Mar Samuel

After analyzing the scrolls and suspecting their particular antiquity, Mar Samuel expressed a desire for purchasing them. Four scrolls found their way directly into his hands: the now well-known Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa), the Community Rule, the Habakkuk Pesher (a comments on the book of Habakkuk), and also the Genesis Apocryphon.

More scrolls soon come up in the antiquities marketplace, and Professor Eleazer Sukenik and Professor Benjamin Mazar, Israeli archaeologists at Hebrew University, soon discovered themselves owning three, The War Scroll, Thanksgiving Hymns, and another, much more fragmented, Isaiah scroll. Towards the end of 1947, Sukenik and Mazar received word from the scrolls in Mar Samuel's possession and attempted to purchase all of them. No deal was attained, and instead the scrolls captured the interest of Dr. John C. Trever, of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), who compared the script in the scrolls to that of The Nash Papyrus, the earliest biblical manuscript then known, and discovered similarities amongst them.