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Israel bags its Dead Sea Scrolls moment

Jmedia Manager
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Israel has unveiled fragments of a biblical scroll dating back some 2000 years, in what experts described as the most significant such find since the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The artefacts were unearthed during excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority in the Judaean desert, which spans parts of southern Israel and the West Bank.

In a site known as the “Cave of Horrors,” archaeologists found fragments of a scroll with a Greek translation of the Hebrew bible, the first such find since the early 1960s.

“For the first time in approximately 60 years, archaeological excavations have uncovered fragments of a biblical scroll,” the IAA said on Wednesday AEDT.

Oren Ableman, an IAA curator, said parts of the same scroll from the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets were first discovered in the Cave of Horrors by Bedouins in the 1950s.

The Cave of Horrors took its name from the numerous skeletons found inside it and the treacherous terrain nearby.

Most of the text is in ancient Greek, a widely used language at the time, but the word Lord appears in ancient Hebrew script.

Dr Oren said that among the most striking features of the new fragments is a deviation with all other known versions of the Old Testament: in one passage, the word “gates” is replaced by the word “streets”. The significance of that deviation is “what we are trying to discover now,” he said.

Yosef Garfinkel, head of the Institute of Archaeology at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, described the find as “exciting,” saying it could enrich the “study of the history of the Greek translation of the bible”.

The items were discovered in a cave believed to have been used by Jews rebelling against the Romans during the failed second-century Bar Kochba revolt.

Read the article by Ben Simon in The Australian.