The Dead Sea Scrolls ...... one to listen to ...... on the wireless today

I grew up with stories of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The cave , home to Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered

They were the stuff of mystery, and history and captured the imagination of a young boy growing up in south east London in the 1950s.  

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the revelatory collection of Biblical texts, legal documents, community rules and literary writings.

In 1946 a Bedouin shepherd boy was looking for a goat he’d lost in the hills above the Dead Sea. He threw a rock into a cave and heard a hollow sound. He’d hit a ceramic jar containing an ancient manuscript. This was the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of about a thousand texts dating from around 250 BC to AD 68. It is the most substantial first hand evidence we have for the beliefs and practices of Judaism in and around the lifetime of Jesus.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of how the texts that make up the Hebrew Bible were edited and collected. They also offer a tantalising window onto the world from which Christianity eventually emerged.

With Sarah Pearce, Ian Karten Professor of Jewish Studies and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Southampton, Charlotte Hempel, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Birmingham and George Brooke, Rylands Professor Emeritus of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester

Producer Luke Mulhall"*

Location; Dead Sea area

Pictures; Jericho and Dead Sea area and River Jordan. Qumran, caves where Dead Sea scrolls were found. Dead Sea in distance, Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, 1 slide, between 1947 and 1961, This file was derived from: Jericho and Dead Sea area and River Jordan.

*The Dead Sea Scrolls, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001ljc0