The Qumran Excavations

“The Qumran manuscripts are first and foremost a treasure for science, but access to these texts, even if it is not reserved for scholars, remains very arduous… They cast a harsh light on Judaism at the turn of our era – more precisely on a sectarian, and therefore marginal, Judaism, readily combative – recovering traces, thought to be lost or out of reach, of the abundant Jewish literature from which some decided what our Bible would contain and in what order. They show the interweaving of languages and scripts, a reflection of the intermingling of religious currents in the Hellenised East, and cast a faint light on the origins of Christianity, which was conceived in Jerusalem but born in Egypt, in Rome, in Carthage, in Lyon…

Thus, drawing on strong similarities between passages of the Qumran community’s manuscripts and the New Testament, some scholars and a host of popularisers believed they could see the origins of the Nazarene on the shores of the Dead Sea. Both were wrong. But in a Holy Land where archaeology fails to show Christian witnesses before the 4th century, the site of Qumran appeared as an opportunity to uncover everyday life in the time of Jesus: living environment, customs, utensils. Things as much as words, then. And the approach is legitimate, since there is no need to demonstrate that Jesus was Jewish.”

“In the spring of 1947, a Bedouin of the Ta‘amireh tribe, which occupied the desert east of Bethlehem, was looking for a lost goat in the cliffs of the Qumran region. Tired, and resting in the shade of the rocks, he idly threw a pebble into a hole in front of him, and was frightened by the sound of breaking objects coming from the crevice. Accompanied by his cousin, he returned the next day with a lamp and ropes. Among the many sherds littering the ground they found eight undamaged jars, all empty except one, from which they removed three scrolls; afterwards they took out other scrolls, in a more or less good state, and a few handfuls of fragments.

Rather embarrassed by their find, they brought their booty to an antiquities dealer in Bethlehem, who acted as intermediary for the sale of these old writings, either to Professor E. L. Sukenik on behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, or to Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of St Mark’s in Jerusalem. Such was the beginning of an adventure of unsuspected importance, at the time of the British Mandate over Palestine. The hiding place was located in January 1949 by the Arab Legion of Jordan and the Belgian Captain Lippens of the UN forces, and the excavation of the cave (which would become Cave 1 with manuscripts) was undertaken in February by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem and the Palestine Archaeological Museum.”