The name given to a cave in a dry river-bed in the Judean desert that was subject to intensive investigation in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Israeli archaeologists for the possibility of more caches of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
One of the most important finds from the cave came in a 1960 expedition by Yigael Yadin from which he expected to find little, since the cave had been explored before by his rival Yahanan Aharoni. His protégé, David Ussishkin reported that Yadin "just went along as if it were a kind of picnic, to spend two weeks in the desert looking at the view."
On the second day of the expedition, however, the team discovered the remains of three men, eight women and six children. Five feet beneath they cave they uncovered a basket filled with bronze cultic object. Then they found a cache of 15 letters, correspondence between Bar-Kokhba, the leader of the Second Jewish Revolt and his commanders. Later still, another cache of documents that came to be called Babatha's Archive for the woman to whom they belonged. These included almost three dozen legal documents, dealing with properties she had inherited from her father as well as issues of legal guardianship of her sons. She had obviously expected to return to the cave after the war to retrieve them, though she never did. Together these documents shed precious light on the revolt which, unlike the First Revolt which was well reported by Josephus, had few contemporary reports of events.
©ALBERITH
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