When Israeli troops occupied the West Bank of the Jordan in 1967, Israel's leading archaeologist, Yigael Yadin, was able to fulfill a dream. Pulling strings with Premier Levi Eshkol, he got the army to assign an officer to visit a certain antiquities dealer in Bethlehem.* Under pressure, the dealer opened a hiding place under the floor of his shop and surrendered an ancient, partially worm-eaten scroll.
Nearly a decade later, Yadin has finally completed his intricate work on the so-called Temple Scroll, the latest and quite possibly the last of the celebrated Dead Sea Scrolls. Later this year he will publish the full text in the original Hebrew and in an English translation, along with substantial explanatory material. Scholars, who have eagerly awaited the event, will be able to purchase the 900-page, three-volume set for $150.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were written, most scholars agree, by the Essenes, a mysterious, ascetic Jewish sect that was wiped out by the Romans about A.D. 70. The scrolls, slightly older than the New Testament, were hidden in some caves at Qumran, near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. They were discovered by Bedouin and sold piecemeal, beginning in 1947. Yadin's father, also an archaeologist, did the initial analysis on the first three.
The caves collection, ten scrolls and 600 scroll fragments in all, includes a full text of Isaiah and portions of all other Old Testament books except Esther. Thus the scrolls have substantiated the reliability of traditional Bible texts and have aided new translations. Other documents such as the "Thanksgiving Psalms" and the Temple Scroll were unique to the sect. All in all, the scrolls have greatly expanded knowledge about ancient Judaism and the backdrop against which Christianity developed.
Down Payment. The Temple Scroll is the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls (28 ft. 3 in.) and perhaps the most important of the entire collection, Yadin told TIME last week. He first heard about it in 1961 from an anonymous agent representing the dealer in Bethlehem, then inaccessible to Israeli scholars because it was part of Jordan. Even though Yadin did not know exactly what he was buying, he offered to pay $130,000, only to have the agent vanish —along with a down payment of $10,000. After the army officer obtained the scroll in 1967, Yadin negotiated a payment of $118,000 to the dealer.
Much work remained before the treasure could actually be read. The parchment was fragile and wafer-thin (.0039 in.), and the top edge had disintegrated into a fudgelike mass. Yadin's team froze the scroll to help unpeel it and used infra-red and reverse photography to reconstruct damaged portions.
In the soon-to-be-published text, God generally speaks in the first person. The Temple Scroll also uses regular script to record the divine name YHWH, unlike other Qumran texts, which used a distinctive script to remind readers that the name was too sacred to be uttered. This means that the Temple Scroll must have been considered a direct revelation from God, on a level with the Bible itself.