Tales from the Cave: Losing and Finding the Biblical Past

Tales from the Cave: Losing and Finding the Biblical Past is a study of the very idea of textual discovery. The famous story about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls by a Bedouin shepherd in a desert cave is not isolated: its contours are more or less true, but it stands in a tradition that dates back to antiquity and has left its mark on both premodern religious mythmaking and modern scholarship. Edward Said, discussing how scholars enter established fields of discourse, remarked that even the discoverer of a “once-lost manuscript produces the ‘found’ text in a context already prepared for it, for that is the real meaning of finding a new text." This book considers this “once-lost manuscript” motif across centuries, identifying the manuscript discovery narrative as a durable religious genre in Jewish and Christian texts that has also shaped historical-critical scholarship. Tales of textual loss and recovery lie at the heart of how both ancient and modern people understand the survival of their past and its incursions into the present.