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How Market Incentives Damaged Scrolls
- Early Bedouin finders sold fragments to an antiquities dealer nicknamed Kando, who acted as middleman to scholars.
- Paying per inscribed area incentivized cutting manuscripts into smaller, damaged fragments.
Value Of Uninscribed Fragments
- Uninscribed parchment pieces matter because they reveal scribal practices, construction, and manuscript function.
- Material philology treats these fragments as archaeological evidence, not just text carriers.
Textual Impact On The Hebrew Bible
- The scrolls pushed the textual history of Hebrew scriptures back about a millennium by providing pre-medieval witnesses.
- They include fragments of every Old Testament book except Esther, showing wide circulation of biblical texts.