Chapter Four
The last artifact I’d been working on lay under protective glass. It was a few pages of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
They’d been found in the mid-twentieth century but were likely written before the second century. Locals in Qumran had found the artifacts wrapped in linen and stored in jars in eleven different caves. Many believed the scrolls had been placed in the caves to hide them from the advancing Roman army during a Jewish revolt in 68 AD.
The authors were likely Jewish scholars. The scrolls were an eight-hundred-plus-page manuscript written on papyrus. Most of the writings were from the books of what most humans knew to be the Hebrew Bible, what Christians called the Old Testament. The rest of the writings were religious texts and secular writings like laws, catalogs, war c
