The Dead
Sea Scrolls
AT SOME POINT rather early in the
spring of 1947, a Bedouin boy called Muhammad the Wolf was minding some
goats near a cliff on the western shore of the Dead Sea. Climbing up after
one that had strayed, he noticed a cave that he had not seen before and he
idly threw a stone into it. There was an unfamiliar sound of breakage. The
boy was frightened and ran away. But he later came back with another boy,
and together they explored the cave.
Inside were several tall clay jars, among
fragments of other jars. When they took off the bowl-like lids, a very bad
smell arose, which came from dark oblong lumps that were Found inside all
the jars. When they got these lumps out of the cave, they saw they were
wrapped up in lengths of linen and coated with a black layer of what seemed
to be pitch or wax. They unrolled them and found long manuscripts, inscribed
in parallel columns on thin sheets that had been sewn together. Though these
manuscripts had faded and crumbled in places. they were in general
remarkably clear. The characters, they saw, were not Arabic. They wondered
at the scrolls and kept them, carrying them along when they moved.
Edmund Wilson 'The Scrolls
from the Dead Sea' W. H. Allen 1955
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