Israeli archaeologist Eleazar Sukenik made public his acquisition and study of ancient manuscripts, purchased through Bedouin intermediaries, that had been found in caves near the Dead Sea. The scrolls, later dated to between the third century BCE and first century CE, included some of the oldest known biblical texts and transformed scholarly understanding of Judaism and early Christianity.
The scrolls had actually been discovered by Bedouin shepherds in late 1946 or early 1947 in a cave at Qumran, near the Dead Sea's northwestern shore, when a goat wandered into an opening in the rock. Word of ancient leather scrolls filtering through Bethlehem antiquities dealers eventually reached Eleazar Sukenik, a professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Sukenik managed to acquire several scrolls despite the chaos of the escalating conflict between Jewish and Arab communities in the final months of the British Mandate. He recognized immediately that the script and language pointed to extraordinary antiquity, and on this day he announced his findings, though full academic publication would take longer amid the outbreak of Israel's War of Independence just days later.
The scrolls eventually numbered in the hundreds, recovered from eleven caves through the 1950s, and included the earliest known copies of the Hebrew Bible by roughly a thousand years, along with sectarian texts from a Jewish community, likely the Essenes, who had hidden them before the Roman destruction of the Second Temple. Sukenik's son, Yigael Yadin, later an Israeli general and archaeologist himself, would go on to acquire more scrolls for the state of Israel.
Key people: Eleazar Sukenik