Scrolls For Sale

Scrolls For Sale

Some important stories don’t make the news.

ON November 29, 1947, headlines around the world proclaimed that the United Nations had voted to establish two separate states in Palestine, one Jewish and one Arab. The news brought joy to those longing for a national homeland for the Jews, and it brought bitter resentment to the Arabs.

However, another event happened that same day in Palestine that was to influence biblical studies forever. The story begins about a year earlier when three Bedouin teenagers, Muhammed Ahmed el-Hamed, Jum’a Muhammed Khalib, and Khalil Musa, made a momentous discovery while exploring a cave near the Dead Sea. They found three scrolls in an ancient jar.

In April 1947 an uncle of one of the boys took the scrolls to Bethlehem, the market town for the Bedouins, and showed them to a Muslim sheikh. The sheikh, seeing that they were not written in Arabic, assumed the language to be Syriac. He sent them to a Bethlehem shoemaker and part-time antiquities dealer known as “Kando.”

Meanwhile, one of the boys, Khalil Musa, and some other Bedouins brought George Isaiah, a Syrian Orthodox merchant from Jerusalem, to see the cave. They found four more scrolls. Isaiah told the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan in Jerusalem about the scrolls, and he offered to buy them.

In July, Jum’a, Musa, and Isaiah brought the four scrolls they had found to the monastery of the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan but were mistakenly turned away. They then sold the four scrolls to the Bethlehem merchant Kando, who in turn sold them for $$9720 to the Metropolitan. Three additional scrolls were sold to another antiquities dealer for $$2835.

The Metropolitan sought out scholarly opinion to identify the scrolls that he had purchased. One of the experts he consulted was Eleazar Sukenik, a noted professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

At that time the British mandate was coming to an end, and the United Nations could not decide how to deal with the Jews and Arabs, making the situation in Palestine volatile. Though it was dangerous for a Jew to travel in an Arab area, when Sukenik learned that an antiquities dealer was selling ancient scrolls in the Arab city of Bethlehem, he was determined to go. On November 29, 1947, the very day that the United Nations voted to create a Jewish state, Sukenik made a secret trip to Bethlehem and purchased two of the scrolls. A month later he purchased a third.

In 1954 the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan tried to sell his four scrolls in the United States. He placed an ad in the Wall Street Journal reading, “The Four Dead Sea Scrolls—Biblical Manuscripts Dating Back at Least to 200 B.C. Are for Sale.”

Sukenik’s son, Yigael Yadin, an Israeli general and a leading archaeologist, was in the United States when the ad appeared. Through intermediaries Yadin was able to purchase the four scrolls for $250,000. Those four together with the three purchased by his father now reside in an exhibit in the Israel Museum called The Shrine of the Book.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from the period 250 B.C. to A.D. 68, are the single most important archaeological discovery of all time. They apparently were part of the library of a Jewish sect, the Essenes, that lived at nearby Qumran. When the invading Roman armies reached southern Judea in A.D. 68, the Essenes hid their library in caves.

The scrolls range in length from the complete book of Isaiah to thousands of small fragments. At least one fragment from every Old Testament book except Esther has been found. Evidence shows that originally about three hundred books were hidden, a third of them portions of the Old Testament.

The greatest value of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they demonstrate the accuracy of our current text of the Hebrew Old Testament, showing it to be virtually the same as that in 250 B.C.

Reflection

Isn’t it reassuring to have evidence of how carefully God has superintended the transmission of the text of the Bible down through the centuries? What does it mean to you that our text of the Old Testament is nearly identical to what it was 2,250 years ago?

Do not add to or subtract from these commands I am giving you from the Lord your God.

Deuteronomy 4:2