Khirbet Qumran

Video from the program «À l'origine» hosted by Steve Suissa on France 2. With the participation of Rabbi Didier Kassabi and Ron Naiweld, CNRS researcher and EHESS lecturer. © France 2.

In the spring of 1947, a young Bedouin accidentally discovered some priceless manuscripts in one of the caves perched on a hillside in the Judah Desert, not far from the Dead Sea.

Entering the grotto of’Aïn-Feschka, The young Bedouin finds himself in the presence of jars 63 cm high and 25 cm wide. Inside, he discovered rolls of leather wrapped in linen coated with a bitumen-like substance, perhaps extracted from the Dead Sea.

The unfolding of the apocryphal scroll of Genesis by Professor J. Biberkraut. Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Having offered them unsuccessfully to a Bethlehem merchant, he travelled to Jerusalem, where he managed to sell four of his scrolls to Archbishop Athanasius Samuel of the Syrian Orthodox monastery of Saint Mark, and three others to E. L. Sukenik, professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Archbishop Athanasius Samuel shows the scrolls to several authorities, who seem hesitant about their value and content. They were finally presented to Professor John C. Trever, then Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, who photographed them and sent copies to Professor W. F. Albright. This famous archaeologist concluded that they must date from around the end of the first century B.C. and immediately called them an «exceptional find».

The Arab-Israeli war prevents any scientific investigation. In February 1949, Professor Laukester Harding and Father R. de Vaux resumed excavations in the cave.. In less than three weeks, they unearthed some 800 scroll fragments (nearly 100,000 to date), belonging to around 75 different leather scrolls, a few papyrus scroll fragments, pieces of linen cloth that had been used to wrap the scrolls, Roman lamps and jar shards. It seems that some 200 scrolls were hidden in the cave.