"Do you really think it's old, sir?"
An Armenian dealer in antiquities was asking the question, standing at a barbed-wire fence in Jerusalem (it had been put up by the British to separate Jews and Arabs). As he spoke, he reached across the fence and handed a small scrap of leather to Dr. Eleazar Sukenik of Hebrew University. The fragment came from the famed Bedouin find of scrolls in a cave by the Dead Sea, and Scholar Sukenik recognized the writing on it as being similar to letters he had seen carved on coffins that were 2,000 years old. Sukenik determined, if he could, to get the scrolls for the emerging Jewish state.
That was in 1947, and Arab territory was dangerous for a Jew, but (on the day the U.N. passed the resolution favoring establishment of a Jewish state) Sukenik boarded a crowded Arab bus for Bethlehem, where the scrolls were, and brought them back for study. In the next few days, while Arab rioters surged through Jerusalem, Sukenik agreed to buy the scrolls for £50 ($170).
Want Ad in Wall Street. Then bad news arrived: the Metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark in Old Jerusalem was in possession of other scrolls from the same find. Sukenik pledged himself to buy them; he mortgaged his house and borrowed as much as he could. But the Metropolitan decided to sell the scrolls in New York. Eleazar Sukenik died in 1953, but the cause was taken up by his son Yigael Yadin,* who brilliantly combined soldiering with archaeology, served as Israel's chief of staff. Yadin tracked down the still unsold scrolls —the Metropolitan had even advertised them in a Wall Street Journal want ad —eventually bought them for $250,000 with the backing of the Israeli government. As the scrolls were flown back to Israel by couriers, one at a time, Yadin received coded cables such as "Chaim arrived safely." He sighed with relief when he read: "All family here now."
Last week Israel was formally honoring father's and son's persistence. The seven precious scrolls from Cave I*—two Isaiah scrolls, the Thanksgiving Hymns, the War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness, the Rule of the Community, a commentary on Habakkuk, and the so-called Genesis Apocryphon—were publicly shown for the first time. Together with the jars that were found with them, the scrolls are on display—under 24-hour guard and brilliantly lit—in a glass-fronted safe set in the basement wall of the new Hebrew University. Eventually a separate wing will be built for them, called the Shrine of the Book.
New Theory. "The scrolls are the greatest discovery of our age," proclaimed the university's president, Benjamin Mazar, and throngs of Israelis and tourists filed past them day after day. Said one proud Israeli teenager, as he spelled out some of the lines from the Isaiah scroll: "It's a great thing for a boy to be able to read as I can what his forefathers wrote 2,000 years ago."