The Bedouin Boys by Kirsty Gill

13 January 2021  { Historical Fiction }


The Bedouin Boys

 

We were just mucking about. It was nearly mid-day and getting really hot. We always stop to have a bit of rest and something to eat at noon I had some dates with me and Ali had some bread. We shared both and drank from our flasks, being careful, as always, not to finish the water as there would be no more until we got home.

Ali is the same age as me and he is my best friend. Neither of us go to school any more. We did not learn much there anyway. We were not really interested. Neither of us can read. We just look after the animals now and that suits us just fine. He minds the sheep and I look after the goats but they all graze together. We only separate them at night.

We like to play games too. I have a small ball which we kick around or play catch with and we have each made our own catapults. We like to use those to see who has the best aim – usually by judging who has the best of three shots, aiming either at a stone or a lizard (which is more difficult, of course).

On this particular day I was getting a bit bored with trying to strike the lizard because Ali was having more luck with his catapult. I did not like losing so I stood up and turned round and fired my pebble into the cave instead. I did not expect what happened next. We heard the tinkling sound of something shattering. It went on for a bit. It sounded like something fragile was breaking into tiny pieces – but what on earth could it be?

We did not venture into the caves very often. They were dark and scary places. We never knew what was in them. More often than not we would trip over something in the dark and hurt ourselves if we did dare go into them. There was also the even worse prospect of being bitten by a poisonous insect or snake that might be lurking inside. There were not that many wild animals in the desert near Qumran – but you never knew there could be a wild dog or a hyena! In any case, if we ever were engulfed in the dark inside one of those gloomy caves our imaginations tended to run riot and we would conjure up the possibility of all sorts of wild and wonderful beasts being there in our minds’ eyes.

When we both heard that strange shattering noise though, our curiosity got the better of us. We wanted to see what I had just broken. Maybe there was some hidden treasure in the cave. Perhaps we could become rich!!! We were both super excited at that thought.

I tiptoed into the cave first.

‘Come on Ali ‘ I shouted and beckoned for him to follow me.

It was pitch black. We could see nothing but feeling along the walls with our hands and treading very carefully, both of us barefoot, we soon came across some sharp, broken shards of something. We were not sure what the broken bits were made of but not wanting to hurt ourselves on the sharp fragments we made our way carefully back out of the cave and decided to come back the next day. One of the older shepherds had a torch.. We would ask him if we could borrow that.

We spoke to Hassan that night and he let us have the torch to take with us the next day. We were both so curious as to what we would find and could not stop talking about it on our way back to the cave the next morning. We hoped we might discover some beautiful glass ornaments or ancient treasures of some kind and that they might be worth a lot.

Imagine our disappointment, therefore when we went back and with the help of the torch, all we could see were some very ordinary, dull, clay jars – just like the ones we used to store water or oil in at home. They were lined up in a row against the back wall of the cave. Little did we realise that the real treasure was within them. We would probably just have left them there and forgotten all about them were it not for the one that I had broken with the stone that I had catapulted into the cave. The contents of that jar were now revealed. A parchment scroll had been hidden inside the jar. Neither of us could read but we decided to take the scroll back to the village elders – they would be able to tell us what was written on it.

It turned out that one of the books of the Old Testament of the Bible was written on the scroll that we had found and we soon discovered that each jar in our cave contained a different book of the Bible. This first cave - the one we call our cave - was not the only one to contain such scrolls. Once we had started the ball rolling – or the stone throwing, so to speak, lots of people started exploring other nearby caves.

Our claim to fame is that we were the first to discover any of what have now come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls because they were found in our cave near El Feshka near the Dead Sea. Experts eventually told us that they were written between 300 BC and 150 AD. There were some from the New Testament but they were mainly from the Old. Some were written in Hebrew and some in Aramaic – the language which Jesus would have spoken. We cannot read either but we still feel very proud to play a part of history. We are known as the Bedouin Boys who discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls.


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