The biblical scrolls: every book but Esther

About a quarter of the manuscripts are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, and among them scholars have identified fragments of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther (which happens also to be one of only two books that never name God, the other being the Song of Songs). That count follows the Hebrew canon, in which Ezra and Nehemiah are a single book: Ezra is represented at Qumran and Nehemiah is not, so a list counting them separately would name two absences rather than one. Some books were clearly treasured above others: the most-copied at Qumran were the Psalms, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah, the same books the New Testament quotes most. What the biblical scrolls revealed (the fact, and the argument it fuels). Two things stand out. First, as with the Great Isaiah Scroll, the biblical text is largely stable a thousand years earlier than we could previously see, the strong continuity is real. Second, and more surprising, the scrolls show that in this era the wording was not yet perfectly uniform: alongside copies that match the later Masoretic text almost exactly, there are copies whose wording agrees instead with the ancient Greek Septuagint, or with the Samaritan version of the first five books, or that go their own way. Most scholars read this as evidence that the Hebrew text was standardized gradually, settling into the single fixed form of the Masoretic tradition around the end of the first century AD, a process the scrolls let us watch in progress. One vivid example of what the older witnesses can contribute: in Psalm 22:16 the medieval Hebrew reads "like a lion" at my hands and feet, while the ancient versions and a Dead Sea fragment support the reading "they pierced my hands and feet" long familiar from Christian Bibles, a case where a scroll bears on a much-discussed verse (Psalm 22:16). None of this unsettles the message of the books; what it does is show, honestly, that "the same text" was a river with a few living channels before it became one settled stream.