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PHOTOGRAPH BY PAOLO VERZONE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IMAGE COLLECTION
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The three cousins were looking for a lost goat. Instead, they stumbled upon a 2,000-year-old treasure trove of Biblical texts in caves near the Dead Sea, including the oldest written version of the Ten Commandments.
Since the 1946 blockbuster find, scholars have shifted ideas about the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include all but one of the books of the Hebrew canon (Christian Old Testament). At first, most scholars thought reclusive monks living nearby wrote them, but later researchers suggest at least some texts were spirited to the caves from Jerusalem before Romans destroyed the great temple in A.D. 70.
New testing shows the scrolls may have been written over a 275- to 465-year period, Nat Geo reports.
Read the full story here.
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