‘Evil spirit’ pursued boy who threw a stone and discovered Dead Sea Scrolls
Mohammed Dhib was a 15-year-old shepherd boy when he threw a stone into a cave and found scrolls that had been hidden for 20 centuries. Boy, did he live to regret it.
What are known as the Qumran caves pockmark the eastern slopes of crumbly marlstone that form the escarpment hemming in the Dead Sea separating Israel and Jordan. For millennia, the caves have overlooked the lowest point of the planet – the shores of the Dead Sea are 431m below sea level. It is the northern end of the Great Rift Valley, a trench formed by the tectonic plates wrenching North Africa in two.
These parched terraces of the Judaean Desert have weathered steadily over the ages as human history played out below. For 5000 years before Jesus Christ walked these hills, Bedouins moved through the valley in an unceasing search for water and the brief blooms of river bed flora on which they fed goats, sheep and camels.
In 1947, the year the United Nations voted to establish the state of Israel, it was estimated that more than 100,000 Bedouins led the untamed lives of nomads in nearby deserts, among them the Ta’amireh tribe into which Mohammed Dhib had been born in 1931. Not yet 16, he’d have known a bit about the outside world, and planes sometimes flew overhead, as they had since the war that had not long ended, but at ground level nothing much was changing. Not in a hurry, anyway. His family lived on near-Biblical terms roaming the valleys, raising animals and living off their thin milk and gaunt muscle.
As the winter’s cool gave way to warmer days, Dhib and two older cousins, Jum’a Muhammad and Khalil Musa, were herding their family’s goats around the ruins of an old fort, Khirbet Qumran, near which an ancient cemetery had been discovered a century before. (Curiously, most of the remains were male, leading to conjecture about the pre-Christian settlement. Had it been an elevated, defensive position, and these were the bones of soldiers? Or was it the base of a male-dominated religious sect?)
Dhib’s story of what happened next changed sometimes over the next five decades, but not its central thrust: two goats had wandered away up the sheer, almost unscalable escarpment. Having lost sight of them, Dhib, a slight boy, climbed higher, dangerously so, to look for them. At one point, spotting a narrow entrance to a small cave, he threw a stone up into the opening in case the goats had made their way in.
He heard a soft tinkle, a sound muffled from its elevated distance, but clearly worth investigating. It turned out he had heard one of the sounds of the century.
Whether he went in then, as he recalled, or the following morning, as his cousins remembered, what happened next reverberated throughout the rest of their lives.
Dhib squeezed his way through the narrow rocky opening – a full grown man could not have – and found three pots, one of which his well-directed stone had, by chance, broken making the sound he had heard. The Dead Sea Scrolls had been looking for mankind for 2000 years and had finally met their mark. Two of the earthenware jugs were filled with the yellow sand and the ochre dust of centuries, the third had a lid still attached to handles on the side and, when opened, revealed a collection of barely legible writings on thin, stretched goat hides – parchment.
It seems the boys were never asked if they found their goats, not that it mattered. This was the archaeological find of the 20th century. It would take two years for news of it to filter out, and even then it seemed too fantastic and was dismissed even by many experts in documents from antiquity as wishful thinking, or a crude scam by devious Arabs.
What Dhib and his cousins had, literally, stumbled upon was what scientists and religious scholars call Cave One – another 10 would be found, the last in 1956 – containing jars with hundreds of scrolls, some only in fragments, a majority written on parchment, many on papyrus and one on copper. A 12th cave was found five years ago, with some tools and broken jars, probably looted in the 1950s.
In the first cave was what researchers call the Great Isaiah Scroll, the longest and best preserved, as luck would have it. Its 17 sheets of parchment stretch over almost 7.5m. It is written in an old form of Hebrew (others are in Greek and Aramaic) probably by a single author, but there are amendments, additions and corrections by others.
The Great Isaiah Scroll is the story of Isaiah as told in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its apocalyptic themes of sin, punishment, redemption and salvation have helped define Western philosophy and have had an incalculable influence on art, literature, music and film. For instance, the sculpture in the garden of the United Nations building in New York is based on a line from Isaiah: “He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (Ironically, this was donated by the Soviet Union in 1959 – someone should alert Vladimir Putin.)
It is not entirely clear who wrote the Qumran texts, but most expert opinion suggests it would have been the Essenes – although some point to the Sadducees who lived about the same time, both around the Judaean valley. The Essenes believed they were occupying the End of Days – “Great tribulation is coming upon the land … after much killing and slaughter, a prince of nations will arise” – and that there would soon be a cataclysmic confrontation between good and evil. It seems their timing was out, but the scrolls also describe their way of life, rules and customs right down to their dining habits and prayers and hymns. It is thought the 972 scrolls might have been the Essenes’ library, hidden in the caves when they came under threat.
One of the first to study the scrolls was a young graduate who would become a legendary palaeographer, Dr Frank Moore Cross. The scrolls would dominate his life, but at first he set out to determine when the words – in black and sometimes red “ink” derived from the toxic mineral cinnabar – had been written.
Cross would spend years charting the evolution of alphabets, which typically change slowly, letter by letter, and by working with known dates and styles would estimate their era. He confidently reckoned the scrolls to have been written from 225BC to 50AD. Years later, modern refined carbon dating techniques confirmed he was right.
By then researchers the world over were queuing up to study the Essenes’ words. The documents were priceless, of unmatched insight but desperately fragile. We are lucky to have them at all. Dhib and his cousins returned to the cave and removed three more scrolls, most of them covered in the chalky scree that had fallen from the cave roof over 2000 years. They made various attempts to sell them to locals trading in old documents.
Rumours of a historic find, including remnants of stories from the Old Testament, started circulating when a few unusual parchments were offered for sale in bazaars around Bethlehem. Some traders who were shown them dismissed the documents as crude frauds, perhaps because of their unlikely provenance and the poor, uneducated Bedouins trying to sell them. Eventually, one Bethlehem trader bought the scrolls for seven Jordanian pounds (about $350 today) and onsold them to the Syriac Orthodox Church Archbishop Mor. Athanasius Yeshue Samuel for 16 pounds. They moved about the region until June 1, 1954, when a single column advertisement appeared in The Wall Street Journal: “The Four Dead Sea Scrolls – Biblical Manuscripts dating back to at least 200BC – are for sale. This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group.”
Archbishop Samuel had objected to selling them to any Israelis, despite the interest. In the event the advertisement was seen by Israeli soldier and archaeologist Yigael Yadin, who was in Washington as part of a lecture tour.
He arranged for their secret purchase for $US250,000 (equivalent to $3.5m today) by an industrialist benefactor and for their return to Israel. Yadin would later serve as that country’s deputy prime minister. Meanwhile, the Bedouins, and others, made a brisk business of finding and selling scrolls while searching for more caves.
The bulk was kept, studied and stored in various poor conditions for decades by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities. After the Six-Day War, the Palestine Archeological Museum came under the control of Israel and the scrolls were later moved to the purpose-built Shrine of the Book museum where they are being digitised, often displayed for short periods, and stored in climate-controlled conditions that mimic those of the caves in which they spent 2000 years. The museum, shaped like the lids of the Qumran jars, is a dramatic moment in Jerusalem’s growing skyline.
But for the Bedouin who found them, life was difficult. In the lead-up to the 50th anniversary of the scrolls’ discovery, I was editor of Melbourne’s Sunday Herald Sun and asked the newspaper’s foreign editor to track down Dhib for an interview. But we discovered he had died three years before, aged 65 and poverty stricken, in a Jordanian refugee camp. His widow, Sarah, spoke to us at length about his life and their bitter memories of the scrolls.
Among Dhib’s last words were: “I wish I had never seen that cave.” He believed he had disturbed a dormant spirit that sought revenge on him, and as he lay dying and unable to afford hospital care or medication the thought obsessed him.
“He was convinced that the jinni (spirit) he disturbed in the cave brought him only bad luck and suffering,” Sarah said.
Dhib had seen a doctor and been diagnosed in 1992, a visit that had cost his last five dinars (about $10). Sarah said hospitals refused to treat her husband without payment, but she was confident his life could have been saved. He wrote to people who had been involved with the scrolls seeking help in his hour of need, including the trader in Bethlehem. “Nobody replied to his letters,” said Sarah. “Nobody sent even a tiny amount of money so that we could go to hospital. We have six daughters and two sons, and they did their best, but none of us had the necessary money for the hospital. I sat by his side and watched him suffer for a long time before he died.”
Dhib had considered burning the scrolls on the day he found them – their strange script was alien and frightened him. “I should have listened to the warning in my heart,” he would tell his children. “I knew that the jinni I had disturbed from his sleep was angry. I wanted to throw all the bundles into the fire, but the older boys stopped me.”
Dhib’s son Odah, 31 when we spoke to him in 1997, worked in a supermarket. “My father was innocent in the ways of the world,” he said, adding that the trader to whom his father sold the scrolls tricked him into showing him the cave and then paid other Bedouins to bring him the scrolls, fragments and jars.
Some scrolls were found in the trader’s house. Others were buried in his garden, but rotted before they could be retreived. The trader died the same year as Dhib, but left no clues – at least not ones anyone will discuss – about where other scrolls might be stashed. And very possibly some merchants still hold them as their value rockets and matches that of world famous paintings.
The trader’s son runs an antiques shop in Jerusalem where he displays the jar in which the Great Isaiah Scroll spent so long.
“It’s not for sale,” he told us back then. “It’s a historic memento of the story of the scrolls. Our father did a great deal to ensure that the scrolls would reach responsible people like scholars who could study them and give them to museums.”
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