It was among the first seven scrolls found and has been central to discussions about the Dead Sea Scrolls ever since. But this work's centrality has depended less on the accident that it was among ...

According to local legend, a Bedouin shepherd boy discovered the scrolls in 1947 while looking for a stray goat. The boy stumbled into a cave to find the first seven scrolls, protected from decay in ...

Meanwhile, by 1958 Israeli and American scholars had published the seven intact scrolls from the initial cache. Most of the intact scrolls were easily readable by anyone who knew Hebrew or ...