CHAPTER ONE

THE DISCOVERY AND PURCHASE OF THE SCROLLS

THE dust had hardly settled over the battlefields of the world when newspapers began to carry reports of a sensational new discovery in the field of biblical archaeology. It was announced that, in the summer of 1947, a cave had been found near the Dead Sea which had produced manuscripts of the book of Isaiah older by something like a thousand years than any previously known Hebrew copy of the Old Testament. Later examination was to show that of the scrolls found in this cave, the biblical manuscripts were probably the least important of what appeared to be the remains of a Jewish sectarian library dating from shortly after the time of Jesus Christ. More discoveries in this region followed in the ensuing years, and before long the world was in possession of the remains of hundreds of scrolls covering a period which had hitherto been one of the most sparsely documented, yet important, periods in Man’s history. Questions which had been hammering at the door of scholarship since the beginning of critical research into Christian origins could now be answered. In this book I have attempted to trace the general outline of results so far achieved and where further research may be expected to lead as this exciting new material becomes generally available. But first let us see how the discovery was made, and to do so we must travel to the wilderness of Judaea, to a point amongst the mountains bordering the Dead Sea, a few miles south of Jericho.

Muhammad Adh-Dhib had lost a goat. The lad was a member of the Ta‘amireh tribe of semi-Bedouin who roam the wilderness between Bethlehem and the Dead Sea (see map on p. 10), and he had been out all this summer’s day tending the animals entrusted to his care. Now one of them had wandered, skipping into the craggy rocks above.