How a Lost Goat Led to the Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls

An afternoon spent chasing a runaway goat is not where you would expect the biggest archaeological find of the twentieth century to begin. But in the cliffs above the Dead Sea, that is exactly what happened.

A Stone, a Cave, and a Sound That Should Not Have Been There

Sometime between late 1946 and early 1947, a teenage Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib, from the Ta'amireh tribe, was tending goats near the ruins of Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea.

When one goat wandered toward a narrow opening in the limestone cliffs, edh-Dhib threw a stone inside to drive it back out.

Instead of a bleat, he heard something shatter.

Curious, he climbed into the cave and found several tall, handleless clay jars lined up along the floor.

Most were empty. One held bundles of old, brittle parchment wrapped in linen.

What Was Inside the Jars

The cave, later named Cave 1, yielded seven scrolls in total.

The shepherds had no idea what they had found.

They carried the scrolls back to their camp and eventually sold several of them to a Bethlehem cobbler and antiquities dealer known as Kando, who passed them along to buyers in Jerusalem.

A Decade of Searching the Cliffs

Word of the find spread slowly, but once scholars realized the scrolls were genuinely ancient, a search began that lasted nearly ten years.

Archaeologists and Bedouin diggers combed the cliffs around Qumran between 1947 and 1956, eventually locating 11 separate caves holding fragments and full scrolls.

In total, researchers assembled roughly 900 different manuscripts, written mostly in Hebrew and Aramaic, with some in Greek.

Older Than Anyone Expected

Among the finds were the earliest known copies of nearly every book in the Hebrew Bible, missing only the Book of Esther.

Before the discovery, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible manuscripts scholars had were the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex, both copied around 1,000 CE.

The scrolls found at Qumran, including a nearly complete copy of the Book of Isaiah, were dated to as early as the third century BCE, roughly 1,000 years older than anything previously known.

What a Handful of Old Scrolls Turned Out to Be Worth

The four scrolls Kando first sold ended up in the hands of a Syrian Orthodox archbishop, who eventually tried to find a buyer by placing a classified ad in the Wall Street Journal in 1954, offering "Biblical Manuscripts dating back to at least 200 B.C." for sale.

Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin negotiated their purchase in secret on behalf of the young state of Israel, paying $250,000.

Those four scrolls, along with most of the rest of the collection, are now held at the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

A lost goat sent a shepherd looking in the wrong cave at exactly the right moment, and it rewrote what the world knew about how old the Bible really was.