211 Karen Rank Sunday, October 17, 1999 While pursuing one of his goats into a cave near the Dead Sea in the Jordan Desert, in 1947, a fifteen year old boy by the name of Muhammad adh-Dhib, stumbled on to a great discovery. Inside the cave, he found broken jars that contained scrolls written in a strange language, wrapped in linen cloth and leather.1 This first discovery produced seven scrolls and started an archaeological search that produced thousands of scroll fragments in eleven caves. The Dead Sea is located in Israel and Jordan, east of Jerusalem. The dead sea is very deep, salty, and it’s the lowest body of water in the world. Because the dead sea is at such a low elevation, the climate has a high evaporation rate but a very low humidity which helped to preserve the scrolls.2 Archaeologists searched for the dwelling of the people that may have left the scrolls in the caves. The archaeologist excavated a ruin located between the cliffs where the scrolls were found and the dead sea. This ruin is called Qumran. The ruins and the scrolls were dated by the carbon 14 method and found to be from the third century which made them the oldest surviving biblical manuscript by at least 1000 years. Since the first discoveries archaeologists have found over 800 scrolls and scroll fragments in 11 different caves in the surrounding area. In fact, there are about 100,000 fragments found in all. Most of which were written on goat skin and sheep skin. A few were on papyrus, a plant used to make paper, but one scroll was engraved on copper sheeting telling of sixty buried treasure sites.3Because the scrolls containing the directions to the treasures is unable to be fully unrolled, the treasures have not been found yet. In all, the texts of the scrolls were remarkable. They contained unknown psalms, Bible commentary, calendar text, mystical texts, apocalyptic texts, liturgical texts, purity laws , bible stories, and fragments of every book in...
