First “Dead Sea Scroll” Found in Egypt Fifty Years Before Qumran Discoveries - The BAS Library
Login
Home > Magazines > BAR > September/October 1982

First “Dead Sea Scroll” Found in Egypt Fifty Years Before Qumran Discoveries

Solomon Schechter presages later Essene scholarship

By Raphael Levy

Some call it the first Dead Sea Scroll—but it was found in Cairo and not in a cave. It was recovered in 1897 in a Genizah, a synagogue repository for worn-out copies of sacred writings. The gifted scholar who had found it, Solomon Schechter, gave it with a hoard of other ancient Hebrew manuscripts to Cambridge University, where it still remains today. Of course no one called it the first Dead Sea Scroll in 1897. That was fifty years before the momentous discovery on the actual Dead Sea Scrolls, in 1947, in the caves of Qumran on the northwest […]

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

1.

Schechter titled his study “Fragments of a Zadokite Work” because the sect that wrote the document followed the Zadokite tradition, calling their priests the sons of Zadok, descendents of King David’s high priest.

2.

See sidebar, “Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Preserves 2000 Years of History.”

Endnotes

1.

S. Schechter, Documents of Jewish Sectaries: Fragments of a Zadokite Work (C.U.P., Cambridge, 1910), Introduction, p. xviii.

2.

Ibid., p. xiii.

3.

A. Whigham Price, The Ladies of Castlebrae University of Durham, 1964), p. 1.

4.

Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, A Biography (The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1938), p. 130.

5.

S. Schechter, Studies in Judaism: Second Series (The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1908), p. 6.

6.

Ibid., p. 6.

7.

Ibid, p. 8.

8.

S. Schechter, Documents of Jewish Sectaries: Fragments of a Zadokite Work, Introduction, pp. xv, xvi.

9.

Millar Burrows, The Dead Sea Scrolls (Viking, New York, 1955), p. 187.