IN OCTOBER 1960 David Ben-Gurion made the following entry in his journal:

Yigael [Yadin] told me that he had received a letter from an Englishman (or an American), saying that he could obtain all the hidden scrolls that have been discovered and are in the hands of Bedouin, so long as the matter remained secret and he was paid one million dollars for each scroll.There are ten such scrolls. I told him the story about the rich Chinese man who drowned in a river.A poor fisherman recovered the body. The drowned man's sons came and demanded the body, and the fisherman asked for a large sum of money. The sons went to a lawyer and asked his advice. The lawyer said: the fisherman doesn't need the body, and no one else will come to take it from him.Therefore it is better for you to wait.They accepted his advice and did not go to the fisherman. The fisherman saw that days were passing, and the corpse was still in his house. He went to the same lawyer and asked his advice. What should he do? The lawyer told the fisherman: the sons can only recover the body from you, and not from anywhere else—therefore, wait. The story does not tell us how the matter ended, but you, Yigael, can wait, because in the end the scrolls will be published, and we will know their contents, and that is the main point.Wait.

Yadin waited.

Those of us who are involved in cultural history, or, if you prefer, intellectual history, are apt to forget that books, the mirrors that reflect life for us, are not life itself.Ordinary life requires the investment of many resources for routine maintenance, and in the above case, the requirements of daily life prevented Israel's first prime minister from agreeing to the request of one of the leading spokesmen for scholars of Jewish history and culture. Furthermore, it is only in recent years that scholars have begun to pay any attention to the history of books in the Jewish world and their public reception over the generations, or to examine their influence on people's daily lives. From this anecdote, and from what I have said so far, it may be concluded that, in parallel with efforts to collect and preserve Jewish writings over the generations, we also need to consider how they have been received.