National Geographic 12/18 - The Search For Sacred Texts

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National Geographic - The Search for Sacred Texts - December 2018

Inside the cloak-and-dagger search for sacred texts
In the shadowy world where religion meets archaeology, scientists, collectors, and schemers are racing to find the most precious relics.

The heat is merciless among the barren hills of the Judaean desert near the shore of the Dead Sea.

But it’s mercifully cool inside the cave where Randall Price lies on his stomach, staring at the crevice where just yesterday he discovered a 2,000-year-old bronze cooking pot.

“This cave was robbed by Bedouins maybe 40 years ago,” explains Price, an American archaeologist and research professor at Liberty University in Virginia. “Fortunately for us, they didn’t dig very deep. Our hope is that if we keep digging, we hit the mother lode.”

Anyone who’s heard of these famed caves near the ancient Jewish settlement of Qumran knows what mother lode Price has in mind. In 1947 young Bedouin goat herders peered into a nearby cavern and made one of the biggest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century: seven rolled parchments covered in ancient Hebrew script, the first of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. Members of the separatist Qumran sect likely stashed the scrolls in the cave around A.D. 70, as Roman troops closed in to crush the First Jewish Revolt. Hundreds more scrolls eventually would come to light. Dating as far back as the third century B.C., they are the oldest biblical texts ever found.

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