Wikipedia's first sentence called it “collective name of fragments containing parts of the books of samuel which were found among the dead sea scroll”. Today it says “collection of four manuscript fragments containing parts of the book of samuel which were found among the dead”.
Measured, not asserted. Every count, date and revision on this page was taken from Wikipedia's own history and checked against the live article. The words quoted are theirs.
Machine-checked against the full current article on 2026-08-03.
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The opening as it read in 2020
The Samuel scroll was a collective name of fragments containing parts of the Books of Samuel which were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls , discovered the first time in 1947, by a Bedouin shepherd who stumbled across them in what was termed "The greatest archaeological find of the twentieth century" by William Foxwell Albright . Among these scrolls were over 930 biblical manuscripts - the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible , over 1000 years older than the Masoretic text from which the Old Testament was then translated from. Among these manuscripts, four contain parts of what is commonly referred to as " The First and Second Books of Samuel ".1
This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 952439869.
The opening as it stood on October 6, 2023 3 passages from the previous snapshot no longer appear
Fragments containing parts of the Books of Samuel The Samuel scroll is a collection of four manuscript fragments containing parts of the Book of Samuel which were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls .
Red text was written in or rewritten since the previous snapshot. Their copy is revision 1174494006. This is our newest snapshot; the live article may have moved again since.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “collective name of fragments containing parts of the books of samuel which were found among the dead sea scroll”. Today it says “collection of four manuscript fragments containing parts of the book of samuel which were found among the dead”. Read the current article and compare.
2020
Oct '23
2025
Counts in the opening at each snapshot. Green: the word gained ground. Red: it was cut. Grey: no change.
What Wikipedia says this is
Every article opens by defining its subject. This one was redefined since 2020, and today's defining sentence is their current revision.
Then
collective name of fragments containing parts of the books of samuel which were found among the dead sea scroll
Now
collection of four manuscript fragments containing parts of the book of samuel which were found among the dead
Struck red text is no longer in the article; dotted amber text was rewritten. Every revision id links to Wikipedia's copy; the text shown is our own saved copy. Data: /data. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA; quoted for the record; not affiliated with Wikipedia.
