The director of the manuscripts department of the French State Library said today that French experts were allowed access to ancient Biblical scrolls, found in a cavern in Transjordan, shortly after their discovery by Arabs. (Prof. Godfrey Driver of Oxford University charged last week that American scholars kept the scrolls secret from the rest of the world.)
Alfred Merlin, permanent secretary of the library, said Father de Vaux, director of the French Archaeological Institute in Jerusalem, assisted in work leading to recovery of the scrolls from the cavern. Father de Vaux was now helping to decipher the texts, he added.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.