The Bedouin Shepherd Who Threw a Stone Into a Cave Above the Dead Sea in Spring 1947 and Heard Pottery Break

In spring 1947 — the exact date is disputed but most accounts give late January or early February — a young Bedouin shepherd of the Ta’amireh tribe named Muhammed edh-Dhib (“Muhammed the Wolf”) was searching for a lost goat along the cliff face above the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. He threw a stone into the dark opening of a cave high in the cliff. He heard the stone hit pottery and break it.

He climbed up the next morning with two companions. Inside the cave were a row of tall earthenware storage jars, several already broken, containing rolled leather scrolls wrapped in linen. The young men opened one of the scrolls. The Hebrew script was unfamiliar — square Aramaic-script Hebrew of an early type. The scroll was approximately seven metres long.

The shepherds took seven scrolls out of the cave over the following weeks and carried them to a Bethlehem antiquities dealer named Khalil Iskander Shahin — known by the trade name “Kando” — who was a Syrian Orthodox Christian cobbler with a sideline in archaeological objects.

The seven scrolls

Kando split the seven scrolls between two buyers in late 1947.

The Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan of Jerusalem, Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel of Saint Mark’s Monastery in the Old City, bought four of the scrolls in summer 1947 for the equivalent of approximately $97. He took them to the École Biblique in Jerusalem for identification. The French Dominicans there could not read them and concluded they were medieval. Samuel kept them in his quarters at Saint Mark’s.

The Hebrew University archaeologist Eleazar Sukenik bought three of the scrolls from Kando in late November 1947, two days before the United Nations vote that would partition Palestine. The transaction took place at the frontier wire between Arab and Jewish Jerusalem — Kando handed the scrolls through the fence to a Jewish bookseller, who carried them to Sukenik. Sukenik recognised within hours that they were not medieval but late Second Temple period — approximately first century BCE to first century CE — and that the Hebrew text of one of them was a previously unknown ancient hymn collection.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War interrupted further investigation. Sukenik died in 1953 without seeing Samuel’s four scrolls.

February 1955

Samuel had taken his four scrolls to the United States in 1949 trying to sell them. He spent six years trying and failing. In June 1954 he placed an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal:

THE FOUR DEAD SEA SCROLLS. Biblical Manuscripts dating back to at least 200 B.C. are for sale. This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group.

The advertisement was answered through an intermediary by Sukenik’s son, the Israeli archaeologist and former general Yigael Yadin. Yadin bought the four scrolls for $250,000 in February 1955 on behalf of the Israeli government. All seven of Cave 1’s scrolls were now in Israeli hands — though the political circumstances meant the purchase had to be conducted secretly through a New York banker, with Samuel never told who the buyer was.

The seven scrolls are now displayed at the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, in a purpose-built rotunda whose roof is shaped like the lids of the cave jars.

What was in the cave

The seven scrolls of Cave 1 included:

— A complete copy of the Book of Isaiah — approximately 1,000 years older than the previously oldest surviving Hebrew Isaiah manuscript — A second partial Isaiah scroll — A previously unknown text now called the Community Rule — describing the regulations of an ascetic Jewish religious community — A previously unknown War Scroll — describing an apocalyptic future battle — A previously unknown collection of Hodayot (thanksgiving hymns) — A Genesis Apocryphon in Aramaic — a retelling of Genesis — A Habakkuk Commentary — a sectarian interpretation of the prophet Habakkuk

What followed

The Qumran cliff face was systematically searched between 1949 and 1956. Ten more scroll-bearing caves were located — Caves 2 through 11 — yielding approximately 25,000 fragments of about 900 ancient manuscripts. The fragments include partial copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, several non-canonical apocryphal and pseudepigraphic texts, and a corpus of previously unknown sectarian writings.

The Khirbet Qumran settlement at the base of the cliffs — investigated by the École Biblique archaeologist Roland de Vaux between 1951 and 1956 — has been identified by most modern consensus as the site of a Jewish religious community (probably Essene) that produced or curated the scroll library. The community was destroyed by the Roman tenth legion during the First Jewish-Roman War in approximately 68 CE. The scrolls had been hidden in the cliff caves before the destruction and never recovered by the community.

The 1947-1956 scroll discoveries fundamentally changed scholarly reconstructions of Second Temple Judaism, the Hebrew Bible textual history, and the religious environment from which Christianity emerged. The Isaiah scroll alone — by demonstrating that the standardised Masoretic Hebrew Bible text was stable across a 1,000-year manuscript gap — settled long-standing 19th-century debates about the reliability of biblical textual transmission.

Muhammed edh-Dhib lived to about 80 and died in Bethlehem in 1995. He was paid approximately $50 by Kando for the original seven scrolls. He never received any later compensation. The Israeli government paid him a small honorarium in the 1970s in recognition of his discovery — an amount the family has not disclosed.