the handwriting and radiocarbon ranges overlap but are not identical, and scholars quote different round figures. On the Servant, Jewish interpretation has long read the Servant of Isaiah 53 as the people of Israel suffering among the nations; Christians, following Philip, read him as one Man who suffers for others. On the people of Qumran, most scholars identify them with the Essenes, but that identification is debated.
Facts on the discovery, dating, and variants from the Israel Museum and the standard scholarly summaries of 1QIsaa; the radiocarbon ranges are the published calibrated results. The Isaiah 53:11 reading is attested in 1QIsaa and the Septuagint. Sources checked 2026-09-24: Carbon dating the Dead Sea Scrolls; Scribal practice in the Great Isaiah Scroll (Academia); Israel Museum, Shrine of the Book. Scripture quotations from the King James Version. This page reports what was found and what it can bear; where a claim rests on tradition or a disputed reading, it says so.