Return to the Cave of Letters: What Still Lies Buried?

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A small shovel started it all. In the summer of 1996, at the excavation of the Galilee site of Bethsaida (which we codirect), we uncovered a small bronze incense shovel. Others like it were used in the imperial cult throughout the Roman Empire. Although not impressive in size (a mere 8 inches long), the shovel is expertly crafted: The handle is molded in the shape of a Corinthian capital; two leaves in the corners of the rectangular pan give it the appearance of a horned altar; and five concentric circles on the pan itself provide elegant decoration (see photo). The discovery was so noteworthy that BAR named it a Prize Find in its 1997 “Dig Issue.”

We discovered the shovel among first-century C.E. remains, near a building that we have identified as a Roman temple. So far, so good: a ritual object resembling others known to have been used in the Roman imperial cult, found near a Roman temple. But then an intriguing problem arose. The shovel looked strangely familiar. Forty years ago, on one of Israel’s most-storied archaeological expeditions, Yigael Yadin discovered a shovel almost exactly like ours in an isolated Judean Desert cave near the Dead Sea known as the Cave of Letters. The two shovels were so much alike that for a short time we thought they might have been cast from the same mold.

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But Yadin found his shovel in a context that he associated with followers of Bar-Kokhba, the leader of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome (132–135 C.E.), who fled to the cave during the last desperate months of the uprising. Yadin made several very important finds in the Cave of Letters, all of which he dated to the second century C.E.: a hoard of bronze objects that included the shovel, a clutch of letters written by Bar-Kokhba to his commanders (which gave the cave its name) and a collection of legal and personal documents known as Babatha’s archive.^a How could two identical shovels come from, in one instance, a first-century C.E. Roman temple^b and, in the other instance, the desert hideout of second-century C.E. Jewish rebels?

The two of us are divided over how to answer this question. Richard suggests that the Cave of Letters shovel dates to the first century C.E. and comes from the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, where it may have been one of the items dedicated to the Temple by Augustus Caesar (ruled 27 B.C.E.–14 C.E.). Rami, too, believes the shovel comes from Jerusalem, but he thinks it was used in the pagan sanctuary erected by Hadrian on the Temple Mount in 132 C.E.

While we disagree over which temple the shovel may have come from and to which century it should be dated, we agree that Jerusalem was almost certainly its city of origin. Jerusalem was the closest population center to the Judean Desert, and the Judean wilderness has always been a place of refuge for people from Jerusalem. The Cave of Letters and Jerusalem are just over 25 miles apart as the crow flies, so we should not be surprised at movement between the two areas.

Prompted by the mystery of the shovels, we returned to the Cave of Letters 40 years after Yadin. We went not only in search of artifacts but also to gain a better understanding of the cave’s history and how people 027survived in it. We have now conducted two forays into the cave, a five-day exploratory mission in 1999 and an 18-day dig last summer. We brought with us high-tech research tools unimaginable to the cave’s earlier explorers.

Like our predecessors, we had to conduct our research in one of the most forbidding landscapes in the world, the Judean wilderness. From the flat areas adjacent to the shores of the Dead Sea, the earth rises dramatically to form craggy, flat-topped mountain ranges that tower above barren valleys. The flat peaks extend like fingers toward the sea; their sides are pockmarked with hundreds of crevices and caves. In the summer, the heat at midday reaches 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

But we’re jumping ahead of our story. To appreciate the scope of our renewed excavation, we need to review previous explorations at the site, a story that begins half a century ago.

In the late 1940s the world was astounded to learn that a cache of ancient manuscripts had been discovered by Bedouin shepherds in caves overlooking the western shore of the Dead Sea, in an area then controlled by Jordan. These documents, preserved by the region’s exceptionally dry climate, eventually revealed a portrait of an enigmatic Jewish community, perhaps the Essenes, that had retreated to the desert outpost of Qumran to pursue an ascetic life. The Dead Sea Scrolls, hidden in caves near Qumran, contained the rules for this community, polemical exchanges with outsiders and Biblical books that were copied before the Jewish canon became fixed and the text standardized. William Foxwell Albright, the doyen of Biblical archaeologists, rightly called the scrolls the greatest manuscript discovery of the 20th century.

The ancient settlement at Qumran met a violent end in 68 C.E., during the First Jewish Revolt, at the hands of Roman soldiers, who would put Jerusalem to the torch two years later.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, however, proved to be not a single discovery, but a series of discoveries. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, a team of archaeologists and local Bedouin continued searching the caves near Qumran for more scrolls. The Bedouin proved far more successful than the archaeological team, which was forced to purchase the Bedouin finds from the now-famous antiquities dealer, nicknamed Kando, who represented them.

At almost the same time, manuscripts began appearing on the market that were said to have come not from the Jordanian-controlled caves near Qumran, but further south—from Israel. These reports soon reached Yohanan Aharoni, the archaeology officer in Israel’s Department of Antiquities who was responsible for the Judean wilderness. Aharoni was just beginning a career that would earn him a reputation as one of Israel’s most distinguished archaeologists; he would later help establish the ancient Near Eastern studies department of Tel Aviv University.

Based on secondhand information from the Bedouin, Aharoni mustered a team late in 1953 to investigate one of the southern caves, a cave with a double opening in Nahal Hever (one of many dry desert riverbeds that are prone to flash floods in the rainy season). This was the first exploration of the desolate cave that would come to be known as the Cave of Letters.

The cave in Nahal Hever that Aharoni explored is particularly hard to reach. Its double entrance lies more than 650 feet above the valley floor and more than 300 feet below the desert plateau. To reach it, you must descend a narrow, twisting path that leads from the plateau to a small ledge about 30 feet below the entrance; from there, someone has to clamber up to the cave, secure a rope ladder at the entrance and drop it down to the ledge for others to use. Equipment must be lifted and lowered by rope. Aharoni’s team included a 27-year-old kibbutznik named Baruch Safrai, whose kibbutz fished the waters along Israel’s northern coast. Safrai was asked to join the team because of his experience with rope and tackle. He proved to be a valuable member of the team for other reasons as well.

If access to the cave is difficult, so are working conditions inside. The cave is dark and fouled by the stench of bat droppings. Movement is difficult because the floor is partially blocked by large boulders that have fallen from the ceiling over the centuries, the result of earthquakes, which are common in this area.

Aharoni’s team reached the cave in late November 0281953. As soon as they entered it, they realized that the Bedouin had been there before them. Cigarette packs from Jordan littered the floor; pottery sherds of no interest to the Bedouin were left behind helter-skelter. From the pottery, however, Aharoni concluded that the cave had been inhabited during three periods: the Chalcolithic period (4500–3300 B.C.E.), the first century C.E. and the second century C.E.

But the most spectacular find would be made by Safrai. He described it in BAR 40 years later:

I was young and slim and lithe in those days, and strong in the bargain. I offered to try to shift some of the boulders and wriggle in among the gaps … I began to descend snakelike in among the gaps, with my arms thrust forward, shining a powerful flashlight ahead of me.

When I had penetrated down to about the length of my body, I glimpsed by the light of the flashlight, pinned under the boulders, a human skeleton lying on its side with its arms and legs asprawl. The skeleton was clothed in a white robe. Around the waist was a rope belt, knotted in front.^c

Safrai believed that the unfortunate fellow he had discovered may have been an Essene who had become trapped by rock debris falling from the cave roof during an earthquake. Safrai was able to pull the rope belt and part of the tunic from underneath the boulders. Alas, no one today knows where the cloth and rope are; they may have been lost after having been put into storage, or they may have been misplaced soon after discovery. But note that the cave’s initial investigators identified a first- and a second-century C.E. period of occupation and believed that the skeleton might have been Essene. In short, they suggested that the Cave of Letters may have been connected to the people who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. As we will see, when Yadin later explored the cave he came to believe that it had been occupied in the second century C.E., but not the first.

Aharoni also discovered two second-century C.E. Roman camps on the plateau above the cave. The soldiers in these camps had laid siege to the rebels hiding out in the cave during its last period of occupation, at the time of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt.

In 1959, six years after Aharoni’s dig, international attention again turned to the Judean Desert caves when several Hebrew texts came onto the antiquities market. The texts were said to have been found by “unidentified sources” in Nahal Se’elim, which winds its way from what was then Jordanian territory into Israel and runs into the western shore of the Dead Sea about 7 miles south of the Cave of Letters. The Bedouin, clearly, had struck paydirt once again, and they were becoming more daring, venturing deeper and deeper into Israeli territory. Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion ordered a crackdown on Bedouin infiltration into Israel. His army chief of staff, though, came up with an even better idea: Put the Bedouin and other potential looters out of business by launching the archaeological equivalent of a pre-emptive strike.

In 1960, four of Israel’s leading archaeologists were dispatched to scour the Judean Desert caves. Each was assigned to caves on either side of various plateaus extending toward the Dead Sea. Aharoni, who already had experience exploring the caves, was given first choice. He chose the northern side of Nahal Se’elim, an eminently reasonable choice because that is where the most recently discovered manuscripts were thought to have originated. The three other teams were headed by Pesach Bar-Adon, a longtime excavator with the Israel Department of Antiquities; Nahman Avigad, of Hebrew University’s archaeology department; and Yigael Yadin, who was in the early stages of what would prove to be a spectacular career as an archaeologist.

Bar-Adon chose the northern side of Nahal Mishmar, which lies between Nahal Se’elim and Nahal Hever. He chose well: His team was to make one of the most stunning finds in the history of Israeli archaeology, a collection of more than 400 copper and ivory cult objects of extraordinary beauty and workmanship dating to about 3500 B.C.E. The cave in which Bar-Adon made the find 029became known, aptly, as the Cave of the Treasure. Impressive as Bar-Adon’s discovery was, his major finds date to the Chalcolithic period and therefore do not relate directly to our story.^d

Avigad had no such luck. He explored the southern side of Nahal Se’elim, opposite Aharoni, but found little. (Readers need not feel sorry for Avigad, however; after the 1967 Six-Day War, he crowned his career by directing the digs in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem).

Aharoni, too, found almost nothing, despite having chosen what seemed like the best site. This must have been a bitter blow.

That left Yadin, who, at first blush, seemed to have been stuck with the worst place to dig. As a junior member of the expedition, he was assigned to return to Nahal Hever, where Aharoni had already been. David Ussishkin, today a senior figure in Israeli archaeology but then a protégé of Yadin, recalled that Yadin’s prospects were slim. “Yadin really didn’t have any expectations,” Ussishkin recalled later. “He just went along as if it were a kind of picnic, to spend two weeks in the desert looking at the view.”¹

It proved to be an extraordinary picnic. On the second day of Yadin’s expedition, while his team was still transferring equipment inside the cave with the double 030opening that Aharoni had already explored, one team member, a kibbutznik volunteer named Pinhas Prusky—“a real maverick,” in Yadin’s words—broke away from the group and, with only a candle to light his way, decided to explore the cave on his own. Near the back of the cave, Prusky came across a small opening, so small that he was barely able to wedge himself through it. When he squeezed inside, he was unnerved by an unexpected sight: several skulls, their jawbones missing, gathered in a basket.

The following day the same crevice yielded numerous other bones, including a skeleton covered by a colorful blanket and, in a basket lined with leather, the remains of a child wrapped in a tunic. Subsequent examination showed the finds to be the remains of three men, eight women and six children. Yadin later found more human remains in the cave and concluded that the cave had served as a hideout for Bar-Kokhba’s warriors and their families during the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome. He believed that the inhabitants starved to death and that their remains were gathered into makeshift burials by people who came to the cave later.

A cascade of spectacular finds followed. When a coin from the Second Jewish Revolt was discovered on the narrow ledge leading to the cave, Yadin decided to add a metal detector to the search. At first the metal detector remained silent, but then, near the area inside the cave where the two entrances join, it began to beep wildly. The ever-resourceful Prusky began to clear the spot. About 5 feet beneath the cave floor Prusky again found a basket, filled this time not with skulls but with bronze cult objects. Yadin arranged for photographers to record the historic unpacking of the finds.

Yadin did the honors, comparing himself to a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat:² Out came 12 juglets, three shovels (including the twin to ours at Bethsaida), a well-preserved skillet-shaped pan (called a patera), a key and two large bowls. Engraved on the center of the patera is a pagan scene: Thetis, the mother of Achilles, giving armor to her son as she rides on a sea creature that has the upper body of a human and the lower body of a fish.

What were these Roman artifacts doing among the possessions of second-century C.E. Jewish rebels?

Two days later, near the spot where the bronze hoard had been found, Yadin’s team made its first manuscript discovery, a fragment of the Book of Psalms that read “O Lord, who shall sojourn in thy tents? … He who walks blamelessly, and does what is right” 031(Psalms 15:1–2).

More exciting finds were to come. Yadin’s group next discovered a leather water skin that contained beads, cosmetics, perfume flasks and a mirror. Near it lay a bundle of papyri wrapped around wooden slats with writing on them. When Yadin extricated one of the slats, he was shocked to read “Shimeon bar [son of] Kosiba, nasi [prince or leader] over Israel.”^e Yadin’s team had stumbled across a cache of correspondence between Bar-Kokhba and his local commanders. The news stunned all Israel. It also gave a name to the cave with the double entrance: From that moment on, it would be known as the Cave of Letters.

Bar-Adon’s and Yadin’s efforts were so successful that it was decided to explore the Judean caves again the following year. Ironically, Yadin had far more luck than Aharoni during the first excavations. By this time the 033two men had developed a well-known professional feud that, unfortunately, also reflected a growing personal animosity between them. The split had begun when Aharoni worked with Yadin at Hazor, an important Biblical site in northern Galilee. Yadin believed Hazor had been put to the torch by Joshua, as described in the Bible; Aharoni, for his part, defended the theory advanced by German Bible scholar Albrecht Alt that the Israelites slowly “infiltrated” Canaanite society and did not conquer it swiftly by military means. There were also personal differences between the two men. Aharoni was, for the most part, quiet and retiring. Yadin, on the other hand, was attracted to the limelight and had a flair for capturing the popular imagination. He also had a knack for finding things.

That knack manifested itself again during the 1961 excavations in the cave. On the first day of Yadin’s dig, his team found a basket filled with objects. Because it was late in the day, the team had to wait until the next morning before removing the objects from the basket so that the entire process could be photographed. The expedition’s photographer was David Harris (whose photos often appear in BAR and who recently reminisced in these pages about his time with Yadin).^f Once again, Yadin did the honors, removing the objects one by one before the photographers. First to emerge from the basket was a container shaped like a small country mailbox—rounded at the top and flat on the bottom. It was empty; Yadin identified it as a jewelry box.

Yadin moved on: wooden bowls, an iron sickle, a woman’s pair of leather sandals, keys and a set of cutlery. Once emptied, the basket itself was removed to see what might lie beneath it. There Yadin found a frying pan, two bronze jugs and a mirror. “The metal disc was so shiny that we could easily see our dusty, sweating, radiant reflections in it,” Yadin wrote in his popular book on his exploration of the cave.³ At the bottom of the crevice lay seven rolled-up papyri, a well-worn leather purse and a goatskin. The goatskin contained rags, rope, yarn and 35 papyrus rolls, “stuffed together like a bunch of asparagus,” in Yadin’s words.⁴

The documents in the goatskin—a cache that we now call Babatha’s archive—provide a remarkable glimpse into everyday life at the time of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt. Babatha was a woman originally from an area southeast of the Dead Sea. She later moved to Ein Gedi and was among the doomed group that fled to the Cave of Letters just before the Roman troops captured that city. In addition to personal items (the mirror and jewelry box were probably hers), Babatha also brought important legal documents with her. She had outlived two husbands and apparently led a litigious life. The nearly three dozen legal documents that Yadin recovered deal with questions over property Babatha had inherited from her father and, most of all, issues concerning the guardianship of her son.

Babatha’s archive reveals a world in which Jews adhere to religious law but also follow Roman law in financial matters. That Babatha expected to return to the cave someday to retrieve the documents is shown by the careful way she secreted her cache: She wrapped and deposited her documents in a nook and disguised the opening by covering it with a stone.

The everyday details contained in the Babatha archive vividly bring to life the people who met their end in the Cave of Letters. Yadin described it best at the end of his popular book on Bar-Kokhba:

Descending daily over the precipice, crossing the dangerous ledge to the caves, working all day long in the stench of the bats, confronted from time to time with the tragic remains of those besieged and trapped—we found that our emotions were a mixture of tension and awe, yet astonishment and pride at being part of the reborn State of Israel after a Diaspora of 1,800 years. Here were we, living in tents erected by the Israel Defense Forces, walking every day throughout the ruins of a Roman camp which caused the death of our forefathers. Nothing remains here of the Romans save a heap of stones on the face of the desert, but here the descendants of the besieged were returning to salvage their ancestors’ precious belongings.⁵

The Cave of Letters thus became fixed in popular imagination as one of the showpiece excavations of early Israeli archaeology, a tour-de-force of historical reconstruction led by Israel’s most dynamic excavator. Babatha’s documents sealed Yadin’s understanding of the cave’s history. For Yadin, the cave represented an important piece of second-century C.E. Jewish history: a hideout for Bar-Kokhba’s warriors and their families, a vivid glimpse into the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome. The cave’s possible first-century C.E. connections—made by its first explorers, Aharoni and Safrai—were almost forgotten.

And that’s where matters stood until we recovered the incense shovel at Bethsaida. Its first-century C.E. context at Bethsaida forced us to wonder: Could Yadin have been wrong about the shovel in the Cave of Letters? Might the cave also have been a refuge in the first century C.E., during the First Jewish Revolt?

One of us (Richard) described the shovel and our 034other finds from Bethsaida at a conference in Jerusalem during the summer of 1997, held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Richard also spoke of Yadin’s work in the Cave of Letters and described our problem over the dating of the two shovels. After his talk, an older gentleman approached him. “If you have time, I will tell you the full story of the Cave of Letters.” The gentleman, it turned out, was Baruch Safrai, the man who discovered the tunic-clad skeleton in 1953!

Safrai told Richard not only of his discovery but all about that first exploration of the cave under Aharoni, before the cave became associated in people’s minds exclusively with the second century C.E. After speaking with Safrai for two hours, Richard became convinced that the shovel found in the cave came from the Jerusalem Temple and that the skeleton may have been that of a priest who had fled to the desert with ritual objects from the Temple to escape the Romans.

The only way to test the theory was to return to the Cave of Letters. But that deceptively simple sentence belies the reality: We were proposing to return to a barely accessible site in an inhospitable locale to dig where Israel’s most famous archaeologists had already explored and where they had established what seemed to be the cave’s definitive history.

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With the encouragement of Adolfo Roitman, the curator of the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book (the home of the major Dead Sea Scrolls and also the repository of Yadin’s finds from the Cave of Letters), we began to make plans.

We don’t believe any dig ever had better luck than we did in forming our excavation team. We were already working with geologist Jack Shroder on the Bethsaida dig. At the time, the three of us were colleagues at the University of Nebraska at Omaha; as we were discussing the feasibility of mapping the Cave of Letters, Shroder suggested we consult with one of his colleagues down the hall, Phil Reeder. Phil had been working for years on mapping caves in Belize, South America. So here at a small state university campus there happened to be the very specialist our project needed! Phil believed he could map the Cave of Letters, and he joined our team as chief geographer.

Perhaps the most serendipitous contribution to the Cave of Letters project was made by someone without any connection to archaeology—Richard’s doctor! Like other men in their 40s, Richard had been told to get a colonoscopy, a screen for colon cancer. Unlike many men, he did not put it off. The procedure is not a pleasant one, but while Richard’s physician was explaining the exam, a thought came to him: The endoscope used in the procedure is a remarkably thin and flexible wire with a tiny lens attached to it; an endoscope, he thought, would be a valuable tool when investigating the narrow crevices of a cave filled with rockfall and other debris. But most doctors don’t keep spare endoscopes around just to lend to archaeologists, so where to find one? As luck would have it, in September 1998 Richard was teaching a Hebrew course at the Jewish Community Center of Omaha, and one of his students was Dr. Gordon Moshman, a physician—and an amateur climber! Dr. Moshman offered us an endoscope and then volunteered to operate it himself in the cave!

Finally, we must mention the most incredible coincidence of all. A long-standing member of our Bethsaida dig has been Pinhas Porat, a member of a kibbutz in the southern Galilee who has long been involved in archaeological projects. As word of our interest in the Cave of Letters began to filter out, Pinhas contacted us 036and told us that he did not always bear the Hebraicized last name of Porat; his original family name was, in fact, Prusky: Working with us at Bethsaida was none other than Pinhas Prusky, the young volunteer under Yadin who had discovered the skulls and the bronze hoard just inside the cave’s first hall. The same Pinhas Prusky whom Yadin had called “a real maverick” had not only found the bronze incense shovels in the cave, but he was—almost 40 years later—a member of the dig that discovered the other incense shovel at Bethsaida! Does the word kismet come to mind?

Needless to say, we were eager to talk to Pinhas about his days on the Yadin expedition. He added a very intriguing detail regarding the discovery of the bronze hoard that included the shovel. According to Porat, the collection was discovered underneath a layer of human excrement, not bat droppings as Yadin initially reported. It’s not a very appealing detail, but it is an important one. We believe the bronze hoard was buried underneath latrines used by Bar-Kokhba’s warriors in the second century C.E. But why would Bar-Kokhba’s troops build a latrine over a hiding place for precious objects? Once again we differ. Richard believes that the second-century C.E. rebels did not know they were building a latrine over a buried hoard. Rami, however, thinks they wished to defile pagan items by dumping them in a latrine.

We decided to perform a five-day probe of the Cave of Letters to see if it warranted further exploration. We hoped to go to the cave in early 1999, over winter break or during the spring months. (Summers near the Dead Sea are simply brutal, with temperatures reaching 110 or 120 degrees.) That’s when we hit our first major obstacle—and it came from the unlikeliest source. The Nahal Hever region, where the Cave of Letters is located, is home to vultures whose nesting season runs from November to June. So in addition to having to apply to the Israel Antiquities Authority for permission to excavate (as do all digs), we also needed the approval of the Nature Reserves Authority. Because of the vultures’ nesting season, if we wanted to explore the cave we would have to do it in July! But better to dig in July than not to dig at all.

Excavating the Cave of Letters increased our admiration for those who had preceded us. It is every bit as difficult to reach today as it was when Aharoni and Yadin explored there. If anything, it is even harder because the narrow ledge below the entrance has eroded even in the relatively short time since the last organized expeditions.

Once inside the cave, we were faced with the same obstacles as our predecessors: the overpowering stench and the massive boulders scattered throughout.

Our foray into the cave was brief, but productive. We put the endoscope to immediate use. Snaking its way through tiny gaps between boulders, the endoscope brought us the kinds of pictures we had hoped to see: live video of remains still buried in the debris. We saw linen bags, coins, wood, pottery, metal, even a comb.

Perhaps more important than the individual finds, 037we proved that it was possible to conduct a modern-day excavation even in so daunting a location as the Cave of Letters.

We knew we had to go back for a more extended search. But a longer season introduced a new problem: Where would we get the money needed for a three-week expedition? Once again, luck smiled on the renewed Cave of Letters excavation. In the fall of 1999, we described to Hershel Shanks, BAR’s editor, the finds we uncovered in just a few days at the Cave of Letters. He was unequivocal in his response. “You must go back and excavate the cave,” he said enthusiastically.

But Hershel did more than provide enthusiasm; he connected us with John and Carol Merrill, of Palm Beach, Florida. (They now spend most of their time on a farm in Virginia.) The Merrills have wide-ranging cultural interests, and they jumped at the chance to support an extended excavation at the Cave of Letters—not only to support us financially but also to join us on the expedition.

The 2000 season almost didn’t get off the ground, however. Once again, the vultures affected our work. As in the previous season, their nesting habits required us to work in the cave in the middle of the summer. Since we were going to be there for several weeks, we had hoped to camp in the valley, at the foot of the cave, to eliminate back-and-forth travel. But the Nature Authority was concerned that our camp would disturb the vultures, so we had to arrange to stay at a settlement one hour away (thereby adding another $20,000 to our costs).

We returned to the Cave of Letters on July 3, 2000. One of the questions that had puzzled us for a long time was where the people who lived in the cave got their water. That puzzle was solved soon after we arrived and surveyed the area. We discovered three nearby sources of water: two pools that hold water from the occasional flash floods that occur in the Judean wilderness and a spring. The year 2000 was a drought year, but even then the two pools contained fresh water.

A survey of the cave with Ground Penetrating Radar quickly established what we had suspected: There were multiple layers (or strata) of occupation, including one from the first century C.E. and one from the second century C.E. (The Chalcolithic period, which is also represented in the cave, is another matter; we hope to explore it further at a later date.) We also found that the cave is much bigger than Yadin realized. He measured it as nearly 500 feet long; we have discovered additional passageways in the cave that bring the total surveyed space to nearly 1,800 feet.

We discovered thousands of pieces of pottery and oil lamps, including two dozen that can be dated; they proved to be first- and second-century C.E. pieces. We also found hundreds of textile fragments. In his excavations, Yadin had found Jerusalem limestone ware in 038the cave; these suggest the presence of Jews because stoneware cannot become ritually defiled. Stoneware was particularly common in Jerusalem while the Temple was still standing, but became much less important afterwards.^g Bits of papyrus, unfortunately without inscriptions, indicate that somewhere in the cave the remains of scrolls may still exist.

All this shows that the Cave of Letters was very likely inhabited during the first century C.E. as well as in the second. We can add one more piece of evidence: coins. We found five coins in the summer of 2000 and two in 1999. Three of them date to the first, second and fourth years of the Bar-Kokhba rebellion (132, 133 and 135 C.E.). The others are a Nabatean coin dating to 106 C.E. and a coin of Trajan from about 113 C.E. These two coins made us suspect that the Cave of Letters had been in use before the Bar-Kokhba Revolt, but we lacked a “smoking gun” to seal our case. Then this past summer we found a silver coin of the Roman emperor Vespasian, dating to 70 C.E. and a coin from the second year of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (68 C.E.). The last coin is very strong evidence of a first-century C.E. occupation in the cave. True, the second-century C.E. inhabitants of the cave, when they quickly gathered their valuables while fleeing from the Romans, may have brought with them coins minted in the previous century, but that is unlikely. How many 65-year-old coins do you have in your pocket?

We also made a discovery that gave us much personal satisfaction: We are almost certain we found the skeleton first glimpsed by Baruch Safrai in 1953. We had asked Safrai to pinpoint the findspot on a plan of the cave; after so many years, he could no longer be certain of the precise spot, but he drew two X’s on the plan to indicate where the skeleton might have been. His memory proved reliable. At the spot marked by the first X, we inserted the endoscope 039underneath a boulder weighing about 4 tons. On the video display we could see parts of the skeleton and the remains of the tunic and rope just as Safrai did nearly half a century ago.

Our return to the Cave of Letters has caused us to completely rewrite its history. Yadin thought it had been inhabited only in the second century C.E., and he thought the bronze hoard he had discovered—including the patera (the pan depicting the mother of Achilles) and the incense shovels—were Roman artifacts that had been plundered by Bar-Kokhba’s troops in Ein-Gedi and brought with them when they went into hiding. We propose a different explanation: The objects that appear to date to the first century C.E.—the incense shovels and rest of the bronze hoard, the stoneware, the Psalms fragment, the First Revolt era coins—not only appear to date to the first century C.E., they really do. Perhaps they were taken to the cave by Jerusalem priests fleeing the city’s destruction by the Romans. The second-century C.E. remains—Babatha’s archive, the Bar-Kokhba letters—pose no dating difficulty (they are clearly second century C.E.), but they should not preclude our dating of the cave’s other artifacts to the first century C.E.

And what of the little incense shovel from Bethsaida that innocently sent us from Galilee to the Judean Desert? Shovels like this were part of the cultic paraphernalia used in the Jerusalem Temple. After the Temple’s destruction, incense shovels (along with other objects from the Temple) were frequently pictured in mosaic floors in numerous synagogues, reflecting their importance when the Temple still stood. But in the ancient world, a world rich in religious symbolism, symbols tended not to be restricted to a single religion. We believe shovels such as those in the Cave of Letters passed from Jewish practice and were adopted for use in Roman temples. Conversely, scenes such as the one on the patera developed first in pagan cults and then passed into Jewish iconography. This same scene appears on the base of the Jerusalem Temple menorah as depicted in the relief on the Arch of Titus in Rome, which shows Roman soldiers carrying off booty from the Jerusalem Temple.⁶

We hope to return to the Cave of Letters this summer, although only for a few days. We suspect there may be important artifacts crushed under the huge boulders we were unable to move last year, so we will be bringing with us a specialist in breaking up rocks. The blank bits of papyrus that we found are tantalizing: Might there be written materials still waiting to be discovered under the boulders we could not move last summer? How many more secrets lie hidden in the Cave of Letters? We hope to find out when we clamber back up the rocky cliffs that face the Dead Sea and step inside the ever-fascinating cave with the double opening.

A small shovel started it all. In the summer of 1996, at the excavation of the Galilee site of Bethsaida (which we codirect), we uncovered a small bronze incense shovel. Others like it were used in the imperial cult throughout the Roman Empire. Although not impressive in size (a mere 8 inches long), the shovel is expertly crafted: The handle is molded in the shape of a Corinthian capital; two leaves in the corners of the rectangular pan give it the appearance of a horned altar; and five concentric circles on the pan itself provide elegant decoration (see photo). […]