Mythwashing and the Two Meanings of Mystery in Manuscript Discovery Stories

Hidden Scrolls, Buried Bibles: How We Discover the Sacred Past. Yale University Press, 2026.

In his classic Orientalism, Edward Said makes a brief aside about unearthing lost manuscripts. All scholarly representation, he writes, is “implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with many other things besides the "truth”; it is shaped by some common history, tradition, universe of discourse. ... Even the scholar who unearths 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.”

The line stuck with me. After all, I started my career as a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, perhaps the most famous “found texts” of all, whose “real meaning” we’ve been debating for nearly eighty years. While specialists consider what the Scrolls mean for the development of the biblical text or for the history of Judaism and Christianity, most people’s knowledge of these manuscripts begins and ends with their discovery story. A young Bedouin shepherd, searching for a stray goat in the desert, stumbles upon a remote cave, and discovers long-lost scrolls, hidden for two thousand years.

Some version of this story is told in every talk and every exhibit. The story is basically true - but, as Said teaches us, “implicated, intertwinedinterwined, embedded, interwoven with many things besides the ‘truth.’” As I began to look more closely into this discovery story’s relationship with the truth, I realized the narrative itself was not new. Its main features stood in a long line of tradition, a “context already prepared for it” across centuries of storytelling about lost and found texts. 

“Who knows how they were really found?”

Hidden Scrolls, Buried Bibles: How We Discover the Sacred Past is a study of manuscript discovery stories as a durable literary, religious, and academic genre. The story of the shepherd and the goat, I discovered, initially came in conflicting versions, and was later canonized into the one we all tell in class (with an increasingly central role for the goat). But let me begin with a different story—one that is less well known, but still oddly familiar: the Afghan Genizah.

The New York Times' account of this thrilling new manuscript discovery ran in 2013. The 11th century texts, including religious commentaries, economic documents, and letters, come “from the mountainous northern reaches of war-torn Afghanistan, reportedly found in a cave inhabited by foxes.”  The National Library of Israel had just acquired them from certain private dealers for an amount they did not make public. “The exact source of the documents is murky,” says the Times; “The manuscripts are said to have come from a remote area near the borders of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, wild terrain largely controlled by warlords.” But, the article continues, the National Library’s digitization project will let them “complete their journey from a dark cave to the glow of the world’s computer screens.”

The Jerusalem Post has another version:

An Afghan shepherd enters a wolves’ den perched high in the mountains of Samangan province looking for a sheep that went astray. Inside, he doesn’t find what he is looking for, but just as he is about to leave he notices something strange: Pieces of old parchment lie strewn on the dirt floor. So goes one of the stories behind the recent discovery of about 150 manuscripts and artifacts in a remote cave that belonged to a medieval Jewish community. “But there are several and they are always the same about shepherds looking for sheep,” admitted Prof. Haggai Ben-Shammai of the Hebrew University on Sunday. “Who knows how they were really found?”

The stories are always the same. But why?

The discovery story is a genre with conventional tropes:  animal guides, abandoned caves, untrustworthy locals who know the way but threaten the discoveries, and a new world of ancient revelation. The cultural and mythic preconditions that shaped our modern scholarly folklore have developed over hundreds of years of storytelling. And as a robust genre, discovery stories have often overshadowed discoveries themselves. For most people, for example, the interesting thing about the Dead Sea scrolls was not the texts, but the fact that they were hidden for two thousand years in a remote cave, and providentially discovered by a stray goat. That story became their “real meaning,” told as a religious or mythic narrative.

“The Bedouin and the Cave Became a Myth”

The story’s mythic quality was salient from the beginning. Already in the 1950’s, Solomon Zeitlin, editor of JQR, suspected it was a fabricated string of cliches meant to cover up a hoax. Provenance narratives might most obviously function to prove that a discovery is authentic, but they can also have the opposite effect. The double-edged origin story—an authorizing tale that is not believed—is not the result of a modern hermeneutic of suspicion. It appears much earlier: in the 13th century, tosafist Moses Taku accused the Karaites of fabricating the origins of their texts: “Anan and his friends used to write down heresies and lies and hide them in the ground.  Then they would take them out and say: This is what we found in ancient books.” No Karaite writers, to our knowledge, claim that their ideas came from unearthed texts—this is most likely a fabricated fabricated provenance narrative.

But Zeitlin had a more recent precedent for his doubts: “Again a Bedouin and a cave,” he scoffed, because he’d heard a story like this before. In the 1880s, the infamous forger Moses Shapira told one about the discovery of his Deuteronomy fragments, which he was trying to sell to the British Museum. In his account, Bedouin were hiding in caves where they found bundles of old black linen. They peeled away the linen, and, instead of gold, which they expected to find, there were only black inscribed strips of leather, which they threw away (or I believe he said threw into the fire, but I am not certain); but one of them picked them up and kept them in great honor as charms, and he became a rich man, worth three hundred sheep.”

With this report from Shapira, Zeitlin writes, the Bedouin and the cave “became a myth.”

Zeitlin did not allow for a myth to sometimes be true, as it essentially was in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And, as Hidden Scrolls, Buried Bibles shows, the myth was already very old when Shapira retold it. It surfaces in ninth century letters, tenth century legends of the Khazars, sixteenth century kabbalistic texts, and more. SOften, stories of lost and found manuscripts and the new world they create circulate without much attention to their nature and contents. of the manuscripts: Tthe narrative of concealment or loss and discovery is itself the religious text that is passed down. This story offers a theology of scripture and revelation as dynamic entities that move in and out of view, are efficacious even while lost, and can potentially reappear to transform the world. 

“Almost Biblical Directness”

When I first began thinking of such stories as religious narratives, I thought my idea was abstract and theoretical. We retell these stories again and again, embellishing them with traditional motifs, and as we do, they take on “canonical form.” But as I continued, I realized that the case for the Scrolls discovery story as a religious text, even a kind of scripture, was more literal than I thought.

Take this 1957 publication of how the Bedouin herdsman, Muhammad el-Hamed, nicknamed  “the Wolf,” discovered the Scrolls. Accounts of his discovery had long been circulated in a form filtered and embellished by Western scholars, where descriptions of treasure-hunting, naïvely superstitious Bedouin treaded well-worn paths. But this was the first transcription of his own words, published by American biblical scholar William Brownlee in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.

Brownlee’s publication looks like any other scholarly article. It has an introduction, a translation, line numbering, textual notes, and a plate with the original text. But the text was Muhammad’s. The speaker whose words were the subject of Brownlee’s skilful psychological apparatus, designed to close the gap between a newly unearthed ancient text and the modern reader, was his own living contemporary. It tells us something surprising about what kind of text Brownlee and his colleagues thought el-Hamed’s story was. 

Let us begin with the idea that this is “Brownlee’s publication.” To be sure, his name is in the author position: the publication would have been included on his CV, and it is searchable in bibliographies under Brownlee’s name. But the words are Muhammad el-Hamed’s. The Arabic text is transcribed by Najib Khoury. Khoury had also provided his own translation into English, but that’s not the one that was published: Brownlee asked his trusty white Protestant colleague at Duke, the biblicist and orientalist William Stinespring. 

What Brownlee has contributed is the introduction and annotations to the text of the discovery story, which is presented here as a primary source. In fact, it is published in exactly the same way that Qumran scholars would publish fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, with introductory commentary, textual notes, and a plate with a photo of the original. 

Brownlee explicitly considers el-Hamed's account a primary source that is alien, obscure, and in need of scholarly explanation. In fact, it is so close in genre to the Bible that scholars should use it to understand how biblical texts were composed. The “almost Biblical directness and beauty of the concise account of Muhammad ed Deeb,” he writes, should be “of interest to form critics as illustrating the oral form of a story told by a simple Oriental might take, though he be an eyewitness.” 

In short, the account is functionally an ancient text, even though its speaker is a living contemporary. As such, it requires scholarly explanation, just as biblical texts do, speaking as they do from long ago and far away. Brownlee cites his colleague Stinespring:

[T]he problem of Biblical exegesis [is] that of interpreting an ancient oriental document to a modern occidental world. The problem of interpretation is still present in the story of Muhammad ed-Deeb, hence the necessity of commentary.

As with other publications of ancient scriptural sources, Brownlee’s textual notes are full of biblical references. When el-Hamed mentions a lost goat, Brownlee does some traditional biblical philology: “‘Lost’ is literally ‘perishing,’ just as in the Biblical idiom of Ps. 119:176 and Luke 15:4.” The Bible is also the authority on topography, as, when el-Hamed says he “supposed [the goat] had fallen into the cave,” Brownlee notes that it is not surprising that an animal should fall into a pit in a region “so famous for its holes (cf. II Sam. 17:9).” Brownlee’s publication has turned a manuscript discovery account into scripture, and relegated its actual author—his own living contemporary—to an alien voice from the distant past.

What is most ironic is that el-Hamed may have been telling the scholars’ own story back to them. It was a decade after the fact, and by then, the discovery of the Scrolls had already turned into a popular folk tale. His account conformed to the expectations of his audience. His claim that he hoped to find gold, for instance, was a two-hundred-year-old French and English colonial cliche about destructive locals who would destroy priceless artifacts to find gold inside.           

Scholars and journalists strung together old motifs to create a narrative that rolled easily off the tongue. Already in the first generation of Qumran scholarship, the discovery had become a tradition to be repeated. “Much has already been written,” said archeologist Eleazar Sukenik, about the hidden scrolls, and I hesitate to tell their tale, although it is one of the most spectacular stories in archaeology of recent years. Yet the Haggada has commanded us, “Even if all of us were wise, all of us of understanding, all of us knowing the Torah, we should still be obligated to discuss the Exodus from Egypt; and everyone who discusses the Exodus from Egypt at length is praiseworthy.”

In the exact language of the Passover Haggadah, the story of the long-hidden scrolls, reclaimed from the desert, becomes a secular liturgy.

“Shrouded in Mystery”

Let me go back to the “mystery” of the Afghan Geniza. “An Afghan shepherd enters a wolves’ den perched high in the mountains looking for a sheep that went astray”… or does he? “Who knows how the texts were found?” What do such stories do when they are told with the clear implication that they are not to be believed – when they are presented as mythic?

We know little about the origins of the texts, thought it seems clear that they don’t come from a genizah. Their name is apparently meant to evoke the Cairo Genizah, but unlike that collection, there is not a single genizah in sight. In fact, the manuscripts probably came from different locations, and were only “assembled by those involved in its long journey from central Afghanistan to the antiquities market.” Many “have no connection to the Jewish communities in the region.”

So what do we make of the shepherd and cave story attached to these manuscripts, turned into a corpus only by their dealers and buyers? Both scholars and popular media acknowledge that there are several accounts, and all are dubious.  But if nobody believes these stories, why do we keep telling them?

As the book shows, manuscript discovery stories are not just frames for ancient texts. They often become the primary element that audiences remember and engage, captivated by the sense of mystery that they evoke.  

But what is a “mystery”? It has another meaning. A mystery, when it comes to modern fiction, is a genre where the protagonist exposes a hidden crime. And, as Roberta Mazza has most recently shown, our academic fields are shockingly crime-adjacent. When an artifact has no provenance—when it is “shrouded in mystery,” as so many are—we should suspect that somewhere, someone has committed a crime: looting, smuggling, colonial violence, or forgery.

The Afghan manuscripts’ “mysterious” origins strongly suggest that they were illegally looted and smuggled out of Afghanistan. The mythic, familiar discovery stories obscure this stark conclusion, working as a sleight-of-hand. I call this move mythwashing: a strategy, conscious or not, of laundering criminal origins by directing our focus to a captivating myth of discovery. Even if these myths are not believable, their power rests in deep-rooted cultural and religious patterns, old ideas about how sacred texts travel through time and space.

These myths have made it difficult to see the connection between mystery and crime. In connection with ancient manuscripts, we think of mystery as wonder and awe, divine secrets, and revelation from other realms. When manuscript loss and discovery is framed this way--when we tell the stories of modern discovery the same way we recite religious texts—our reverence and desire distracts us from the material reality of trade in ancient artifacts. The other kind of mystery, hidden crime, remains obscure. Tales of lost and found scrolls have created a world of secrets and gaps. They are filled for us by forgers, smugglers, and other criminals, and mythwashed by ancient dreams of revelation.  

 Eva Mroczek is the Simon and Riva Spatz Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor in Religious Studies at Dalhousie University.