The Dead Sea Scrolls Are Discovered

The Israel Antiquities Authority tells the discovery “as the story goes”. A shepherd of the Ta’amireh Bedouin, looking for a stray animal among the cliffs near Qumran, threw a stone into a cave and heard pottery break. Inside were large clay jars, and in a few of them old scrolls, some wrapped in linen. The Authority’s caption to a photograph of two goatherds says that they “claimed” to have found the first scrolls (Dead Sea Scrolls Leon Levy Digital Library, Discovery and Publication).

The Bedouin took their finds to a dealer in Bethlehem, who sent them back for more. Seven scrolls came out of the cave. Four were sold on to Archbishop Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, head of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St Mark in Jerusalem. The other three went to a second dealer, and there Eleazar Sukenik, professor at the Hebrew University, saw them, having first been shown a fragment through the wire at the edge of a British military zone in Jerusalem. He wrote in his diary that his hands shook as he unwrapped one of them, and that he felt he was looking at a Hebrew scroll which had not been read for more than two thousand years (Dead Sea Scrolls Leon Levy Digital Library, Discovery and Publication).

In 1948 John C. Trever, of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, photographed three of the archbishop’s scrolls: a complete book of Isaiah, the Community Rule and a commentary on Habakkuk. Sukenik acquired his three and published selections from them: the War Scroll, the Thanksgiving Scroll and a second copy of Isaiah. Samuel took his four to the United States, and on 1 June 1954 offered them for sale in the Wall Street Journal as biblical manuscripts “dating back to at least 200 BC”. Sukenik’s son Yigael Yadin bought them through an American intermediary for the State of Israel, and since 1965 the seven have been kept together in the Shrine of the Book (Dead Sea Scrolls Leon Levy Digital Library, Discovery and Publication).

The first cave was excavated by archaeologists in 1949. By 1956 written remains had come from eleven caves, five found by Bedouin and six by archaeologists (Dead Sea Scrolls Leon Levy Digital Library, Discovery Sites). They are the remains of more than 900 manuscripts, most of them in fragments (Dead Sea Scrolls Leon Levy Digital Library, Discovery and Publication).

The scrolls were copied between the third century BC and the first century AD. About 230 of them are books now in the Hebrew Bible, and the Authority describes them as more than a thousand years older than the biblical manuscripts known before, and in many cases close to the traditional Hebrew text (Dead Sea Scrolls Leon Levy Digital Library, Introduction). The others include the writings of the community described in the Community of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Isaiah scroll that Trever photographed is described in the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ).