19 We read: “It came about that when Jezebel cut off Jehovah’s prophets, Obadiah proceeded to take a hundred prophets and keep them hid by fifties in a cave, and he supplied them bread and water.”
(Nahum 1:2) For example, after Jehovah told his wayward people that they had made his house “a mere cave of robbers,” he said: “My anger and my rage are being poured forth upon this place.” —Jeremiah 7:11, 20.
As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw ten tall jars lining the walls of the cave, and a mass of broken pottery amid fallen rocks littered the floor.
The Judean wilderness was a safe natural haven for the precious manuscripts not only in the caves close to Qumran but in those many miles to the north, around Jericho, and to the south, near Masada.
“From the very infancy of the gospel, the Christians always had their settled and determinate place of divine worship.” —“Primitive Christianity,” by William Cave.
Joseph and Jacob’s other sons carried his body “into the land of Canaan and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah, the field that Abraham had purchased.”
“The men of Israel themselves saw that they were in sore straits, because the people were hard pressed; and the people went hiding themselves in the caves and the hollows and the crags and the vaults and the waterpits.”