The object
The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ) is a long parchment scroll containing the entire book of Isaiah in Hebrew, written in columns on sheets sewn together. It is the most complete biblical scroll from Qumran Cave 1, where it was found in 1947.
Date
The manuscript is dated on palaeographic and radiocarbon grounds to the second century BC. That is the date of this copy; the book of Isaiah itself is older.
What it establishes
Isaiah existed as a book, in substantially the form known from later tradition, centuries before Christianity. The scroll also shows textual variation: it differs from the Masoretic text in many details, which matters for any argument that depends on the exact wording of a quoted verse.
Open questions
The scroll does not tell us whether the Qumran community, or anyone else, read Isaiah as a prediction of Jesus. Whether these passages (7:14; 53; 61) were written about him is a question of interpretation that the scroll cannot settle. What it does settle is the pre-Christian history of the text: the words Christians later read as fulfilled were already there.
The wider find
The scroll is one of about 900 manuscripts from eleven caves near Qumran, recovered between 1947 and 1956 and published progressively.
Where it is now
The scroll is displayed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The Israel Museum and the Israel Antiquities Authority publish high-resolution images.
