The Shepherd, the Jar, and the Library of the Wilderness

Sometime in late 1946 or early 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd went looking for a lost goat on a hillside above the Dead Sea, west of the Jordan River, not far from Jericho. Idly tossing a stone into a dark opening in the rock, he heard something break. Curiosity pulled him down into the cave, and there, on the floor, sat large clay jars. Inside them, wrapped in linen, lay leather scrolls that had rested undisturbed for centuries.

The shepherd — later identified in different accounts as Muhammed edh-Dhib, alongside his cousin Jum'a Muhammed and Khalil Musa — had found what would become known as Cave 1 at Qumran. He pulled out a handful of scrolls, among them what scholars would come to call the Isaiah Scroll, the Habakkuk Commentary, and the Community Rule. None were destroyed in the retrieval. For a time, the Bedouins simply hung the scrolls from a tent pole while they debated what to do with such strange objects, showing them around to family and neighbors.

When they finally tried to sell them, the first dealer they approached, a man named Ibrahim 'Ijha in Bethlehem, waved them off as worthless. It would take more educated eyes to grasp what had been found. Eventually, five scrolls from Cave 1 were purchased by the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, and three more by Professor E. L. Sukenik of the Hebrew University — the men who first understood that the tent-pole curiosities were, in fact, among the oldest biblical manuscripts ever discovered.

Word spread, and between 1946 and 1956 a combination of Bedouin searchers and professional archaeologists combed the cliffs near Qumran, eventually locating eleven caves in total. Cave 4, nicknamed the Cave of the Partridge, proved the richest: excavated in September 1952, it yielded thousands of fragments belonging to hundreds of manuscripts, later distilled into some four hundred identifiable texts covering every book of the Old Testament except Esther. Cave 11, opened in 1956, gave up thirty-six well-preserved Psalms, a Hebrew Leviticus scroll in excellent condition, fragments of an Apocalypse of New Jerusalem, and an Aramaic translation of Job.

Altogether, scholars would eventually assemble roughly 15,000 fragments representing about 850 scrolls, drawn from the eleven Qumran caves. Most were written in Hebrew, some in Aramaic, a few in Greek — inked onto parchment and papyrus, with one unusual scroll engraved on copper. Dated by paleography and radiocarbon analysis to between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE, and corroborated by bronze coins spanning the reign of the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus through the First Jewish–Roman War, the scrolls capture Judaism at a hinge moment in its history.