The Habakkuk Pesher is usually read for what it says, but that reading says nothing about how a text that had sat sealed in a cave for roughly nineteen centuries came to be read at all, and the discovery is its own documented episode.
In late 1946 or early 1947, Bedouin shepherds searching the cliffs above the Dead Sea near the ruin of Qumran came across a cave holding sealed clay jars containing ancient leather scrolls. The scrolls passed first through antiquities dealers in Bethlehem before reaching scholars at all, split between two buyers who did not initially know the other held part of the same find, Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Syrian Orthodox metropolitan of Saint Mark's Monastery in Jerusalem, and Eleazar Sukenik, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University. The Habakkuk Pesher was among the seven scrolls in this first batch, and its identification as a running verse by verse commentary reading Habakkuk's ancient prophecy as a coded description of the Qumran community's own recent history was itself part of what convinced early scholars the find was both genuine and extraordinary.
Further excavation through the 1950s located ten more caves and thousands of additional fragments nearby, but the first cave's seven scrolls, reaching scholarly hands within months of a shepherd's discovery, are what made pesher exegesis, previously known mainly at second hand through later rabbinic memory of sectarian reading, into a body of primary text that could be read directly rather than inferred.