| Dead Sea Scrolls | |
| —pl n | |
| a collection of manuscripts in Hebrew and Aramaic discovered in caves near the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956. They are widely held to have been written between about 100 | |
| a fool or simpleton; ninny. |
| a gadget; dingus; thingumbob. |
A large collection of written scrolls, containing nearly all of the Old Testament, found in a cave near the Dead Sea in the late 1940s. The scrolls were part of a library collected by the Essenes, a religious community of Jews that flourished for a few centuries around the time of Jesus. The scrolls are highly valued for the information they give about the Bible and about Judaism in the period.