What are the Dead Sea Scrolls, and why are they so important?

The answer

In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd searching for a stray goat near Qumran discovered clay jars containing ancient scrolls in caves by the Dead Sea. The collection of roughly 900 manuscripts, dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, includes the oldest known copies of Hebrew Bible texts and reveals the diversity of Jewish religious thought before and during the time of Jesus. They pushed back our earliest biblical manuscripts by over a thousand years.