You know the Dead Sea Scrolls. Bet you don’t know they once went begging for a buyer.
An archbishop hauled four of them around the United States for five years. Nobody bought them... so he took out a classified ad.
Somebody answered eventually. The buyer hid his name... and he turned out to be somebody’s son.
One of those four rolls was a thousand years older than any Hebrew Bible on Earth. So after a thousand years of hand-copying... had the words changed?
Two thousand years is a long time to be lost. As it turns out, it’s also long enough to get found.
The answer goes through a Bethlehem shoe shop and a barbed-wire fence... and wait till you get to the treasure map.
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A stone broke pottery, and history changed
Three Bedouin cousins were grazing goats in the cliffs near Qumran in the winter of 1946-47.
A goat wandered off. So the story goes, one of them chucked a stone into a hole in the rock and heard pottery shatter.
They figured…gold coins maybe. Treasure!
The youngest squeezed into the cave alone at dawn two days later. Tall clay jars stood along the wall, over two feet high, some with bowl-shaped lids still on.
Most were empty. One held three rolls of old leather, two of them wrapped in linen.
Gold? Negatory.
His cousins smacked him around a bit to be sure he wasn’t holding out on them. Then they carried the three old rolls back to camp.
Four more scrolls came out of the same cave over the next few weeks. Seven in all... including the Great Isaiah Scroll, a complete copy of the Bible’s Book of Isaiah. It was written around 125 BC on 17 sheets of sheepskin stitched end to end.
Next stop, a tiny shoe shop in Bethlehem
What do you do with rolls of old leather covered in writing no one can read?
Why, take ’em to a local leather expert. Of course.
In the spring of 1947, the shepherds took the scrolls to Bethlehem.
Wound up at the shop of Khalil Iskander Shahin. Everybody called him Kando. He fixed shoes for a living and sold antiquities on the side.
Kando couldn’t make out what the scrolls said, either. He was a Syrian Orthodox Christian, though, so he went to the top dog in his own church... Mar Samuel, the archbishop at St. Mark’s Monastery in Jerusalem.
Mar Samuel bought four. The price? About $97, in July 1947.
The other three went through a second Bethlehem dealer toward a professor named Eleazar Sukenik.
A professor read scripture through barbed wire
Jerusalem in late November 1947 was a subpar place to go shopping. British troops had cut the city into zones with barbed wire, and you needed a pass to cross.
Sukenik, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University, got a phone call from an Armenian dealer he trusted. You gotta see this, he said.
They met at the gate to Military Zone B with the fence between them. The dealer held up a scrap of leather.
Sukenik squinted through the wire... and knew the letters.
He had seen the same handwriting before, on first-century bone boxes dug up around Jerusalem. Always scratched into stone... never in ink on leather.
If the scrap was real, it was 2,000 years old. And he was reading it through a fence.
The rest was in Bethlehem. His wife said, don’t go, and his son wasn’t crazy about the idea either.
He went anyway.
November 29, on a public bus, up to a dealer’s attic... then home again with two leather scrolls under his arm, wrapped like an ordinary parcel.
At home, he unrolled one with trembling fingers. His diary says he felt “privileged by destiny to gaze upon a Hebrew Scroll which had not been read for more than 2,000 years.”
The week before Christmas, he bought a third... a second copy of Isaiah, blackened and in pieces.
A thousand years older and almost the same Isaiah
Before the caves, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible anybody could hold was the Leningrad Codex, still kept in St. Petersburg. It dated to 1008 AD.
Then the Great Isaiah Scroll rolled out. Twenty-four feet long, all 66 chapters... more than a thousand years older than the Leningrad Codex.
How much had changed?
The answer is next. So is the buyer who hid his name... and a treasure map to tons of gold nobody has found.
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