Name: The History of the Bible, Animated | National Geographic
Uploaded: 2025-03-07T15:00:43.000Z
Duration: 3 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Along the shores of the Dead Sea, three Bedouin shepherds were tending their flocks.

When one of their goats strayed from the herd.

One of them threw a stone to scare the animal out.

The unexpected sound sparked their curiosity.

And inside, the young shepherds uncovered clay jars that contained one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century.

The oldest biblical texts ever found, the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The scrolls were handwritten some 2,000 years ago on durable animal skin parchment.

They were mostly composed in Hebrew from right to left.

With sheets written in columns, then sewn together, creating a single scroll.

Some of them would be wrapped in linen and encapsulated in tall jars, the scroll was eventually replaced by the Codex as the format for Christian manuscripts.

They were made by folding sheets of papyrus and stitching them together.

As time passed, codices began to grow larger and more complex.

During the medieval period, books were reproduced by hand.

Monks spent their days copying texts in Latin and Greek.

That required great skill and training, to illuminate the text, they used various pigments and gold leaf.

And the pages could require the hides of hundreds of sheep or calves.

But it was the introduction of the printing press that transitioned the Bible from the Middle Ages into the early modern world.

This invention revolutionized book production.

Ultimately making the Bible available to the masses.

Today, it is the best-selling book of all time.

Inside its pages, you can find the stories of.

The birth of Jesus, his crucifixion and resurrection.

The Holy Spirit coming to the apostles and many more.

Large portions of these biblical stories are represented in 400 of the oldest manuscripts studied so far.

Although a few are complete, most are either incomplete or fragments.

Today, the search for more manuscripts continues.

What other treasures like the Dead Sea Scrolls are yet to be found?

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The History of the Bible, Animated | National Geographic

ultimately

eventually

process

period