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Werner Braun

GUARDED SECRETS. For millennia, the darkened caves peering out over the Dead Sea stood guard over one of the world’s greatest archaeological treasures, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Since their discovery, the scrolls have shed invaluable light on the Bible, Second Temple Judaism and the origins of Christianity, but many questions remain, including who hid the scrolls, and why? Were they left in the caves by the sectarian Jews living at Qumran, or were they hidden by desperate Temple priests fleeing the Roman destruction of Jerusalem? Our author, scroll scholar Sidnie White Crawford, believes the caves hold the answer.