60 free Dead Sea Scrolls trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Between 1946 and 1956, Bedouin shepherds and archaeologists pulled roughly 15,000 fragments of some 981 manuscripts from eleven caves above the north-west shore of the Dead Sea. They turned out to be the oldest surviving copies of most books of the Hebrew Bible, a thousand years older than anything known before, alongside the rulebooks, hymns and war plans of a Jewish sect that vanished when the Romans came in 68 CE. This quiz covers what was found (the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Copper Scroll's list of buried treasure, the Temple Scroll, the War of the Sons of Light), where it was found, and who wrote it. It also follows the scrolls' strange modern journey: the cobbler-dealer known as Kando, the Syrian archbishop who advertised four scrolls for sale in the Wall Street Journal, the general-archaeologist who bought them for Israel, the decades of restricted access that ended in 1991, the Google digitisation, and the sixteen fragments a Washington museum discovered were fakes. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the scrolls, the individual manuscripts and the people involved, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Dead Sea, ancient Israel and Bible quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Qumran caves where the scrolls were found lie in which modern territory?
The West Bank
The caves sit near Ein Feshkha on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea, an area under Jordanian control when most finds were made.
Q 02The scrolls were discovered over a ten-year period beginning in which year?
1946
The first finds came between November 1946 and February 1947; the last Qumran cave was found in 1956.
Q 03Who made the initial discovery of the scrolls?
Bedouin shepherds
Muhammed edh-Dhib was the first to actually fall into what is now called Cave 1 and carried a handful of scrolls back to camp.
Q 04Roughly how many different manuscripts have researchers assembled from the Qumran caves?
About 981
Most survive only as scraps; fewer than a dozen scrolls are nearly intact.
Q 05The scrolls come from how many caves in the immediate vicinity of Qumran?
11
A twelfth cave announced in 2017 held only a blank parchment and evidence of looting in the 1950s.
Q 06The scrolls date from roughly which period?
3rd century BCE to 1st century CE
Coins found at the sites run from John Hyrcanus (135-104 BCE) to the First Jewish-Roman War, matching the radiocarbon dates.
Q 07Most of the scrolls are written in which language?
Hebrew
Some are in Aramaic, including regional dialects such as Nabataean, and a few are in Greek.
Q 08What share of the identified texts are copies of the canonical Jewish scriptures?
Two-fifths
Roughly 30% are non-canonical Second Temple works like Enoch and Jubilees, and 30% are the sect's own writings.
Q 09Which biblical book has never been found among the scrolls?
Esther
Scholars suspect the Qumran community disliked the book's marriage to a Persian king or its Purim festival, which their calendar lacked.
Q 10Where are almost all of the scrolls and fragments held today?
The Shrine of the Book, Jerusalem
The wing of the Israel Museum was built in 1965; the Copper Scroll and some fragments are held elsewhere.
Q 11The Shrine of the Book is built as a white dome facing what?
A black basalt wall
One reading is that the white and black stand for the Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness of the War Scroll.
Q 12The Bedouins first offered the scrolls to a dealer in Bethlehem, who returned them saying what?
They were worthless
He had been warned they might have been stolen from a synagogue and wanted nothing to do with them.
Q 13The antiquities dealer known as 'Kando', who handled the first scrolls, worked by day as what?
A cobbler
Khalil Eskander Shahin later sold the Great Isaiah Scroll to a Syrian Orthodox archbishop who wanted it authenticated.
Q 21The Copper Scroll differs from all the others in that it is what?
A list of buried treasure, not a literary text
It names 64 hiding places for gold and silver, one of them supposedly holding 900 talents, about 30 tons, of silver.
Q 22Because it could not be unrolled, the Copper Scroll was sent to which English city to be cut into strips?
Manchester
The corroded metal was sawn into 23 strips in 1955-56 at the university's College of Technology, on John Allegro's advice.
Q 23The Copper Scroll has been on display since 2013 in which city?
Amman
Q 14Three of the original scrolls sold to a dealer for seven Jordanian pounds, roughly how much in US dollars then?
About $28
Four of the same scrolls later fetched $250,000 in New York, about $3 million in today's money.
Q 15In 1954 four of the scrolls were advertised for sale in which newspaper?
The Wall Street Journal
The 1 June advertisement offered 'biblical manuscripts dating back to at least 200 BC' as an ideal gift for an institution.
Q 16The four advertised scrolls were bought for Israel at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for how much?
$250,000
That is about $3 million today; the seven Cave 1 scrolls were finally reunited in Jerusalem.
Q 17Which soldier-archaeologist and later IDF Chief of Staff bought the four scrolls with Benjamin Mazar?
Yigael Yadin
He was the son of the professor who had bought the other three Cave 1 scrolls in 1947.
Q 18The Syrian Orthodox archbishop who took the Great Isaiah Scroll to America was known as what?
Mar Samuel
Athanasius Yeshue Samuel took the scroll to the United States in 1949 hoping to sell it and three others.
Q 19The Great Isaiah Scroll is notable as the only Qumran scroll that is what?
Preserved almost in its entirety
Dating from about 125 BCE, it is roughly a thousand years older than the previous oldest known Hebrew manuscripts.
Q 20Roughly how long is the Great Isaiah Scroll?
About 7.3 m (24 ft)
It runs across 17 sheets of parchment in 54 columns of text.
It was found in Cave 3 in 1952 while the area was under Jordanian control, and it stayed in Jordanian hands after 1967.
Q 24Which is by far the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls?
The Temple Scroll
More than half of it concerns the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and one scholar called it 'the Torah according to the Essenes'.
Q 25The War Scroll describes an apocalyptic battle in which the forces of Light fight which enemy?
The Sons of Darkness
The first phase is a war against the Kittim, usually read as the Romans, followed by the conquest of the 'nations of vanity'.
Q 26The Community Rule was originally given what name by Millar Burrows?
The Manual of Discipline
It is catalogued as 1QS, for Cave 1, Qumran, Serekh, the Hebrew word for 'rule'.
Q 27The Habakkuk Commentary describes the community's leader by what title?
Teacher of Righteousness
His enemy is the 'Wicked Priest'; neither is ever named, which has kept scholars guessing for decades.
Q 28The Genesis Apocryphon, one of the original seven scrolls, is written in which language?
Aramaic
It retells stories of Lamech, Noah and Abraham on four sheets of leather, missing both its beginning and its end.
Q 29The Damascus Document was already known before Qumran from fragments found in 1897 where?
A synagogue storeroom in Cairo
Solomon Schechter pulled the medieval copies from a storeroom of Cairo's Ben Ezra Synagogue half a century before the caves were found.
Q 30The dominant theory holds that the scrolls were produced by which Jewish sect?
The Essenes
The idea rests on parallels between the Community Rule and Josephus's description of the sect, plus Pliny's placement of them near the Dead Sea.