In 1947, young Bedouin shepherds, searching for a stray goat in the Judean Desert, entered a long-untouched cave and found jars filled with ancient scrolls. That initial discovery by the Bedouins yielded seven scrolls and began a search that lasted nearly a decade and eventually produced thousands of scroll fragments from eleven caves. During those same years, archaeologists searching for a habitation close to the caves that might help identify the people who deposited the scrolls, excavated the Qumran ruin, a complex of structures located on a barren terrace between the cliffs where the caves are found and the dead sea. Within a fairly short time after their discovery, historical, paleographic, and linguistic evidence, as well as carbon-14 dating, established that the scrolls and the Qumran ruin dated from the third century B.

C. to 68 a.d. Coming from the late Second Temple Period, a time when Jesus of Nazareth (a.ka. jesus christ) lived, they are older than any other surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures by almost one thousand years.

Since their discovery the scrolls and the identity of the nearby settlement have been the object of great scholarly and public interest, as well as heated debate and controversy. Why were the scrolls hidden in the caves? Who placed them there? Who lived in Qumran? Were its inhabitants responsible for the scrolls and their presence in the caves? Of what significance are the scrolls to Judaism and Christianity?in this song, the searching for the dead sea scrolls is equated with the longing for a god ('dependent on above'), about which you can read more in the works of soeren kierkegaard and albert camus. see also camus' quotes about this metaphysical or religious longing: in a universe suddenly divested of illusion and li... and then came human beings, they wanted to cling but t....