Picture a teenage shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib, sometime in late 1946 or early 1947, climbing the limestone cliffs above the Dead Sea. One of his goats has wandered off. He spots a small opening in the rock face, too dark to see into, and does what anyone might do. He picks up a stone and throws it inside, hoping to spook the animal out.
Instead of a bleat, he hears something shatter.
Inside the Cave
Nervous, he backs away. He comes back the next day with a friend, and this time he climbs inside. What he finds are several tall clay jars, some still sealed with their lids in place. Most are empty. One is not. Wrapped in linen cloth are several ancient scrolls, brittle with age, covered in writing he cannot read.
He has no way of knowing it yet, but he is holding what will become known as the Great Isaiah Scroll, a copy of the biblical Book of Isaiah written more than a thousand years before any Hebrew manuscript scholars had ever seen. The cave is later named Cave 1, and the site above it, Qumran.
A Decade of Searching
The scrolls eventually make their way to a shoemaker and antiquities dealer in Bethlehem named Kando, who buys them for a small sum without fully grasping what he has acquired. Word spreads slowly. Scholars begin to examine the writing. What follows over the next decade is one of the largest archaeological searches in modern history, as researchers and Bedouin searchers comb eleven caves scattered across the same cliffs, eventually recovering fragments of roughly 900 to 1,000 separate manuscripts, dating from as early as the third century BC.
Among the scrolls that surface in the years after that first cave are multiple copies of a book called Enoch, and even more copies of a book called Jubilees, both written in Hebrew and Aramaic. These are not obscure fragments. Jubilees alone turns up in roughly fourteen or fifteen separate manuscripts, more than all but a handful of the best-represented books at Qumran. The people who hid this collection in the desert, likely to protect it before the Roman legions arrived around 68 AD, clearly valued these texts as much as anything now sitting in a modern Bible.
A Match Nobody Expected
Here is the detail that connects a shepherd’s lost goat to a library halfway across the world. When scholars laid the Qumran fragments of Enoch and Jubilees next to the only other place these books had survived in full, Ethiopic manuscripts preserved by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the two matched closely. A community sealed away in desert caves two thousand years ago and a church copying scripture in the Ethiopian highlands had, without any contact with one another, kept the same books.
One was lost and found again by accident. The other was simply never lost.
The Complete Ethiopian Bible includes both Enoch and Jubilees, the very books found scattered in that cave, preserved whole and translated into English for the first time. Read what the shepherd’s cave and the Ethiopian church both kept.