ABSTRACT
I had several conversations about the Dead Sea scrolls with Professor Yigael Yadin. Yadin is the son of the late E. L. Sukenik, the former head of the Archaeology Department of the Hebrew University, who was the first, amid the confusion of the Arab war in 1947, to recognize the antiquity of the scrolls and who bought some of the first batch from a Bethlehem dealer. Yadin (he has taken a Hebrew name), also an archaeologist, played a leading role in this first Arab war when, at thirty, he became Chief of Operations of the Israel Defense Forces and, later, Chief of the General Staff. He has an extraordinary combination of high intelligence, informed authority and almost hypnotic persuasive charm. One understands how it was recently possible for him to direct, as described above, the staff of three hundred volunteer workers who succeded in two seasons in excavating the rock fortress of Masada. He combines the scholar with the man of action in a very unusual way.
