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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2022
Seven animal hide scrolls with Hebrew and Aramaic writing were sold in Jerusalem in 1947. Additional smaller fragments of similar scrolls were sold from 1948 to 1950. Within a few years of their appearance, these “Jerusalem Scrolls” as they were then known, became “the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran Cave 1.” While this change of names may seem trivial, it glosses over some difficult questions about the provenance of these materials. What we now call “Cave 1Q” or “Qumran Cave 1” was excavated in 1949, but scholarship reveals considerable confusion concerning which purchased scrolls can be materially connected to fragments that were excavated by archaeologists under controlled conditions in Cave 1. Furthermore, Cave 1 is often treated as if it was a sealed context rather than the highly contaminated site that it actually was at the time of its excavation by archaeologists. For these reasons, it is not completely clear whether all the scrolls usually assigned to Cave 1 actually originated at this site. This article is an attempt to sort through the evidence to determine exactly which scrolls and fragments attributed to Cave 1 were purchased, when and from whom such pieces were purchased, and what can actually be known with confidence about the connection of these “Jerusalem Scrolls” with the site we now call Qumran Cave 1.
1 This research was supported by the Lying Pen of Scribes, a project funded by a FRIPRO/ TopForsk-grant from the Research Council of Norway (2019-24, project number 275293). The essay has benefitted from a great deal of effort and enthusiasm from several individuals. My colleague Matthew Monger first pointed out to me some of the unresolved problems surrounding the scrolls that appeared on the market in the 1940s. Ârstein Justnes and Eibert Tigchelaar engaged in extensive conversation with me and patiently answered many questions over a period of several months. Stephen Reed also gave generously of his expertise on multiple occasions. Several people read earlier drafts of this essay and provided excellent criticism and feedback: Sidnie White Crawford, Mary Jane Cuyler, Torleif Elgvin, Marcello Fidanzio, Ingrid Breilid Gimse, Charlotte Hempel, Morag Kersel, Liv Ingeborg Lied, Joan Taylor, and Jürgen Zangenberg. I explored several lines of thought in this essay on my blog, Variant Readings. Numerous commenters in that forum helped me to sharpen arguments and avoid inaccuracies. An anonymous reader for HTR saved me from conceptual and bibliographic oversights. I am very grateful for all of this help. These colleagues will not agree with everything that I have ended up arguing here, but what I have written is much better because of their input.
2 See, for instance, John C. Trever, “Preliminary Observations on the Jerusalem Scrolls,” BASOR 111 (1948) 3-16; Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, “The Purchase of the Jerusalem Scrolls,” BA 12 (1949) 25-31.
3 William F. Albright, “Notes from the President’s Desk,” BASOR 110 (1948) 1-3, quotation at 2. The phrase echoes the language Albright had used after having seen photographs of just one of the scrolls earlier that year: “the greatest MS discovery of modern times.” See Albright’s letter to John C. Trever, 8 March 1948, quoted in John C. Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran (Westwood, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1965) 85.
4 The most recent and thorough investigation is that of Weston W. Fields, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Full History; Volume One, 1947-1960 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). More reliable on some of the details, however, is the earlier study of Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran.
5 Specialists today typically use the designation “1Q” to refer to this cave, reflecting a system of classification developed as part of the Qumran Caves Expedition in March of 1952. See Roland de Vaux, “Exploration de la région de Qumrân,” RB 60 (1953) 540-61, and idem, “Archéologie,” in Les “petites grottes ” de Qumrân (ed. Maurice Baillet, Józef T. Milik, and Roland de Vaux; DJD III; Oxford: Clarendon, 1962) 1-41, at 6. At that time, surveyors explored caves in the region of Qumran and assigned cardinal numbers sequentially (roughly from north to south) to the caves that contained evidence of human activity. They assigned a second set of “Q” numbers to those caves at which scroll fragments were found. This latter sequence is chronological, numbered according to the order of discovery. Thus, the first “scroll” cave discovered (Cave 1Q) is “Cave 14” of the survey. The second “scroll cave” (Cave 2Q) is “Cave 19” of the survey. At different points in this essay, I will be drawing attention to some curiosities of nomenclature and abbreviation used in scholarship on the scrolls, so, for now, I will simply designate the “scroll” caves of Qumran (1Q-11Q) as “Cave 1,” “Cave 2,” etc.
6 See Dennis Mizzi and Jodi Magness, “Provenance vs. Authenticity: An Archaeological Perspective on the Post-2002 ‘Dead Sea Scrolls-Like’ Fragments,” DSD 26 (2019) 135-69; and Ârstein Justnes, “Fake Fragments, Flexible Provenances: Eight Aramaic ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ from the 21st Century,” in Vision, Narrative, and Wisdom in the Aramaic Texts from Qumran (ed. Mette Bundvad and Kasper Siegismund; STDJ 131; Leiden: Brill, 2020) 242-71. The more intense focus on issues of provenance in recent years stems in part from work in related disciplines, such as papyrology. See, for instance, Roberta Mazza, “Papyri, Ethics, and Economics: A Biography of P.Oxy. 15.1780 (P39),” BASP 52 (2015) 113-42. Surely, however, the most proximate cause for the increased concern with provenance is connected to questions of authenticity raised by the emerging consensus that nearly all so-called Dead Sea Scrolls that have appeared since the turn of the millennium are forgeries. See Kipp Davis, “Caves of Dispute: Patterns of Correspondence and Suspicion in the Post-2002 ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ Fragments,” DSD 24 (2017) 229-70; and Torleif Elgvin and Michael Langlois, “Looking Back: (More) Dead Sea Scrolls Forgeries in the Sch0yen Collection,” RevQ 31 (2019) 111-33.
7 I am unsure of exact numbers of fragments recovered. Frank M. Cross reports “tens of thousands of fragments” coming from Cave 4. See Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran (3rd rev. ed.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995) 38. The sharp distinction between “archaeologists” and “Bedouin” is customary in scholarship, even though some Bedouin would become part of the archaeological team active in the hunt for further scrolls in the 1950s. See, for example, de Vaux, “Exploration de la région de Qumrân,” 540: “a contingent of Ta‘amireh Bedouin was hired, and the work began immediately” (“on embaucha un contingent de Bédouins Ta‘amrés et le travail commença aussitôt”).
8 See Stephen A. Reed, “Find-Sites of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” DSD 14 (2007) 199-221; Corrado Martone, “The Excavated Fragments from Qumran: Steps Toward a Reappraisal,” Kervan: International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies 23 (2019) 101-10; and Eibert Tigchelaar, “Two Damascus Document Fragments and Mistaken Identities: The Mingling of Some Qumran Cave 4 and Cave 6 Fragments,” DSD 28 (2021) 64-74.
9 My focus is on the scrolls that were purchased and not on the various other artifacts that are said to have originated in Cave 1 and that were sold to various buyers. For details of these items, see the excellent survey of Joan E. Taylor, Dennis Mizzi, and Marcello Fidanzio, “Revisiting Qumran Cave 1Q and Its Archaeological Assemblage,” PEQ 149 (2017) 295-325.
10 Whether such a connection actually indicates ancient deposition in Cave 1 rather than modern intrusion is, strictly speaking, a separate question. As will be discussed below, Cave 1 was by all reports a highly disturbed context when archaeologists first arrived on the scene. Illicit diggers had not only removed surface materials from inside Cave 1. They had also already dug into the deposits on the cave floor and thrown out a waste pile by the entrance of the cave by the time the professional archaeologists arrived on the scene in February 1949. See the discussion below.
11 Another cause of confusion is the habit of using certain designations interchangeably. For instance, as noted above, 1Q33 refers to a group of fragments found by archaeologists in Cave 1. These fragments can be placed in columns 18 and 19 of Sukenik’s War Scroll (1QM). Yet, it is not unusual to encounter the designation “1Q33” used interchangeably with “1QM,” as if 1Q33 referred to the entire scroll. See, for instance, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, A Guide to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008) 23.
12 Treatments of the Dead Sea Scrolls written for general audiences tend to leave the impression that many of the purchased scrolls said to be found at Cave 1 were connected to fragments excavated by archaeologists. See, for example, Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective (rev. ed.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981) 11-12: “In one essential respect, [the archaeologists’] findings were conclusive. Hundreds of manuscript fragments, some of them belonging to the scrolls already known, proved that the latter came from that particular cave.”
13 Eugene Ulrich and Peter W. Flint, Qumran Cave 1, II: The Isaiah Scrolls, Part 2: Introductions, Commentary, and Textual Variants (DJD XXXII; Oxford: Clarendon, 2010) 22: “While Sukenik was working on the main part of 1QIsab, those seven additional fragments were found during excavations in Cave 1 by [Gerald] Lancaster [sic] Harding and Roland de Vaux.” A similar slip with regard to 1Q8 (and 1Q20) occurs in Hartmut Stegemann and Eileen Schuller, 1QHodayota (DJD XL; Oxford: Clarendon, 2009) 13 n. 3.
14 Dominique Barthélemy and Józef T. Milik, Qumran Cave I (DJD I; Oxford: Clarendon, 1955) 43. See also the statement at 107: “All the fragments that we group under the number 28 definitely belong to the same set (ensemble) as 1QS. In fact, they were sold to the Palestine Archaeological Museum in 1950 by the Bethlehem antiquities dealer together with fragments of ‘the Apocalypse of Lamech’ (published here as 1Q20) and the Hebrew University’s Isaiah, =1QIsb, published here as 1Q8.”
15 The SBL Handbook of Style for Biblical Studies and Related Disciplines (ed. Billie Jean Collins, Bob Buller, and John F. Kutsko; 2nd ed.; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014) 282. The same description of 1Q20 (“Excavated frags. from cave”) is found in Emanuel Tov, Revised List of the Texts from the Judaean Desert (Leiden: Brill, 2010) 12.
16 Fields, The Dead Sea Scrolls, 111: “The official excavation found fragments from Sukenik’s scrolls only. These were fragments of the War Scroll (lQM) and the Thanksgiving Scroll I (lQH).” In a footnote, Fields does hesitate somewhat: “Even the two fragments of the Thanksgiving Scroll do not contain sufficient text to make a conclusive paleographic analysis of the connection between them and larger parts of the scroll” (535 n. 65).
17 For a discussion of the non-identity of Sukenik’s Thanksgiving scroll and 1Q35, see Emile Puech, “Quelques aspects de la restauration du Rouleau des Hymnes (1QH),” JJS 39 (1988) 38-55, esp. 39-40; and Hartmut Stegemann, “The Material Reconstruction of 1QHodayot,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Fifty Years After Their Discovery, 1947—1997 (ed. Lawrence H. Schiffmann, Emanuel Tov, and James C. VanderKam; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2000) 272-84, esp. 279.
18 Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran, 20-22.
19 There are numerous accounts of this purchase. For an early version, see Samuel, “The Purchase of the Jerusalem Scrolls.”
20 Again, there are numerous accounts of this purchase. See, e.g., Eleazar L. Sukenik, The Dead Sea Scrolls of the Hebrew University (prepared for press by Nahman Avigad; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1955) 13-17.
21 The summary here relies on Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran, 101-13 and the accompanying notes. It should be remembered that Trever’s reconstruction does not exactly match with reports from Mar Samuel and Kando. Mar Samuel’s account makes no mention of the Genesis Apocryphon being part of a separate find, although he was likely not in a position to know such details. See Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, Treasure of Qumran: My Story of the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1968). Kando also gives a different version of events (Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran, notes on 196-97), but I take Trever’s critical sifting of the evidence as the most convincing reconstruction. For an assessment of some of the dynamics at play within the Syriac Orthodox community at this time, see Sarah Irving, “Palestine’s Syriac Orthodox Community and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Contemporary Levant 6 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1080/20581831.2021.1881720.
22 The full name of the person usually identified as the first “discoverer” is given both as “Muhammed Ahmed el-Hamed, whose nickname is ‘Edh-Dhib’” (Trever, The Untold Story, 103) or “Muhammed edh-Dhîb Hassan” (Frank M. Cross, “The Discovery of the Samaria Papyri,” BA 26 [1963] 109-21, at 114 n. 4). In what follows, I adopt a customary designation and transliteration, Muhammad ed-Dhib.
23 In his account of the story of the discovery (said to be based on a written account by Najib S. Khoury), Sherman E. Johnson states that the first dealer involved was one Dawood Musallam (see Johnson, “The Finding of the Scrolls,” AThR 39 [1957] 208-17). For doubts about the reliability of this account, see Trever, “When was Qumrân Cave I Discovered?” RevQ 3 (1961) 135-41, at 139. The name Dahoud (Daud) Musallam appears in connection with the scrolls allegedly found in Cave 1 in the archive of Anton Kiraz (see George A. Kiraz, Anton Kiraz ’s Dead Sea Scroll Archive [Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2005] 93, 100, and 106-7).
24 Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran, 174.
25 At least one of Trever’s sources, an interview of Muhammad ed-Dhib and Jum‘a Muhammad conducted by Anton Kiraz in 1961, gives the number of scrolls recovered by Isha’ya and Khalil Musa on this occasion as two rather than four (Kiraz, Anton Kiraz ’s Archive, 93). I am grateful to Torleif Elgvin for drawing my attention to this discrepancy.
26 Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran, 106. This is an important point that Trever alone seems to have noted. That Kando was at one time in possession of all seven scrolls helps to explain the contents of the material he sold to the Palestine Archaeological Museum in 1950. On this sale, see the details below.
27 See the account in Yigael Yadin, The Message of the Scrolls (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957; repr., New York: Crossroad, 1992) 39-52. Page numbers taken from the reprinted edition. Some very small pieces of the scrolls bought by Mar Samuel in 1947 ended up in the possession of John C. Trever, who had photographed the scrolls after Mar Samuel bought them. According to Trever’s account, “several small fragments of leather from the outer margins of the Isaiah Scroll, bits of ancient repair material and linen thread, remained in the satchel, and a few had fallen to the table during the repair work. There were a few which the Metropolitan claimed belonged to a ‘cover’ which had been attached to the scroll when he first saw it. These I gathered onto sheets of paper, and the Metropolitan suggested that I keep them as souvenirs” (Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran, 43-44). Trever sold these pieces to Martin Sch0yen in 1994, and they now form part of the Sch0yen Collection in Spikkestad, Norway (see Martin Sch0yen, “Acquisition and Ownership History: A Personal Reflection,” in Gleanings from the Caves: Dead Sea Scrolls and Artefacts from the Schoyen Collection [ed. Torleif Elgvin, Kipp Davis, and Michael Langlois; LSTS 71; London: T&T Clark, 2016] 27-32, at 28-29.
28 Sukenik referred to an intermediary in the deal simply as “X.” Yadin’s account further identifies this person as a friend of Sukenik and “an Armenian dealer in antiquities” (The Message of the Scrolls, 16). Trever seems to have identified him as “Mr. Ohan” shortly after the publication of The Untold Story of Qumran in 1965 (see the exchanges of letters in Kiraz, Anton Kiraz ’s Archive, 190-93). Subsequent scholars often give the name as Nasri [Yousef] Ohan, the father of Levon and a dealer well known in Jerusalem in the early twentieth century, but the elder Nasri Ohan died in 1942. I am grateful for Michael D. Press for alerting me to this potential confusion.
29 The main sources for this purchase are Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran, 123-33; John C. Trever, “Completion of the Publication of Some Fragments from Qumran Cave I,” RevQ 5 (1965) 323-44; and Mar Samuel, Treasure of Qumran, 174 and 205-8.
30 Trever, “Completion of the Publication,” 323: “Not long after July 18, 1948, the beginning of the second truce in the Arab-Jewish conflict of 1948, Cave I was again visited by George Isha’ya who picked up some (or all?) of these fragments and delivered them to the Syrian Metropolitan of St. Mark’s Monastery.”
31 The archdiocese of the Syriac Orthodox Church in New Jersey did not respond to my request for confirmation of the whereabouts of this material. Some small fragments of the leather clump were given by Mar Samuel to Trever (Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran, 187 n. 4). These fragments were also among those that Trever sold to Martin Schoyen in 1994. See Schoyen, “Acquisition and Ownership,” 28-29.
32 The purchase is mentioned twice in DJD I (Barthélemy and Milik, Qumran Cave I, 43 and 107). John Allegro provides a detailed (and highly dramatized) narrative of director of the Palestine Archaeological Museum Yusuf Saad’s purchase of several fragments from Kando, and John C. Trever connects this narrative to these specific items. See John Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls (Baltimore: Penguin, 1956) 23-32, and Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran, 146. As Kando had been in possession of the larger portions of all these scrolls in 1947, it makes sense that he would have retained these fragments.
33 The designation of 1Q28 is somewhat complicated, as the fragments collected under that heading had all (apparently) at one time been physically connected to 1QS, though none of them actually contains text from the Community Rule. The set 1Q28 consists of a fragment of skin containing a partially preserved title for the Rule of the Community and at least one more text. This “title” sheet would have been attached to the beginning of the whole scroll (before 1QS). What is designated 1Q28a is a set of fragments with another “rules” text (the Rule of the Congregation, 1QSa), which would have been attached to the end of 1QS; and 1Q28b is a set of fragments with still another “rules” text (the Rule of the Blessings, 1QSb), which would have been attached to the end of 1QSa.
34 The photographs are PAM 40.059-40.077. See Stephen J. Pfann, “Chronological List of the Negatives of the PAM, IAA, and the Shrine of the Book,” in Companion Volume to the Dead Sea Scrolls Microfiche Edition (ed. Emanuel Tov and Stephen J. Pfann; 2nd rev. ed.; Leiden: Brill, 1995) 73-95, at 75, but note that these materials are not, as the entry suggests, “from excavation.”
35 Barthélemy and Milik, Qumran Cave I, 107. Tov has argued that 1QS was not stitched to 1QSa. See Emanuel Tov, Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert (STDJ 54; Leiden: Brill, 2004) 111-12 n. 149. More recently, Charlotte Hempel has analyzed unpublished photographs of 1QS that more clearly show the remains of stitching at the end of the last column (see Charlotte Hempel, The Community Rules from Qumran: A Commentary [TSAJ 183; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020] 17). Furthermore, material analysis carried out on an uninscribed scrap of 1QS and an inscribed fragment of 1QSb in the Sch0yen Collection led Ira Rabin to conclude “that they may derive from a single skin, or at least from the same preparation batch” (see Rabin, “Material Analysis of the Fragments,” in Gleanings from the Caves, 61-77, at 67). The portion of 1QSb in the Sch0yen Collection was purchased from the family of William Brownlee, who had received the fragment as a gift from Mar Samuel (see George J. Brooke and James M. Robinson, “A Further Fragment of 1QSb: The Sch0yen Collection MS 1909,” JJS 46 [1995] 120-33). It is unclear whether Mar Samuel acquired the fragment with the first four scrolls he bought or with the more fragmentary material he acquired from Isha’ya.
36 Barthélemy and Milik, Qumran Cave I, 107.
37 Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran, 203 n. 2. The sentence is identical in Trever’s revised edition, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Personal Account (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977) 231 n. 2.
38 In theory, Trever’s claim could be either confirmed or disconfirmed by reference to photographs taken by Harding at the time of the excavation itself in 1949. As Harding wrote in DJD I: “Inscribed fragments were mounted between glass each day as they were found, and photographed on the spot for safe record” (Gerald Lankester Harding, “Introductory: The Discovery, the Excavation, Minor Finds,” in Barthélemy and Milik, Qumran Cave I, 3-7, at 7). While a very small group of these photographs seems to have been published (see the bibliography in Barthélemy and Milik, Qumran Cave I, 43), I have been unable to locate the original copies of this set of excavation photographs. The Jordanian Department of Antiquities did not respond to my queries concerning these photographs. Stephen Reed reports that the John C. Trever Collection of photographs includes some of Harding’s images (see Stephen A. Reed, Marilyn J. Lundberg, and Michael B. Phelps, The Dead Sea Scrolls Catalogue: Documents, Photographs, and Museum Inventory Numbers [RBS 32; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994] 451-52). According to the descriptions Reed provides, the Harding photos in the Trever collection seem to contain a mix of excavated and purchased materials, so these may not be the excavation photos that Harding mentioned. I contacted James Trever, the son of John Trever, in July 2020 to try to obtain copies of this material, but he was unable to locate these photographs or negatives. Among the PAM photographs, at least one sequence seems to derive from Harding (PAM 40.433-40.552). Although the date given for the photographs is April 1953, these images appear to be photographs of earlier photographs by Harding (PAM 40.508 is actually labeled “MR LANCASTER HARDINGS (sic) PHOTOGRAPH A1”). Again, these contain a mix of excavated and purchased materials, and none of them seems to match the published photographs mentioned in DJD I, 43. The recovery of Harding’s excavation photographs is a desideratum.
39 There is some disagreement about how many different scrolls of Deuteronomy might be represented by the fragments published as 1Q5. See Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, “Paleographical Observations Regarding 1Q5—One or Several Scrolls?” in Qumran Cave 1 Revisited (ed. Daniel K. Falk, Sarianna Metso, Donald W. Parry, and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar; STDJ 91; Leiden: Brill, 2010)247-57.
40 Barthélemy and Milik, Qumran Cave I, 43 (“Les fragments édités en appendice ainsi que la partie centrale du f. 5 13 sont les restes de la prospection clandestine des Syriens”).
41 See Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran, 123-33.
42 Barthélemy and Milik, Qumran Cave I, 43 n. 1.
43 Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran, 146. Allegro’s narrative of this purchase more vividly depicts the “Sherlock Holmes” elements but frustratingly leaves out the details of the manuscripts involved (see Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls, 23-32).
44 Gerald Lankester Harding, “The Dead Sea Scrolls,” PEQ 81 (1949) 112-16, at 113.
45 Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran, 203 n. 2.
46 An infrared PAM photograph taken in 1953 (PAM 40.531) appears to show fragment 13 of 1Q5 in a similar state as that depicted in the 1949 photograph, but some small rotted portions of the top of the fragment seem to have been removed. The plate including fragment 13 of 1Q5 published in DJD I in 1955 seems to include nothing more than what is seen in the 1961 PAM photograph (PAM 43.751), although the published plate has been subjected to some fairly extensive touching up (see Barthélemy and Milik, Qumran Cave I, plate X).
47 Fields, The Dead Sea Scrolls, 421 and 561. The ledger also lists “rewards” given to two individuals in 1950, Ibrahim Shaghanriyah and Mahmoud Hussein. No indication is given for the purpose of these “rewards.”
48 On the non-scroll material, see Taylor, Mizzi, and Fidanzio, “Revisiting Qumran Cave 1Q.”
49 Fields heavily stressed this point in The Dead Sea Scrolls, esp. 111-13.
50 See, for instance, Ovid R. Sellers, “Excavation of the ‘Manuscript’ Cave at ‘Ain Fashkha,” BASOR 114 (1949) 5-9.
51 This is a point noted by Fields, The Dead Sea Scrolls, 111.
52 Harding, “Introductory,” 6.
53 Sellers, “Excavation of the ‘Manuscript’ Cave,” 7. See also Millar Burrows, The Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Viking Press, 1955) 34.
54 Roland de Vaux, “La grotte des manuscrits hébreux,” RB 56 (1949) 586-609, at 586-87 (“Le plafond était à 2 m 50 ou 3 m au dessus de la «couche archéologique». Celle-ci-ne représente en fait que la surface de la grotte bouleversée par les derniers pillards en quête des manuscrits et d’un «trésor»; c’est dans cette couche et dans les déblais rejetés devant l’entrée que nous avons trouvé tous les tessons, les débris de linges et les fragments de manuscrits. Son épaisseur variait de 25 à 50 cm”).
55 Harding, “Introductory,” 6.
56 This point comes across very clearly in Harding’s early reports: “The thrown-out soil was the first thing we tackled: it was full of potsherds and fragments of linen, and the first hour’s work on it showed that it also contained small fragments of inscribed leather, the first definite proof that this was indeed the right spot” (Gerald Lankester Harding, “The Dead Sea Scrolls,” The Illustrated London News [1 October 1949] 493-95, at 493).
57 William L. Reed, “The Qumrân Caves Expedition of March, 1952,” BASOR 135 (1954) 8-13, at 9.
58 De Vaux, “Archéologie” (in DJD III), 9: “La grotte avait été entièrement vidée.”
59 De Vaux, “Exploration de la region de Qumrân,” 553. See also “Archéologie” (in DJD III), 3: “We knew that the Bedouins must not have left much behind, and in fact we found that they worked with astonishing care. The cave had been emptied down to the smallest crevice, and they left behind just two small fragments that we found while examining their rubble.” I am not aware of the identity of these fragments.
60 The frequently repeated statement that this cave had been discovered by the Bedouin for the first time just a month earlier, in February 1952 (e.g., de Vaux, “Archéologie” [in DJD III], 3), cannot be substantiated. It may well have been visited months, or even years, earlier.
61 Roland de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls (trans. David Bourke; The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy 1959; London: The British Academy, 1973) xv. Here, de Vaux makes the point by identifying those caves that appeared not to be related to Qumran. See also de Vaux, “Archéologie” (in DJD III), 6-13.
62 See de Vaux, “Archéologie” (in DJD III), 8. Marcello Fidanzio adds the following important observation regarding the survey’s “Cave 12”: “It is noteworthy that a jar base contained linen textiles like those associated elsewhere to the scrolls. This is documented in the photo album kept at the École Biblique” (personal communication; I have not seen this photograph myself). For a recent treatment that emphasizes the relative neglect of these “non-scroll” caves, see Jürgen Zangenberg, “The Functions of the Caves and the Settlement of Qumran: Reflections on a New Chapter of Qumran Research,” in The Caves of Qumran: Proceedings of the International Conference, Lugano 2014 (ed. Marcello Fidanzio; STDJ 118; Leiden: Brill, 2016) 195-209.
63 See Yuval Baruch, Gabriel Mazor, and Debora Sandhaus, “Region XI: Survey and Excavations of Caves along the Fault Escarpment above Horbat Qumran,” ‘Atiqot 41 (2002) 189-98.
64 See Harding, “Introductory,” 5: “The cave was found early in the summer of 1947 by two Bedu shepherds of the Ta‘âmireh tribe named Mohammed edh Dhib and Ahmed Mohammed. The following is a considerably condensed version of their account of how they found it.” See also idem, “A Bible Discovery: Earliest Known Texts of the Old Testament,” The Times (9 August 1949) 5.
65 William Hugh Brownlee, “Muhammad ed-Deeb’s Own Story of His Scroll Discovery,” JNES 16 (1957) 236-39.
66 Brownlee elsewhere claimed that the upper entrance to Cave 1 could be entered from above (see William Hugh Brownlee, “Some New Facts Concerning the Discovery of the Scrolls of 1Q,” RevQ 4 [1963] 417-20, at 419). But the description “like a cistern” most readily brings to mind Cave 4, which was most easily entered from above. There is, however, conflicting information about whether or not the Bedouin accessed Cave 4 in this way. According to Brownlee, Harding stated “that the ceiling entrance into Cave IV was made by the archaeologists when they excavated the cave, that the Bedouins who first entered the cave gained access through one of the side balconies to which they had to descend over the side of the cliff” (Brownlee, “Some New Facts,” 420). This statement would seem to be contradicted by de Vaux’s report, according to which the Bedouin did indeed have access to the cave through a “chimney” of sorts: “They arranged easier access to the cave by widening the narrow chimney made by the rain at one of the edges of the chamber. They had thus passed very close to the ancient entrance that was filled up and that they had not recognized.” (de Vaux “Archéologie,” in Qumrân Grotte 4II [ed. Roland de Vaux and J. T. Milik; DJD VI; Clarendon: Oxford, 1977] 3-22, at 3).
67 John C. Trever, “When Was Qumrân Cave I Discovered?” RevQ 3 (1961) 135-41, at 136. Trever was of course aware that the original entrance to Cave 1 was high off the ground, but he was adamant that it was “not at all ‘like a cistern’” (136).
68 See Roland de Vaux, “Les manuscrits de Qumrân et l’archéologie,” RB 66 (1959) 87-110, at 89: “In 1952 I had as a worker Muhammad ed-Dhib, the Bedouin who had first entered the cave, and I had him tell his story in front of his comrades who checked his account. One cannot reject the testimony of the Bedouins… [nor] the fact that some of the fragments that we recovered from [Cave 1] belong to the manuscripts that were sold by the Bedouins as coming from this cave.”
69 William Hugh Brownlee, “Edh-Dheeb’s Story of His Scroll Discovery,” RevQ 3 (1962) 483-94, at 483: “Mr. Harding may have such [an interview with Muhammad ed-Dhib] tucked away in his notes, but he has not published it in any recognizable form. Instead he has published two contradictory accounts, and we are not informed which portions of the accounts come from edh-Dheeb himself.”
70 Fields also reached this conclusion in 2009 (The Dead Sea Scrolls, esp. 111-13). It is not clear to me how much impact his arguments have had among scholars of the scrolls. While expressing appreciation for the work that Fields carried out, Taylor, Mizzi, and Fidanzio dismiss in a footnote the suggestion of “1Q” scrolls coming from anywhere besides Cave 1 (“Revisiting Qumran Cave 1Q,” 322 n. 2).
71 See, e.g., Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, “Old Caves and Young Caves: A Statistical Reevaluation of a Qumran Consensus,” DSD 14 (2007) 313-33.
72 The role of the Ta‘amireh tribe of Bedouin in these early discoveries (as something other than naïve herders) requires greater scrutiny. See Morag Kersel, Christina Luke, and Christopher H. Roosevelt, “Valuing the Past: Perceptions of Archaeological Practice in Lydia and the Levant,” Journal of Social Archaeology 8 (2008) 298-319, esp. 309-14. In the years leading up to the appearance of the first Dead Sea Scrolls on the market, members of the Ta‘amireh tribe had already been associated with the sale of antiquities in Bethlehem. See, for example, René Neuville, “Statuette érotique du désert de Judée,”L’Anthropologie 43 (1933) 558-60 and Louis-Hugues Vincent, “Une grotte funéraire antique dans l’ouady et-Tin,”RB 54 (1947) 269-82. Indeed, Vincent notes that Neuville’s explorations in the 1930s had already encouraged the Bedouin to search caves for portable antiquities: “The successful prehistoric investigations carried out by Neuville in the caves of the Wadi Khareitoun about fifteen years ago stimulated the excitement of the Ta‘amireh Arabs, the semi-nomadic people who occupy the region. The smallest crevices were diligently searched, and remarkable pieces of bronze and pottery began to flow into the clandestine market for ‘antiquities’ in Bethlehem” (“Les fructueuses recherches préhistoriques effectuées par M. R. Neuville dans les cavernes de l’ou[adi] Khareitoun, il y a une quinzaine d’années, stimulèrent le zèle intéressé des Arabes Ta‘âmereh, semi-nomades qui occupent la région. Les plus minimes cavités rocheuses furent diligemment scrutées et de remarquables pièces de bronze et de poterie commencèrent un jour d’affluer sur le marché clandestin d’«antiques» à Bethléem”) (269). The phenomenon of Bedouin artifact-hunting in the caves of the Judean desert in the 1930s and early 1940s would seem to merit further exploration.