Athanasius Yeshue Samuel
Head of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St Mark in Jerusalem, who bought four of the first seven Dead Sea Scrolls, took them to the United States and sold them in 1954. John C. Trever photographed three of them in 1948.
Samuel was head of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St Mark in Jerusalem when a Bethlehem dealer sold him four of the scrolls brought in by the Bedouin. In 1948 John C. Trever of the American Schools of Oriental Research photographed three of them; the fourth could not yet be opened. Samuel took the scrolls to the United States, where he kept them at a Syrian church in New Jersey, and in June 1954 advertised them in the Wall Street Journal. They were bought for the State of Israel by Yigael Yadin, son of Eleazar Sukenik (Dead Sea Scrolls Leon Levy Digital Library, Discovery and Publication). See the Dead Sea Scrolls Are Discovered.
In the timeline
- 1947, estimated dateThe Dead Sea Scrolls Are Discovered
Bedouin bring seven ancient scrolls from a cave near Qumran to dealers in Bethlehem. A Syrian Orthodox archbishop and a Hebrew University professor buy them, and scholars find Hebrew manuscripts about a thousand years older than any biblical text then known.