How it was discovered
Bedouin searchers reached the twin chambers of Cave 4 first, in September 1952, and removed a large part of the contents before Roland de Vaux's team took over the excavation. Because the scrolls had not been stored in jars, they had decayed into tens of thousands of fragments, many the size of a fingernail — a jigsaw that occupied scholars for the next half-century and fuelled the long publication controversy of the 1980s and 90s.
Why it matters
Cave 4 supplies most of the biblical manuscript evidence from Qumran and demonstrates that several distinct Hebrew text traditions circulated side by side before 70 CE.
Source & further reading