Qumran. A religious community on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea dating from ca. 150 B.C. to A.D. 70.  The inhabitants were most likely a conservative, sectarian religious community that had rejected the status quo. The presence of a scriptorum at the site is consistent with a community who labored to produce copies of the Hebrew Scriptures as part of their worship. A significant number of copies and fragments of the Hebrew Scriptures and other Hebrew documents have been recovered from nearby caves. These documents are known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The great majority of these Biblical scrolls are so similar to the Masoretic texts preserved by the Masorete scribes in the seventh to tenth centuries A.D. that the Masoretes' accuracy in  copying the Scriptures has been significantly authenticated. The Masoretic Text is the text of the Hebrew Bible today.  See Dead Sea Scrolls.