0:00 You ever throw a pebble just to hear it drop, only to hear something break wide open?0:06 Aye, usually a greenhouse window back when our lad was kicking a football about.0:13 Why, Earl?0:13 What broke?0:14 A clay jar, hidden away in a dark limestone hole about a mile off the Dead Sea.0:21 Back in episode twenty-seven, we sat right here and talked about the folks working on the sidelines while history was made.0:31 We asked who truly gets remembered when the dust settles.0:35 And today, I cannot stop thinking about a teenage shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib.0:42 edh-Dhib.0:42 The wolf, isn't it?0:44 What was he doing tossing stones into holes?0:47 Watching his flock.0:49 Early in 1947, out in the hills of Mandate Palestine, near Khirbet Qumran.0:55 He was out with his cousin Jum'a Muhammed and Khalil Musa.1:00 Ta'amireh Bedouin boys.1:01 A goat wanders off, or maybe an animal took shelter up a cliff face, so edh-Dhib tosses a rock up into a low crevice.1:11 Expecting dull stone.1:12 Instead, he hears earthenware smash.1:15 Ooh.1:16 Not a sound you expect out on a quiet ridge.1:19 Not hardly.1:20 He squeezed through that crumble of rock, and he didn't find stray livestock.1:26 He found tall jars packed with leather and papyrus, wrapped up tight in linen.1:32 Seven ancient scrolls.1:34 He carried them straight back to camp, and for a while, those boys just hung them from a tent pole while they figured out what they had.1:45 A tent pole.1:46 Lord love him.1:47 The greatest biblical manuscript find of the twentieth century, dangling like an old coat.1:54 Swear on my tackle box, that is the honest truth.1:58 Nobody knew they were looking at manuscripts dating from the third century before Christ up through the first century.2:08 More than two hundred biblical texts across eleven caves down the line.2:13 Almost a thousand documents in the end.2:16 But in 1947, to those young men, it was just leather that might bring a few coins in town.2:24 Well, naturally.2:25 A lad's got to eat.2:26 But how on earth did it get from a Bedouin tent to scholars arguing across Jerusalem?2:33 First, they carried them to a cobbler named Ibrahim 'Ijha in Bethlehem.2:39 He looked at them and said they were worthless, worried they might have been lifted from a synagogue.2:47 Oh, bless him.2:48 A bit too hot to handle.2:50 So they walked over to a cobbler and part-time antiquities dealer named Khalil Iskander Shahin.2:58 Most folks called him Kando.3:00 The boys sold three scrolls to a dealer through him for seven Jordanian pounds.3:06 Around twenty-eight dollars back then.3:09 Twenty-eight pounds for texts that pushed Hebrew manuscript history back an entire thousand years.3:17 That's it.3:18 Kando moved four scrolls to Metropolitan Samuel at Saint Mark's Syrian Orthodox Church, and the other three ended up with a professor at Hebrew University.3:30 Within months, institutions were bidding fortunes, museums were carving out the Shrine of the Book, and the grand names of archaeology took every headline.3:43 And edh-Dhib?3:44 The lad who actually climbed the cliff?3:47 Eclipsed.3:47 Reduced to a footnote.3:49 An accidental bystander who happened to throw a rock, while the professors got the glory of the preservation.3:58 It is the same old pattern we see every time a treasure turns up.4:03 The local hands who knew the land, who scrambled through the dust and pulled the thing out of the dark, get written off as luck.4:13 The real history, they tell you, only started when the ink hit university paper.4:20 Aye.4:20 As if finding it wasn't the hard graft.4:23 It takes a shepherd's eye to spot a gap in the limestone, Earl.4:28 Scholars in tweed jackets aren't out chasing goats up crags in the heat.4:34 Not a one.4:35 Those caves held nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther.4:40 But the boy who broke the jar never got his name in bronze.4:45 He just went back to his flock while the world carved up what he carried out.4:51 Night night, sleep tight, chuck.4:54 You left the world a library, whether they put your name on the door or not.5:00 Well.5:00 That is about the size of it.
