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The Study of Man: The Cave Scrolls and the Jewish Sects
- Abstract
In the summer of 1947, some Bedouins of the Wilderness of Judah (the arid eastern slope of the hill country of Judah that descends to the Dead Sea) chanced upon a grotto near a ruin by the name of Khirbet Qumran, lying south from the northwest corner of the Dead Sea. The grotto contained forty or fifty large jars, of a cylindrical shape. Most of them were broken; and it was apparent that their contents had been in part removed by men, in part gnawed and scattered by rats. But from the scattered remains, and from the contents of the few comparatively intact jars, it was evident that all or most of the jars must have served as receptacles for leather scrolls—in at least one case, it later developed, for a papyrus scroll—wrapped in linen. The jars had lids.
The Bedouins, who had no idea that the writing was Hebrew, took a number of scrolls and fragments of scrolls to Bethlehem; eventually the bulk of them were acquired by the Assyrian Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, and the rest by the Hebrew University. Copies and collotype photographs of all but one of the Assyrian-owned documents were published by the American School of Oriental Research under the editorship of Professor Millar Burrows of Yale University; the Jewish-owned ones have, unfortunately, been published only in extracts, by the late Professor E. L. Sukenik of the Hebrew University.
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