Where were the Dead Sea Scrolls found?

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In caves in the cliffs above the north-western shore of the Dead Sea, around the ruin of Khirbet Qumran, in today's West Bank: about 15 km south of Old Testament Jericho, 22 km east of Jerusalem in a straight line and 33 km north of En-gedi. Bedouin of the Ta'amireh found the first seven scrolls in 1946–47 in what is now called Cave 1; by 1956 eleven caves had yielded the remains of nearly a thousand manuscripts in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, written between about 250 BC and AD 68, among them copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible but Esther, the complete Great Isaiah Scroll and the writings of the community itself. The map's point is the “city of Salt” of Joshua, which some identify with Qumran. The scrolls are a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew Bibles known before them, and they show how the text was read in the time of Jesus. The community's own rule applies to itself Isaiah's call, “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God”, as a command to go out into the desert; a commentary on Habakkuk applies “the just shall live by his faith” to those who keep the Law and are faithful to its own Teacher. Joshua lists among the towns of Judah “in the wilderness” Beth-arabah, Middin, Secacah, “Nibshan, and the city of Salt, and En-gedi; six cities with their villages”, and Secacah, named in the Copper Scroll, is sought in the Buqeia valley above Qumran or at Qumran itself. Roland de Vaux excavated Khirbet Qumran in 1951–1956: a settlement he dated from the late second century BC to AD 68 (Jodi Magness starts it in the first century BC), with cisterns, a long room he called a scriptorium, pottery like that of the caves and a cemetery of more than a thousand graves. He and most scholars since take it for the home of the Essenes, whom Pliny places on the west shore above En-gedi, and whom Josephus describes; by the usual dating, from coins of the revolt, the Romans destroyed it in 68. Others disagree: Norman Golb argued that the scrolls were libraries brought from Jerusalem and hidden before the siege, and Yizhar Hirschfeld that the ruin was a manor. Most scrolls are kept in the Shrine of the Book of the Israel Museum and by the Israel Antiquities Authority; the Copper Scroll is in the Jordan Museum in Amman.