Dead Sea Scroll Writers Wore White Linen Clothes

New data points on the kind of clothing favored by the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls (white linen, rather than the more common wool and colorful clothes of the era) support the already leading theory that the more recent of the scrolls in the group were written by members of the ancient Jewish religious group called the Essenes. The absence of the equipment necessary to make linen at the site (which was almost exclusively women's work at the time) also suggests that the Dead Sea Scrolls may have been stored at a male dominated religious center, rather than a place that had a whole community of complete families.