Prophecies of Daniel.

[EGross]

Remember, Qumran had a geneiza, just like the Cairo one. A Geneiza is a storage recepticle for items that have "God" of some form written upon them. For example, if you want to learn to be a scribe, you begin by practicing on verses of psalms. Some are pretty bad, or mis-spelled, or wrong, or perhaps correct but could be better, so they get tossed into a geneiza. If a teacherr had a Torah scroll that he had written for personal use, and made his own commentaries (which was, according to the Talmud, a common practice) then these scrolls would be buried upon the death of the writer). Later, this practice was dissuaded for obvious reasons, lest people think these were authentic ones). One example found a few years ago is where God says to Abraham "My son, My only one Whom I love" rather than the normal "your son, your only one, whom you love". This fragment was found in another geneiza.

I got to see the DSS collection more than once, and as I expected, the Psalms normally had the worst script, then Writings had it better, Prophets even better, and eventually sections of Torah, which were the best. From that, it has been suggested that these were scribal school discards, which I tend to agree with. I did find it facinating that in some cases, rather than normal Hebrew, Paleo-Hebrew was used when writing the name of God, while the rest of the text was Hebrew. Some things can be inferred about that, but not confirmed.

Finally, the Arabs who found the scrolls discovered that people paid by the number of pieces found, so they shredded them and sold them in smaller pieces. The final grouping was then taped together with scotch tape, and now, they have people hired to remove the decaying scotch tape one micron at a time, since it was ruining the leather.