Refuge in the Holy Land

In 1961, Yoseph Porath, a volunteer on an archeological expedition to what is now known as the Cave of Letters, along the west coast of the Dead Sea discovered a bundle of papyrus scrolls. The cache turned out to be the valuable personal documents of a Jewish woman named Babatha, who lived and died in the second century A.D. Babatha's documents covered everything from a sale of property to a petition to the governor, and from a court summons to a marriage contract. View a video excerpt from the expeditions and see the original documents and translations of them here.