In 1896, Solomon Schechter climbed into a sealed storeroom above the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo and found roughly 300,000 discarded manuscript fragments. Jewish law forbids destroying texts that carry God’s name, so for nine centuries the community had dumped its worn-out pages into this attic, the genizah, and forgotten them.
Among the shopping lists, marriage contracts and Bible scraps, Schechter pulled out two medieval copies of a work nobody could identify. It read like the rulebook of a breakaway sect. Its members called themselves the men of the “new covenant in the land of Damascus,” followed a Teacher of Righteousness, and condemned the Jerusalem priesthood as corrupt. Scholars named it the Damascus Document and argued for decades about who on earth wrote it.

Then, in the late 1940s, shepherds found the Qumran caves. Cave 4 alone held eight copies of the same text. The medieval pages from a Cairo attic turned out to be a Dead Sea Scroll, copied and recopied for a thousand years after the sect itself vanished.
One page stops me every time I read it. The preacher warns his community against the “stubbornness of the heart,” then reaches for his proof: the Watchers of heaven, the angels who fell because they followed their own will, and their giant sons, “whose height was like the height of cedars and whose bodies were like mountains.” That story comes from 1 Enoch, a book that never made it into the Hebrew Bible. For this community it counted as plain history, as binding as the Flood.

So the chain runs: Enoch’s fallen angels, absorbed into a sect’s covenant sermon around the 1st century BCE, buried in desert caves, copied by medieval scribes, dumped in a Cairo storeroom, and read again under electric light in Cambridge.

The plays name is Deathtrap