Word: caving
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cradle of Christianity? Since a Bedouin shepherd boy named Muhammad adh-Dhib ("The Wolf") first stumbled on them just ten years ago in a cave near Qumran (he had hoped to find buried treasure), the scrolls have stirred up perhaps the most vigorous debate in Christianity since Darwin. One faction, headed by French Orientalist André Dupont-Sommer (whose views were popularized in the U.S. by Amateur Scrollman Edmund Wilson), held that the Dead Sea Community more than Bethlehem might have been the cradle of Christianity. Philologist John Allegro of Britain's University of Manchester strongly implied that...
...Cave. Since "The Wolf" found Cave 1, scrolls and fragments from ten more caves near Qumran have been recovered. Most notable are the contents of Cave 4, in which the remains of more than 400 manuscripts have been found in tens of thousands of tiny fragments; presumably this was the main library of the Qumran Community. The Suez crisis raised serious roadblocks to the scholars' work. Many were called home, and the manuscripts themselves were packed away in 36 cases and locked up in the Ottoman Bank at Amman, Jordan, from which they were returned to Jerusalem for study...
...scholars carried on as best they could. This week came news that an important new find has been made in an eleventh cave. Because of the political situation and payment difficulties, the Jordan government has so far kept its contents under lock and key, but scholars have been permitted a preliminary peek. On the basis of this examination, they tentatively identified the Cave II scrolls as the Biblical 'Psalms and Leviticus, an apocalyptic description of the New Jerusalem, and a targum (i.e., a translation of a Hebrew text into Aramaic, the colloquial language of Christ's time...
...with timeless patience through four-foot layers of dust and bat dung, spoonful by spoonful, to find the tiny fragments of black and crumbly leather-often smaller than a postage stamp-that they know will make them rich. The Jordan government has given the Ta'amireh Bedouins a cave-hunting monopoly-making the Qumran area a military zone, and policing it to keep other tribes from muscling in on the scroll rush...
...work is done in a long, light, white-paneled room filled with 20 trestled tables. There lie the scroll fragments, pressed flat and protected between plates of glass. Fragments are identified by labels bearing such symbols as 4 QM5, i.e., a fragment from Qumran Cave 4, under study by Milik, and belonging to the fifth plate in a series...