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Dead Sea Scrolls for Sale

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Fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls are now up for sale by their owners, a Palestinian family from Switzerland.
Fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls are now up for sale by their owners, a Palestinian family from Switzerland.
Shards of the Dead Sea Scrolls are up for sale, and a recent spotlight has been placed on their owners.

The Kando family— Christian Palestinians originally from Bethlehem— is the owner of the world’s oldest biblical manuscripts, and has been selling bits and pieces to various collectors in the US and Europe since the 1940’s, according to the Associated Press.

While most of the pieces are the size of postage stamps with barely legible writing, in the past couple of years evangelical Christian collectors have offered to pay millions for the archeological find. This angers the Israeli government’s antiquities authority, which has threatened for decades to seize every last scrap claiming that it’s Israeli cultural property.

Meanwhile, the Kando family has been keeping fragments of the scrolls in a safe deposit box in Switzerland —-where they’ve resided long before Israel passed a 1978 law prohibiting the removal of collector’s items from the country without government permission.

“I told Kando many years ago, as far as I’m concerned he can die with those scrolls,” said, Amir Ganor, head of Israeli’s anti-looting squad, in speaking of William Kando, who maintains the family’s collection.

“The scrolls’ only address is the State of Israel,” Ganor told the Associated Press.

William claims that his family offered the remaining parts to the antiquities authority, but that they rejected the offer because they could not afford them.

“If anyone is interested, we are ready to sell,” he told the Associated Press while sitting in his family’s Jerusalem antique shop. “These are the most important things in the world.”

For some background, the scrolls are a collection of 972 texts discovered between 1946 and 1956 at Khirbet Qumran caves in the West Bank. They were found on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name. The texts are of great historical, religious and linguistic significance because they include the earliest known surviving manuscripts of works later included in the Hebrew Bible, along with extra-biblical manuscripts which preserve evidence of the diversity of religious thought during the time of the second temple.

According to the Associated Press, in 2009 and 2010, the Green family— evangelical Christians from Oklahoma City— bought 12 of the Konko’s fragments for its own private collection. Today, the family owns the world’s biggest collection of rare biblical documents.

“They are really small pieces, but they are important because you may have two or three lines that may have not been found anywhere else. And suddenly it adds a lot to the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Jerry Pattengale, who oversees the scrolls in the Green Family collection.

“This is at least one rather amazing discovery in one of them.”

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