The Wadi Murabba'at manuscripts

Record summary

Caves at Wadi Murabba'at yielded manuscripts, documents, coins, textiles and other materials during discoveries and excavations in the early 1950s. The corpus includes biblical fragments, legal and administrative documents, and material associated with the Bar Kokhba period. It matters for comparing manuscript transmission, desert refuge sites and the chronology of Jewish resistance under Roman rule. Some pieces entered circulation through antiquities dealers before controlled excavation, complicating provenance. The corpus is not a single ideological library and should not be conflated wholesale with the Qumran collection.