These discoveries between 1947 and 1956 and in 1979 have entirely altered our perception of the biblical text. Before Qumran, the earliest known complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, came from 1008 CE. The highly authoritative but incomplete Aleppo Codex was copied in the tenth century. Earlier biblical manuscripts were discarded by the Jews as they lacked the work of the early medieval biblical experts, the Masoretes or guardians of tradition, who in order to fix the meaning of the scriptures, provided the original consonantal text with vowel signs. Consonants suffice to read and understand Hebrew and even modern Hebrew texts are devoid of vowels. 

Codices containing the whole ancient Greek translation of the Bible, known as the Septuagint, are considerably older than the Hebrew Leningrad Codex from the 11th century: the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus go back to the fourth century CE. In fact, most Qumran biblical remains precede by more than a millennium the oldest complete Hebrew Bible previously known. 

During the Babylonian captivity (586-539 BCE) Hebrew largely ceased to be the vernacular spoken by the exiled Jews and was soon replaced by Aramaic, the international language of the Persian empire. Even some parts of the Old Testament (sections of Ezra and Daniel) exist only in Aramaic. If the interpretation of the Law of Moses by the Levites, members of the priestly tribe, at the great ceremony presided over by Ezra signifies translation, the Aramaic rendering of the Bible, called Targum, goes back as far as the mid-fifth century BCE. The earliest Targum texts come from Qumran. Two small Aramaic fragments from Leviticus and Job have been found in Cave 4. The Polish Scrolls scholar, J.T. Milik, dates the former to the late second century BCE and the latter to the middle of the first century CE. Cave 11 has yielded a somewhat longer fragmentary Targum, of Job, which originates from the middle of the first century CE. All the Qumran Targums display some variations compared to the original Hebrew. One renders "the Holy" as "the House of Holiness", as do also the later Targums. The translation is not always literal. As none of the corresponding Hebrew extracts has survived at Qumran, it is impossible to establish whether the differences are due to the translator or to variant readings in the original text.

Jewish tradition places the Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch by Onkelos to the late first or early second century CE and the Targum of the Prophets by Jonathan to the first century CE. Both Onkelos and Jonathan are fairly literal, except in the poetic passages. The present form of the Palestinian Targums of the Pentateuch (Codex Neofiti, Fragmentary Targum and Pseudo-Jonathan), filled with exegetical supplements, are somewhat later. Pseudo-Jonathan was revised up to the seventh century CE, but they were all redacted between the second to the fourth century CE and have preserved much earlier tradition. Onkelos is sometimes associated with Aquila, the second century CE literal translator of the Greek Bible.