The Scandals of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Part II)

Desperate Measures Mar Samuel was desperate. As discussed in the previous part of this series, he had been the head of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem and the initial buyer of four of the first Scrolls to be discovered. He’d then emigrated to America in the early 1950s to assume leadership of the local branch, and he needed to raise funds quickly. He decided to sell these Scrolls and on June 1, 1954, he placed a “For Sale” notice in the Wall Street Journal, inviting expressions of interest in “Four Dead Sea Scrolls … an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution. Box F206”.

The Shrine of the Book Coincidentally, this advertisement came to the notice of Yigael Yadin, the son of Eliezer Sukenik, who had just recently died. Yadin was an ex-Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, who had retired, gained his PhD in archaeology at Hebrew University with a thesis on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and was then in America on a lecture tour. Working through a…