MTB-03 The Dead Sea Scrolls

In early 1947, less than 30 miles east of Jerusalem, a young Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed ed-Dib was trying to retrieve a goat that had wandered away from his flock. Up in the craggy, limestone hills on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea near Qumran, he began throwing rocks into caves to determine which one the animal might have wandered into. From the mouth of what is now known as Qumran Cave 1, Muhammed heard what sounded like breaking pottery. Too frightened to enter alone, he returned the next day with companions to investigate. When they entered the cave, they saw tall, cylindrical clay pots, which contained rolls wrapped in linen. Today, these and other artifacts found in the area are known as “The Dead Sea Scrolls.”

We’ll examine the Dead Sea Scrolls by looking at four related topics, starting with the scrolls themselves. What are the Dead Sea Scrolls, and how did they survive for almost two thousand years before being discovered?

The shepherds who first discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls had no idea of their value. They took them to a leatherworker and antiquities dealer called Kando who bought them for a small sum. When he noticed lettering on the scrolls, he sold them to Archbishop Samuel of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem. At first, the discovery went largely unnoticed. But in the next year, Gerald Lankester Harding, Chief Inspector of Antiquities in the British Mandate of Palestine, and Father Roland de Vaux, Head of the École Biblique, began excavating the caves. This led to the discovery of hundreds of documents. Some were nearly complete scrolls. Many others were just fragments of documents. And some fragments were so small that it was impossible to identify them with a specific document.

For almost 1900 years, the scrolls at Qumran had remained undisturbed. But why were they there in the first place? Well, although no one knows for sure, the available evidence seems to suggest that during the war against the Jewish people in Judea and Galilee, between A.D. 66 and 73, either the Romans destroyed the community that kept the scrolls, or the community abandoned their location. But at some point before disappearing, they put the scrolls into clay jars and stored them in caves, leaving them to be found almost 2000 years later.