Khirbat Qumran Travel Guide

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How do you live in the middle of a remote desert without a source of fresh water...well the answer is that you conserve and collect ever drop of water that falls out of the sky, yes the RAIN....Here at Qumran there are, like many desert outposts, a series of cisterns for collection of water. The photo shows one of the aquaducts built to transfer the water to a cistern.

The second photo shows one of the kilns in the kitchen area, used both for daily bread and the ritual bread used for the Friday meal.

The last photo shows two things. In the foreground is the room where they found many desks and inkstands. The archeologists think that this is the Scriptorium (or writing room) where many of the scrolls found here may have been written. But also take a look in the background, there is lush GREEN growth...this area has small trees and shrubs that grow well in salty water. What a place to sit and contemplate, high desert mountains to one side and the enormous Dead Sea and this green swath below you on the other side....nice.

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The Jewish religious culture revolved as most religious cultures do, around rituals. One of them is the ritual clenseing (or bathing) in the Mikveh. Here in this small remote community on the shores of the Dead Sea with NO source of water, the Essenes would use their water that was gathered from rainfall into cisterns, to fill these ritual baths. Here you can see several of them.
If you would like to learn more of this ritual, take a look at:
http://www.jafi.org.il/education/lifecycle/jewishlc/mikve.html

The famous Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered here in Qumran by a Bedoun shepard in 1947 and from thre begins the adventure. Today many other scrolls haved been found and they included books of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha and works of the Essenes themselves. The Dead Sea Scrolls are on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem today in a building designed and constructed ONLY for them, it is called "The Shrine of The Book". What I have always found so fascinating is that if you know modern Hebrew you can actually READ this document over 2000 years old, or at least parts of it.

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Qumran is located on a dry plateau about a mile inland from the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank, just next to the Israeli Kibbutz of Kalia. Qumran is best known as the settlement nearest to the hiding place of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the caves of the sheer desert cliffs.
In 1947 two Bedouin shepherds accidentally came across a clay jar in a cave near Khirbet Qumran that contained seven parchment scrolls.The documents contain over 100 copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible, most of which survived only as fragments. Out of 24 books all except the Book of Ester are represented.
The community to which the Dead Sea Scrolls apparently belonged occupied Qumran around 130 BCE to 70 CE, and possibly lived also in other places in the region. The name "Dead Sea Sect" was given to it because the main knowledge of the sect derives from these manuscripts.

The Essenes were ascetics, and as such, had paid great attention to ritual bathing and purity. They lived a communal life in a settlement that was constructed to make them as self-reliant as possible. They had assembly halls, a central dining room, in which ceremonial meals were eaten, a kitchen, ritual baths, a laundry room, a watch tower, a stable and pottery workshop.

Members of the sect lived in huts and tents. The central cemetery of the sect was also located at Qumran.

One of the caves where the scrolls were found.

The caves that dot the difficult-to-reach slopes and crevices of Qumran had served the Essenes in time of need as hiding places for their library. The scrolls, hidden in jars for nearly two thousand years and preserved as a result of the area's arid climate, included books of The Old Testament, the Apocrypha and the sect's own works.

Some of these scrolls are on display at "The Shrine of the Book" in the Israel Museum.

The Qumran site was discovered in 1946 by a bedouin boy, who went to find a lost goat, but instead found a cave in which clay pots were hidden. In these pots, a treasure of manuscripts was discovered. This discovery led to the discovery of over 700 additional manuscripts in this area.

Qumran is famous for the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A young bedouin boy found the first Dead Sea scrolls in a cave in 1947. This discovery was followed by a excavation of a monastery-like site of the Essenes, where the scrolls originate from. Altogether more than 500 Hebrew, Aramaic and occasionally also Greek manuscripts have been found in eleven caves in Qumran. They date from the 1st centuries B.C. and are the oldest manuscripts of the Bible.