The Qumran literature consists of a number of manuscripts of books of biblical and para-biblical literature, some of which were already known and some hitherto unknown. Many of the manuscripts are very fragmentary; they are written for the most part in Hebrew, but there are some in Aramaic and a few small fragments in Greek (see list p. 183). They were found in caves at a desolate spot on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea known as Qumran, close to the ruins of a set of buildings. It is impossible to understand the Qumran literature except against the background of the appropriate period in the history of Israel. After the scrolls were first discovered this was difficult to determine, until de Vaux and Harding undertook a thorough archaeological investigation of the ruins in 1952-6, and at the neighbouring Ain Feshka in 1958. These investigations made clear that the period in question was the end of the Hasmonaean and the beginning of the Roman period (roughly 160 bc to ad 68).

De Vaux has given a lucid account of his, findings in his Schweich Lectures for 1959, published in French in 1961; they were ‘reissued with revisions in an English translation in 1973’, the revisions leaving the main findings unaltered. They have well stood the test of examination by scholars, and the vast majority accept de Vaux's conclusions as correct and build upon them, a process to be followed here.