The History of Second Temple Judaism

A lot of Jews in our period certainly seem to have been very text-based societies. There was nothing really approaching a canonical Jewish body of texts across the board until the first century CE at the earliest. The Dead Sea Scrolls, another extraordinary cache of documents found in a group of caves called Comran in Palestine, supply our earliest scriptural texts of any length. This is our earliest Torah, except for a few little fragments that appear on inscribed bits of silver.