Dead Sea Scroll fragments found
Wow:
In a stunningly rare discovery, dozens of 2,000-year-old biblical scroll fragments have been excavated from Judean Desert caves during a daring rescue operation. Most of the newly discovered scroll fragments — the first such finds in 60 years — are Greek translations of the books of Zechariah and Nahum from the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets, and are written in two scribal hands. Only the name of God is written in Hebrew in the texts.
The fragments from the Prophets have been identified as coming from a larger scroll that was found in the 1950s, in the same “Cave of Horror” in Nahal Hever, which is some 80 meters (260 feet) below a cliff top. According to an Israel Antiquities Authority press release, the cave is “flanked by gorges and can only be reached by rappelling precariously down the sheer cliff.”
Along with the “new” biblical scroll fragments from the Books of the Minor Prophets, the team excavated a huge 10,500-year-old perfectly preserved woven basket — the oldest complete basket in the world — and a 6,000-year-old mummified skeleton of a child, tucked into its blanket for a final sleep.
Photos at the link.
This is part of an Israeli drive to find more such artifacts before thieves find them.
For a good time call Sheba the Amorite
I wonder what the climate was in the area 2,000 years ago. Were there trees and shrubs?
Just did a Bing search
The Bible also describes Solomon’s use of prodigious quantities lumber to build the Temple and many other buildings in around 1000 BC.
Land-use studies throughout the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Mid-East show the prevalence of crops and forests, which were suited to cooler, wetter climates in the period before 1000 B.C.
In Jesus’ time though, just like today, the hilly, mountainous topography (with the deep rift in the earth near the Dead Sea), strongly affected the microclimate from mile to mile.
And usually these fragments of scripture are found to say what authorities still teach that they say, 1900 years later, in this case, or 2100-2200 years, in the case of the previous Dead Sea scroll finds. It’s a remarkable record of faithful transmission of texts.
Fascinating discoveries.
It will be interesting to see if they can place a date on the writing of the fragments.
1. The placement of the word “new” in quotes will be particularly interesting to Christians who see it coupled here to a reference to the Masoretic texts. Not, that there is a complete pre Septuagint Greek version of 247 BC. of Isaiah wating to be revealed.
These are mostly fragments, unless I missed a line on this forst reading.
But it will be interesting to see if it can be determined that this presumably later Greek but pre-Christiam milieu translation differs in any systematic respect from the Masoretic.
Also interesting is the apparently informed and deliberately anachronistic use of a “paleo Hebrew” script for the Divine Name instead of what the scholars assume was the then contemporaneous form. The implications, are obvious.
[Inside baseball here: the oldest extant text of the Septuagint predates the oldest known version of the Masoretic text, by some centuries. The Masoretic text is of course the version of ghe Hebrew used by the Protestant Reformers, on the mistsken assumption that it was the oldest and therefore least corrupted text available.]
2, “Woven” does not seem to me to be quite the right word for the construction of the basket. It seems to be composed of a fabric of horizontally stacked reeds or withies, held in place at intervals by a vetical band interlacing,. Reminds me more of a Medieval kitchen garden fence, but unlike, in that the uprights not being rigid are mere bindings, and therefore the horizontal rank does not even weave.
Or maybe I missed something in the picture.
3. The coins are great. So often the planchets look irregular and are struck off center, or the coins are obviously clipped.
4. It will be interesting to see what genetic analysis of the mummy reveals. As it obviously predates ancient Israel, and is unrelated to presumable Cannanite populations, one would hope ithe process and publication would prove uncontroversial. But, possibly not … knowing the generalized hysteria at work in our present civilization.
The timber was described as being from ” the Lebanon”, was it not?
Not that the land may not have been generally more humid and better watered in those times as well.
Though, I have also read in connection with the discovery of some of the oldest fragments of writing found in Hebrew hill settlements of the Cannanite era, that the well designed “farmsteads” had cisterns. Presumably they were needed at times.
Interesting to think of lions roaming about the countryside in those early iron age times. Not to mention just a few centuries before.
Just last week my husband and I were saying in light of this pandemic how happy we are that we went to Israel when we had the opportunity (April 2018). And we were there for Israel’s 70th Independence Day. One of my favorite memories is going to Magdala, a church that when it was to be built the following was unearthed:
The dig performed by Israeli Antiquities Authority only went as deep as a foot below the surface when they unearthed a rare archaeological treasure: one of the oldest synagogues in the world, with traces of frescos and decorations dating from the time of Christ and the apostles, where Jesus may well have taught.
The Magdala stone was found in the synagogue, where it was buried 20 inches deep for 1900 years. There are many other historical finds and a beautiful Catholic Church was built with a view of the Sea. An ecumenical area was preserved for visitors where you sit on the benches as would the people of that time, the original floor intact. What an experience. I highly recommend clicking on this link and scrolling to the picture of the altar at this church. It is in the shape of a boat and the windows behind it look onto the Sea.
http://www.magdalenepublishing.org/blog/magdala-sea-galilee-amazing-discovery/
Re Shirehome’s comments alluding to the eventual desertification of much of the Levant relative to prior conditions.
I would bet that at times, i.e. in certain epochs of naturally varying precipitation levels, and under certain conditions of land use, the area would have given southern or middle California a run for its money.
It could very well have seemed a land of milk and honey. Get rid of the goats, and replant some forests as Israel has done, and you can almost see it.
In fact a glimpse of it can be had by searching “Israel parks, and reforestation” as terms. Some beautiful nature photography there if nemory serves.
How fascinating! That tidbit about the Divine Name in Hebrew in the midst of the Greek is quite interesting. I wonder how old that scroll or page will turn out to have been. I don’t quite get that use of the ‘new’ designation there; anything LXX-related piques my interest, though.
(Sidebar: Getting ready for Holy Week a little bit last night, I suddenly noticed that the website whose rubrics I use most often has a whole extra sentence in its English version of one Psalm that isn’t in any of the Septuagint copies to which I have access, neither is it represented in any of the other, more established English OT translations I checked. I’m baffled where this sentence came from, and it’s kind of annoying, as translation inaccuracies in the Psalter are a particular pet peeve of mine these days. But I’d be happy to leave it out anyway, since it’s an extraordinarily ungainly phrasing in that translation whether it truly belongs there or not.)
Did anyone indicate how long the team had needed to work that site for these finds? I didn’t see anything to that effect in the article, just that they’ve been working in the region generally since 2017; but I mean when they started on this cave.
Philip…
Which Psalm?
What is the extra verse?
What translation?
🙂
John, in Ps. 37, here’s the translation by Holy Transfiguration Monastery, which adheres quite closely to the Greek:
But mine enemies live and are made stronger than I, and they that hated me unjustly are multiplied.
They that render me evil for good slandered me, because I pursued goodness.
Here is the St. Athanasius Academy rendering of the same:
But my enemies live, and are become stronger than I; and those who hate me unjustly are multiplied; those who repaid me evil for good slandered me, because I pursue righteousness; and they threw away my love as though it were a stinking corpse.
That last sentence is the one that has me scratching my head. (There is also the minor (?) quibble over ‘pursued goodness’ vs. ‘pursue [pres.] righteousness,’ which the HTM text wins, but that’s easier to deal with.)
Another (similar) description of the discovery, with photos, background and several more details:
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium-israel-finds-new-dead-sea-scroll-first-such-discovery-in-60-years-1.9621317
Sharon – my brother and his wife were in Israel last spring with a tour group. They got out on the last of the planes allowed to leave before the Covid lockdown started.
Got some great pictures, though!
Further food for thought from Barry’s link.
The presence of the coins is now explained by the skeletons, which are now more or less identified as to affiliation. And the fact that they were there to be found initially, is explained by the mention of a Roman encampment 250 feet above the cave entrance.
Reflect on that for a moment: both as to the desperation of one group of people seeking out and accessing such a remote and inaccessible hole in a cliff face as a refuge, and the relentless determination of another group of people to pursue them into the middle of nowhere in order to hound them to death.
Yeah, keep that in mind if the thought ever occurs to you that there is some unnoticed redoubt somewhere that we can all hide in if the battle becomes too stressful “here”.
Also extremely interesting to note that 10,000 years ago people were already using a cave in a relatively sheer cliff face that for all normal intents and purposes is inaccessible.
What kinds of pressures would drive someone to make use of such a spot? What investment of time, resources, and physical effort in order to do so, would have been necessary? Maybe they just had nothing better with which to occupy their time?
Not only does one have the dangerous and strenuous problem of getting down 200 feet to the entrance, but one also has the little matter of getting back out and hundreds of feet straight back up.
By the way, at least one of those cave entrances in the Times images seems to have been shaped by man; and in another picture, there are mud bricks or some similar appearing elements forming a low wall behind one of the researchers in a cave.
Obviously these caves were being used.
And here we are in the United States “nothing to get het about”, and yet with half the population apparently mentally ill in some way, and trying to press an hysterical regime of terror which in the end will bring to our civilization all those homicidal joys that our founding fathers had designed their polity to avoid.
To hell with tranquility I guess; when, unbearably sensitive and evolved as you are, you come to suspect that someone, somewhere, is not sufficiently invested in and affiring of you. Sufficient that is, to reassure you that life is indeed worth living and that they deserve to be left unmolested. What other option is there in that case, other than to get emotional and destroy it and everyone …
Yeah let “Social justice without end, or back to the caves!” be our motto.
What other option is there?
DNW, do you really think the powers that be currently in the US are comparable to Rome in ca. 100 AD? I think TPTB are a lot more like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZByH4Wai_I
(Video: “I Want Candy,” from Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola)
“What kinds of pressures would drive someone to make use of such a spot? What investment of time, resources, and physical effort in order to do so, would have been necessary?” DNW
And not just ancient Israel. When we were in the south of France in 1996, we visited a cave where Mass was celebrated as it was necessary to do so in hiding.
LOL
Well, I don’t think that the powers that be in the US have to equal Hadrian in personal attributes [ he reigned as Emperor in Rome during the Bar Kokhba revolt], they just have to direct forces willing to ruthlessly follow their commands.
You will also note that it was this uprising that resulted in the final dispossession of the Jews.
It has become apparent that the United States is now in the midst of an ideological war wherein the progressives’ aim is, as Obama stated, to completely transform the fundamental nature of the polity and its existential premise. And, that they are completely uninhibited concernimg the meams they employ to accomplish it, or with regard to the costs involved to the population they aim to subject and marginalize. To, that is, essentially, dispossess.
The fact that the leaders of this movement are in significant measure mentally [often proudly so] disturbed “gurls” of both sexes, does not mean that they are not in homicidal earnest.
They are willing, yearning in some instances, to kill; or at least to see the “Neanderthals”, killed. Does anyone imagine that Eric Swalwell who talked about nuking those resisting firearms confiscation would balk at having others killed? What about the state representative from Detroit who exhorted members of the military to take care of Republicans? What of the drum banging crazies dressed in black, some of whom are lawyers ans academics employed in public institutions? What of the crazies in pussy hats ululating their rage onstage?
Many of you already know this and recognize it in your social circle; and as a result are frightened of your own preening and vitriol spewing relatives and “friends”.
They don’t have to kill you themselves if they can use the state to do it.
I would bet that at times, i.e. in certain epochs of naturally varying precipitation levels, and under certain conditions of land use, the area would have given southern or middle California a run for its money.
I’ve certainly read that North Africa was more fertile, which is why Carthage was so valuable, and that the region was considered Rome’s “breadbasket.” Sad that all those gasoline engines and coal-powered electricity changed the climate.
I blame Biggus Dickus, and what have the Romans ever done for us?
But you really didn’t want to get on their bad side.