The Dead Sea Scrolls are documents of great historical and scholarly value, found in 1947 and later in caves above the North West Dead Sea. Archaeologists have shown that the scrolls stored in jars in the first cave at QUMRAN were written or copied between the 1st century B.C. and the first half of the 1st century A.D. Chief among the scrolls are two copies of the Book of Isaiah, almost 1,000 years older than any Hebrew biblical manuscript previously known. Another important scroll was the so-called Manual of Discipline for an ascetic community, which has been identified with both the ruins at nearby QUMRAN and the Essenes, a Jewish religious sect living an ascetic communal agricult