From where did keepers of the Dead Sea Scrolls get prophecies other than 16 prophetic books? The Dead Sea Scrolls contain prophetic texts identified as 2Q23, 6Q10, 6Q12 and 6Q13. Please respond to this because my Muslim friend asked me this and I’m confused.

This Muslim person is not your friend, at least not religiously.  He is trying to undermine your faith in the Scripture, and is being disingenuous.  Muslims give great attention to trying to undermine biblical prophets for the simple reason that they do not have such prophets, and fulfilled predictive prophecy is one of the cornerstones of why we can be confident that the Bible is the Word of God.  Prophecies such as Isaiah 53, Micah 5:2, Daniel 9:24-25 are wonderful and convincing proof that Jesus is indeed the Messiah and the Son of God, so Muslims will go to great lengths to undermine this evidence.  Part of these efforts is to throw out confusing questions as an attempt to gaslight you.

Such is the case here.  Why is it our job as Christians to explain where the Qumran community got its supposed prophecies?  Presumably, they wrote them themselves.  Scholars will tell us that most likely the Qumran community was occupied by the group known as Essenes. The Essene community had its own theories about the Messiah, and their own supposedly prophetic writings.  They had a mysterious Messiah-like figure known as the Teacher of Righteousness, and their own writings, such as the War Scroll.  The Essenes were mentioned by Pliny the Younger, Philo and Josephus.  We can feel free to let the scholars of religion explain the interesting beliefs of the Essenes, as well as their prophetic writings.  Where did they come from?  They came from the Essenes themselves.  Christians do not need to explain where false prophecies from Jewish sects, which are not inspired and are not part of the canon of Scripture came from.

John Oakes