The accidental discovery: 1947 at Qumran

The story begins with a lost goat. In late 1946 or early 1947 a young Bedouin shepherd of the Ta'amireh tribe, remembered as Muhammed edh-Dhib ("the Wolf"), was following his flock along the cliffs above the Dead Sea when he threw a stone into a cave opening and heard pottery break. Inside, in tall clay jars, were leather scrolls wrapped in linen. The first seven scrolls from that cave (now called Cave 1) passed through the antiquities market: three were bought by the Hebrew University scholar Eleazar Sukenik, and four by the Syrian Orthodox monastery of St. Mark, from whom the American scholars John Trever and Millar Burrows photographed and, in 1948, publicly announced them. Between 1947 and 1956, Bedouin and archaeologists together combed the cliffs and found scrolls or fragments in eleven caves clustered around Qumran; the nearby ruins were excavated by the Dominican priest-archaeologist Roland de Vaux from 1951 to 1956. It was, by any measure, one of the great finds of the century, the largest cache of ancient Jewish manuscripts ever recovered, and the oldest. There is an old resonance here that the finders themselves noticed: the prophet Jeremiah had once been told to take deeds of purchase and "put them in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days" (Jeremiah 32:14, King James Version), and it was exactly earthen jars in the dry desert air that preserved these scrolls for two thousand years.