In 2016, Herschel Hepler was browsing Google Images to practice his paleography — the study of historical writing systems — when he stumbled upon an eerily familiar photo that would lead to a groundbreaking discovery.
“I recognized it immediately and said, 'That’s a manuscript in our collection,'” Hepler, a curator at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, recalls.
The museum had recently acquired the manuscript — a rare Jewish prayer book — believing it to be part of the famous Cairo Geniza, a trove of ancient Jewish documents uncovered in a Cairo synagogue in the late 19th century.
But the black and white picture in magazine described the manuscript as a “16th to 17th century Hebrew book of Psalms, said to be from the Bamiyan area” of central Afghanistan.
Stunned by the revelation, Hepler set out to verify it. Tracking down the author of the article, British historian and archaeologist Jonathan Lee, Hepler confirmed that Lee had in fact found the book in an Afghan warlord’s possession in 1998 and photographed the cover and two inside pages.
“Without Jonathan’s documentation from his trip to Bamiyan in 1998, we would still be assuming this is probably from the Cairo Geniza,” Hepler said.
But if Hepler was surprised to learn about the book's origin in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, Lee was equally stunned when Hepler revealed that the manuscript had been carbon-dated to at least the 9th century.
“At that point, I realized that the discovery was of major importance,” Lee said via email.
Recognizing their combined expertise — Hepler in Hebrew manuscripts and Lee in Afghan history — the duo joined forces and invited in other experts.
Their yearslong research not only established the manuscript as the oldest-known Hebrew book but also unearthed evidence that Jews had lived in Afghanistan — and along the ancient Silk Roads — for longer than historians previously believed.
But the thrill of discovery was dampened by the realization that the manuscript had probably been smuggled out of war-torn Afghanistan and bought on the antiquities market.
At the time, the museum, founded by the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby arts and craft company, was still reeling from its acquisition of artifacts smuggled from Iraq and Egypt.
The museum faced a significant challenge: Before it could showcase it to the world, it needed to legitimize its ownership of the manuscript. This required years of delicate negotiations with New York’s small Afghan Jewish community and an Afghan government teetering on the brink of collapse. The stakes were high, and the path to secure the manuscript’s rightful place in the museum would prove be too complex and demanding.
Lee, who has spent the better part of the last five decades researching and writing about Afghan history and archaeology, discovered the book by chance.
In April 1998, he was guiding a Japanese TV crew in Bamiyan and was on the lookout for a Bactrian language inscription and gold coins looted from an ancient Buddhist shrine.
At the time, the Bamiyan Valley, with its famed Buddha statues still standing, was controlled by a local Shiite insurgent group, while the Taliban ruled most of the rest of the country.
The anti-Taliban group’s leader, Karim Khalili, kept a collection of antiquities, among them the cache of gold coins Lee had been looking for. Lee photographed them.
"Then, his [Khalili’s] advisers brought in a miscellaneous collection of other antiquities that included the ALQ,” Lee said, using the acronym for the “Afghan Liturgical Quire,” the Hebrew book in the Bible Museum’s collection.
A local man affiliated with the Shiite insurgent group had found the book under a collapsed roof in a cave the prior year and given it to Khalili.
Unversed in Hebrew, Khalili apparently showed the book to other foreigners visiting Bamiyan, trying to figure out what it was.
“I was told it had been found in Bamiyan, but then everything is found in Bamiyan,” Lee said.
As Lee recalls, the pocket-size book looked remarkably well-preserved for its age.
“The cover was somewhat bent, damaged and watermarked, but the folios were relatively well-preserved, and most of the texts readable,” he said.
To Lee, that suggested the manuscript was "not that old.” He left Afghanistan and for years didn’t give it much thought.
How and when the manuscript left Afghanistan remains unknown.